DISCLAIMER: this list is NOT intended to be a diagnostic tool. I’m not a psychologist and I don’t even know you. The list is meant to enumerate a few amusing examples from my life that made me go “Aha! There’s my autism.” Each item is in some way related to the diagnostic criteria, but it is in no way exhaustive. You could be autistic and be on the opposite extreme of certain things mentioned. But, if you relate to most of the items on the list, I encourage you to visit the website EmbraceAutism.com and the Autism Quotient Quiz (see below), which is considered an excellent screener to determine whether or not you may be autistic.
Okay, then. Without further ado…
You might be autistic if…
…you have a much better time socially when you’re the “odd one out.” In fact, it may be the only way you’ve ever been able to get a shred of social acceptance tossed your way. You might seek out situations where you’re the only person of your gender in a group, or you’re the only person from your generation (you may surround yourself with either older or younger people), or you may seek out cross-cultural living (as I did). You always felt like you were different somehow from everyone else, and you never understood why, but all the same, you tried to hide that fact by literally being different whenever possible. I.e., if you’re an ex-pat in a foreign country, and people find that you’re weird/different/quirky, there’s an obvious explanation for that in their minds: “She’s not from around here, what do you expect?” If you’re the only woman, the group will expect you to be different, etc. People will extend you a little more grace, and social acceptance is more easily attained.
…you have a lot of collections you like to line up or organize in a particular way. Some autistic girls like to line up their dolls instead of playing with them, but that wasn’t me. For me, it was my books, which I kept lined up on the shelf starting with Flowers in the Attic and ending with My Sweet Audrina, and never did the order vary. I was (and still am) a neat freak about my books. I handle them so carefully, they often hardly even look like they’ve been touched, let alone read. Even the smallest dog-eared corner is a tragedy. A book that gets wet is worth shedding tears over.
…people often react to you/what you say in ways that surprise you or you find confusing. E.g., once, I was telling a small group of women a funny story about the antics of our ringbearer at our wedding, and was interrupted with, “Then why did you ask him to be your ringbearer?” I stopped short in confusion because I didn’t know why they thought I was complaining. It was a funny story that I remember fondly. I have very little awareness of how to regulate my tone of voice to convey what I’m feeling accurately. There have also been times when, for example, I thought I was benignly answering someone’s question only to have them react as if I’d said something rude.
…you can easily fill in the following chart: When I was ___ years old, I was obsessed with___. If you can stick various ages in the first blank and there’s one particular subject/TV show/movie/music/other thing that consumed most of your thoughts and your time, that could be indicative of autistic “special interests.” The poster child for this is the young boy who memorizes train schedules. But special interests for autistic females tend to be more mainstream and therefore less recognizable as weird. E.g., When I was 15, instead of memorizing train schedules, I memorized Christian Slater’s filmography. There were a lot of teenage female Christian Slater fans in the early 90’s, but not all of them kept a scrapbook full of clippings and other information about him, watched Pump Up the Volume about a hundred times, could list every scene in PUTV in order if you asked, and can still remember thirty years later that he was born on August 18, 1969 in New York, his middle name is Michael, his mother’s name is Mary Jo Slater, a casting agent by profession… You see what I mean. It looks normal at a glance but now we’re wading into weird.
…you avoid hair salons because, in part, of the unfamiliar hair products the stylists put in your hair. You spend the rest of the day walking around with your head in a cloud of weird scents and you can never get away from them because the source of the smell is your own hair. You find it very distracting and it interferes with your ability to pay attention to what’s going on around you. In my case, it often gets to the point where I can’t sleep at night if there’s an unfamiliar smell in the room.
…you get a lot of scratches, bumps and bruises you can’t remember getting. This could be because your body doesn’t give you clear signals about where it is in the available space, and you may often misjudge where objects like furniture are, too. If you also have a reduced sensitivity to pain, you might not even remember bumping yourself. If you like big French abstract nouns, this is known as poor proprioception.
…your nervous system has a lot of other quirks similar to the previous two, e.g. you hear sounds that other people miss; you notice tiny details that others overlook; certain sounds might be strongly associated with a specific colour; you have a hard time watching violent movies, especially ones with a lot of pugilistic fighting of because watching other people get punched feels literally painful to you; you are prone to missing physiological cues from your body like hunger signals, or the urge to go to the bathroom. Again, this list is nowhere near exhaustive.
…you have problems with recognizing and/or understanding your own emotions. E.g., Mr. Cole saying to me when I was about to go out for my first driver’s test: “You’re nervous.” Me: “No, I’m not, I feel surprisingly calm.” Me to Mr. Cole (several hours later): “Okay, you’re right, I was nervous. How did you know that?” Mr. Cole: “You started driving away while the guy doing the driver’s test was still halfway in the car.” For the record, I did not “start driving away” – I had released the brake slightly. But if you often experience a total lack of understanding or a delay between something happening and knowing your reaction to it, you may have what’s called “alexithymia,” a common co-occurring condition for autistic people.
…you either don’t drive, or had to be coaxed to learn to drive, or put off learning to drive well into adulthood. Your trouble with coordinating your body to move in new, unfamiliar ways made you nervous about whether or not you could do it safely. Most autistic people have to work harder than usual to synchronize their body movements, and driving a car does demand a certain coordination. Once we get there, we’re okay but it can take time. Anyway, when it comes to driving, you may have had a very big hurdle overcoming that anxiety, if you overcame it at all.
…you have trouble remembering people’s faces. You have to meet someone several times before you’ll be able to remember their face. You have had to make up for that by becoming a whiz at recognizing voices, and/or you are heavily dependent on context for recognizing people. E.g., You might not recognize your coworker right away if you run into them in the grocery store. This can be SO embarrassing. And people get easily offended by it.
…you sometimes have uncharacteristic, intense emotional outbursts (could be anger or crying) that make you feel raw and fragile for a while after, even for days. This one possible manifestation of an autistic meltdown.
…you hate team sports and always have. In team sports, there are a lot of non-verbal cues that go back and forth between teammates. If you’re autistic, you probably weren’t able to pick up on them and therefore you never knew what you were supposed to be doing during the game. So, you always goofed up the play and people would get annoyed at you, and then you’d feel bad about yourself… It just never goes well for you.
…you HATE small talk and always have. You’d rather sit down with someone and ask, “What’s the one thing in your life that brings you the greatest joy?” instead of having to prattle on mindlessly about what you did over the weekend.
…you don’t flirt; you’ve never known how to flirt; the insincere nature of flirting is confusing and scary and makes you very uncomfortable.
…you have a hard time going from plan A to plan B. If something goes wrong with plan A, it’s a nothing short of a disaster to you. You don’t see how the problem could possibly be fixed. People start coming and offering solutions. Well, you have very good reasons (they are reasons in your mind) why none of these solutions will work. People get annoyed at you because you keep rebuffing their helpful ideas. But they aren’t helpful ideas to you. Unless they’re talking about miraculously reinstating plan A, or something very nearly identical to it, you’re not on board. There is no plan B. You get the idea.
…you are very uncomfortable with doing anything spontaneous, to the point where you sometimes can’t do certain things at the drop of a hat. You need time to get used to the idea that you’re going to do X activity on X day or else your anxiety goes way outer limits.
…you have a vivid, interesting inner world that very few people in your life know about or even suspect.
…you need a lot of alone time/down time/sleep in order to function well in the world.
…you’ve ever been tripped up by idiomatic expressions. This one isn’t a big feature of my autism, although, when I was a kid, my parents had a wall hanging in our kitchen that read “TOO MANY COOKS SPOIL THE BROTH” and I don’t think they knew exactly how much time I spent trying to riddle out what that meant. Oh, I “puzzled and puzzed” till my “puzzler was sore.” I can remember considering the possibility that the thing contained a type-o and should have read “TO MANY, COOKS SPOIL THE BROTH” as if it were a little note addressed to someone named Many. Good times.
…you have close family members who are diagnosed autistic, especially children or parents, and/or a lot of your friends are diagnosed, or getting diagnosed. “Birds of a feather,” you know.
Where to find the Autism Quotient questionnaire:
Helena Mary Cole 
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