These are some symptoms of autistic spectrum disorders that I experience, and I’m posting them because I don’t think people don’t think about minor forms of autism enough. People get stuck on the Rain Man/Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time caricature, and though I like both those works of fiction, they are fiction. Not that many people with ASDs are like that in real lfe. There are a lot more people with ASDs like me, where it’s subtle, and you probably wouldn’t notice unless you were looking for it - you’d just think them a bit quirky. None of these things actually affect my life too much in isolation, but together they just…make things a little harder. I have to work a bit harder than most people in day to day life, and so I get tired out a bit more quickly than average and need to rest a little more. It’s like doing life on hard mode.

The List

• Delay in learning social norms. This is the big one. I have to struggle to learn social rules. They frequently have to be spelled out for me; I can’t pick them up intutively the way most people can, social norms/rules/conventions are things that I have to learn the way you might learn new words - yes, sometimes you can pick up the meaning through context, but it’s much easier if you can reference a dictionary. Being in a new social situation is often really stressful for me because I literally do not know what to do or how I’m expected to treat people; on the upside, I know I do this, so if someone explains the rules to me I’ll normally just accept them and get on with it, even if I think they’re stupid. Example: I joined a new school a while back. Some of the other new students there had come from the same schools and already knew each other - they were all new to the school but not to each other. Obviously I didn’t know this, so I tried to treat my schoolmates the way I saw their friends treating them (because I didn’t know they were friends and I thought that was normal for this social context). That got me in trouble when I tried to be teasing in a way that is fine for friends, but not for acquaintances.
• Misunderstanding sarcasm and taking things literally. This is so prevalent that my family and close friends have invented a hand gesture to signal sarcasm, so I don’t get confused quite so much. (Thank you for this, family and close friends, it really helps.) I’ve almost got into arguments with people when I thought they were saying something really outrageous, and they were actually being sarcastic. I can do sarcasm sometimes but I miss it a lot, especially really dry sarcasm without many cues in the tone of voice. (This makes me anxious in social situations sometimes because I can’t tell whether something is sarcasm or not so don’t know how to respond appropriately.)
• Poor social imagination (struggle to empathise). I want to, I really do, I swear. I work quite hard at trying to understand why people think/feel/behave the way they do. I just really suck at it - unless I try not to I tend to assume that people feel the same as me and often need what they’re ACTUALLY feeling explained to me by a friend. This has got me in trouble before when, eg, I assumed that it was cool to show a friend’s boyfriend my very naked modelling portfolio - I assumed that she feels the same way about nudity as I do, ie who cares, and obviously she didn’t because she proceeded to scream at me
• Struggle to read faces. I don’t always understand facial expressions…obvious happy/sad/angry ones I can get, but ambiguous or subtle expressions tend to miss me. This isn’t too awful, I tend to cope with it by

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