how do you know you’re autistic?

[00:00:00]Welcome to my channel. I'm Katchcha and there are two wolves inside of me. One has autism, one has ADHD. Sit down, join me on the couch, and let's talk about how these things interact.

[00:00:11][music] Today, the topic is autism. Autism is a very interesting, it's a autism is a dear friend of mine that I've lived with for a long time, but just recently realized how intertwined, how close we were.

[00:00:28]It's the best forever.

[00:00:32]>> Autism. What was it like? What happened?

[00:00:34]What it's like now? So, autism, I didn't have the word for it.

[00:00:40]So, thinking about things in the past as autistic is new for me. Um, new as in just a few years old. Autism for me as a child looked like being really interested in textures and feelings and visual experiences.

[00:00:59]So my first memory that I have is like of seeing um the light through my fingertips and it being red in between my fingers. I have paint on my fingers so please excuse me.

[00:01:15]And I remember just having this really intense sensory life, this experience of spending a lot of time outside. I would collect all the softest leaves in the yard and I would put them in little piles that were made for fairies. It was little like offerings for fairies. I had very strong imagination. I think there's misinformation about people with autism not having a strong imagination. And I don't believe that to be true. The way that my world worked is I found it a very lovely place to escape to. My imagination was a lovely place to escape to. And um I took messages from movies and books extremely literally. So for example, like seeing something like Peter Pan where it was talked about like not losing the magic of childhood. I took that like extremely literally.

[00:02:14]Autism can look like being very literal and I would take that and be like, "Okay, that means I have to start now."

[00:02:20]Like I have to foster these childlike traits inside of myself. I have to remember what it's like to be a kid so that I can keep that with me as time goes on. Um, so when I was a kid, that's what it looked like. It looked like um having just really different ways of thinking of ways of interacting than other children. I really enjoyed parallel play. There weren't other kids that really enjoyed that. So what I would do was I would end up um kind of like joining in with groups unconsciously. like people would kind of like recruit me into their group without or like I'd find myself in these friendships that were basically people just started being around me and they would like tell me to do things and then I just would do them um because I thought that's what I was supposed to do. So, I had a few really, really great friends and a lot of friends that were sort of just ended up happening because I don't really even understand why. The way that I see it is um thinking it was something that I had to do because people with strong personalities had like ways of engaging where they were like telling things as if they're rules. And as soon as I like learned a rule, I made it like really important to me. Um, I really didn't like getting into trouble. So, learning rules of how people liked to wanted me to be was something that I held really dearly to.

[00:04:02]And I also would like create and enforce my own rules. I wouldn't I don't know if I would create them, but I wanted things to be really fair. So like with my sister and me, I would just like try to like, you know, just try to make everything fair. As a kid, I was very sensory oriented and very rulebased. Um when I later in my life, um I started really really masking, really really like making it important to me to not stand out. Um I just like copied what people wore.

[00:04:41]I would try to have my own flare with things, but I would just like kind of like accentuate like looking attractive.

[00:04:48]Like that was my goal so that I could like have closeness with somebody. I think like I've been very romantic from a young age and so it was really important to me to feel like this closeness with somebody and have like physical closeness with somebody. Um, so that's something I really really aimed towards. Um especially starting in high school. Um yeah, I kind of lost myself for a while.

[00:05:14]Didn't know exactly who I was. Like some of this stuff would come out when I started drinking and using. I would like get to be more I so I have a history with addiction and um I was so uptight that like I have this like strong feeling this memory of like losing myself for the first time when drinking and getting drunk for the first time and that feeling so liberating like feeling like I can finally like stop thinking so much and just be myself. So, um I really like leaned on alcohol as a way of letting loose for a period of time and ended up hitting like a pretty um low a pretty low spot um during COVID times uh COVID lockdown. And at that point, I was able to get sober. And through getting sober and learning how to live life soberly, I've seen and reacquainted myself with how sensitive I am, how sensory oriented I am, and um and had a whole new experience with um with myself. In doing that, it came to my attention through a friend of mine who was like, "Have you ever thought about neurode divergence? Have you ever thought you might have autism?" and I was very curious about what this person was talking about. Um, he gave me a book to read called Unmasking Autism and I read it. It's by Devon Price, PhD. And I read that book and I really related to it. Um, a lot of the like rule-based thinking, this being rigid, having a strong sense of justice, right and wrong, black and white thinking. Um yeah, being overwhelmed easily, things like that.

[00:07:15]And it was really, really interesting. I got like very excited about, very interested in it. And I started talking about it with a lot of people. People had varying responses to it. Some people would be like, "Oh, me too." And some people would be like, "Everybody has autism." And some people would be like, "There's no weird autistic. Like autism looks like this." And they would think of somebody with like really high high um uh they would have they would think of people with who have a lot of needs in order to um make it through the day. And so I looked different than those people. And I just I just had trouble with that. I didn't enjoy the feedback and how varied it was. And I just got confused by it. and I put it down for a while and just tried my best to make it through life without thinking about things in that way. Um, and it came back up again recently um when I was talking with somebody who who made a lot of sense to me and she was like, "Oh, and I'm autistic, so I just need to like things like I need to be things to be explicit and like talked about like very clearly."

[00:08:33]And that made a lot of sense to me. And when I heard that, I was like, "Oh my gosh, like this person, I had already been thinking like, this person makes a lot more sense to me than other people do." And I was like, "Oh my god, it's because she's autistic. I have to revisit this." And that has just created this super hype super hyperfixation on learning more about autism. Again, reading more books, um, listening to podcasts and researching, looking at YouTube, um, then watching YouTube creators who have autism level one. And autism level one is like people who have um high functionality high functionality like they have fewer um needs like they have fewer um they don't need as much support um to get through the day. So, I really have been relating to that like crazy. And um and so I had also been learning about like self diagnosis versus getting a professional diagnosis. And it had been had heard things like warnings about women getting diagnosed um by professionals and that being like a challenge actually because the field hasn't caught up to the research or like the the professionals haven't caught up to like what's being shown in the world of what it's like to be an autistic adult. And um and so after some time I like was able to go get an assessment and was actually met with like this um reaction of like you know because you have such high capabilities of being able to speak and you have an imagination and um that we we don't believe you to be autistic and um and norm Normally in the past that would be something that would put me into a tail spin and just be like, "Okay, well then that probably means that I'm not autistic, but at this point after all the research I've done and just how much it's resonated for me, especially as somebody who's been like misdiagnosed with things, um I just I just know in my heart that like this stuff makes sense to me and if the research like shows at some point that like this isn't autism or you know what these traits show is something different then that's fine like I'd be happy to like adjust my diagnosis but for now I self diagnose as autistic um and here are the reasons I diagn I self diagnose as autistic because I identify with bottom top thinking meaning I start with small details and go bigger. And so I'm very I'm very self-referential. I realize I don't know what that person or that person or that person is thinking.

[00:11:43]So I start with like this is how I think about things and then I like can um I get really literal like I can't like assume that other people think this way too. I used to do that assume everybody thinks the way I do. It's only been through my mentors through sobriety that I've learned how that can be ineffective in like building relationships. And so it's a it's a practical choice for me to like not do that on purpose. Even if I can't see somebody else's perspective, I realize like I do not know what somebody else is thinking. So, because I have all of these tools from sobriety and other mental health work, it's like the way that I present is as somebody who is not autistic to somebody who doesn't isn't up todate on what autism can look like.

[00:12:38]So, that's where I am now. I'm really like leaning into learning more to sharing about my experience and helping the um the field grow because it is such a new and emerging field. I'm so excited that this is happening. I'm so excited to know more about myself and I'm so excited to take you on this journey with me. I'm sure you've been on it already as and that's why you found me. But I am so excited to share about it with you and I hope to see you again soon. If you enjoyed this video, give it a like. If you want to see more, subscribe and let me know in the comments if there are ways that you really identify with the um mainstream perception of autism and if there are ways that you don't that you seem different than the mainstream way of talking about autism. So, I thank you so much for watching the video and I hope you have a good day. [music]