10 weird autistic traits I had as a child

so i recently watched the queen's gambit on netflix and it brought back a lot of weirdly intense memories about my childhood and kind of like the way that i moved my body in childhood as well for those of you who don't know the first couple of first episode um focuses on the main character as a girl of about nine i think to me she's quite obviously autistic and kind of coded autistic throughout the series but it actually set off a lot of thoughts and memories about what i was like during my childhood when i was obviously undiagnosed and you know i was a child that actually looked pretty normal from the outside but boy was i hiding a whole host of weirdness within so today i want to show you 10 weird habits i used to have while growing up with undiagnosed autism hi everyone if you're new to my channel i am sam i was diagnosed with autism as an adult and now make videos about autism and neurodiversity right here on youtube so if you think you might like that sort of thing please click subscribe now these 10 weird things that i want to talk about are mostly things that i ended up either growing out of or replacing with kind of more socially acceptable habits or stims so this is mostly talking about sort of childhood childhood like between the ages of maybe six and ten i also just wanna clarify that i use the word weird with respect and fondness being weird isn't actually bad you know it is just operating slightly outside of society's preferences and expectations and if you do any of these things i'm not saying that you should stop doing them unless it's causing you harm somehow certainly if your child does them there's no need to intervene because a lot of these things might go away naturally and if they don't they're not harming anyone actually so number one is eating paper now some of you might know that i've talked about my very restrictive food preferences as a child in another video this one which i will also link in the description box below and a lot of autistic people have restrictive food preferences some autistic people also have what's known as pica i think it's pronounced pica or pica pika which is an eating disorder which in which you eat non-food items of which paper is one i don't actually remember eating anything else to be honest and i don't think that this would actually qualify as as pica but i just remember liking to eat the paper on certain books and it wasn't just any book it was a very particular paper type and texture and age and i also remember that i actually had to like the contents of the book so i wasn't just going around eating books um it was like my favorite books does that make it better and i wasn't eating the words i was eating around the margins and those of you who know me know that i tend to be pretty reflective and able to think about why i did the things in my life and understanding myself but honestly i really have no idea why i used to do this other than i just liked to i must have grown out of this one by about age nine or so i would imagine it was right around the time that i was really obsessed with the famous five series and finding secret tunnels to places and mystery and stuff and i don't know why that coincided with eating the pages but most of those famous five books are now sort of like sadly nibbled for those of you who don't remember they are extremely racist and it's probably best to leave them in the past number two was blue tech fiddling and chewing and this is probably one of the more socially acceptable stims um you know if you've got a fiddly piece of blue tack people aren't gonna be like what are you doing i didn't go to school in america um i don't know i just i kind of like kind of like see american high school culture as the ultimate culture of conformity where any kind of weirdness is not tolerated obviously that's based on absolutely no experience other than watching tv and movies so i would have my favorite bits of blue tack that i would roll in certain ways and sometimes chew i now actually fulfill the same need with thinking putty which you can get online anywhere and it's it's kind of like very similar in texture but it's not as sticky and gross but i don't chew on it anymore because i have an increased understanding slash paranoia about germs which to be honest i kind of wish everyone else shared right now number three is hair sucking and this is another one that i don't really know why i did it other than it was kind of nice at the time and it would be like that would be kind of like a concentrating one but yeah i don't really know why i stopped probably because i was shamed by my peers maybe possibly because i extrapolated from watching the world around me that this was not something other people did and this might be a sign that i was not one of them number four living in created fantasy characters and this one's kind of hard to explain but i would kind of make up these characters and then live my day as normal but pretending to be this character so from the outside i probably wasn't doing anything weird but on the inside i was you know whoever this character inspired by probably something i watched on tv i think uh in one of my headcanon videos i talked about mr bean and i talked about creating this character called miss bean and i think that's like one example where i would just i would live my day as as miss bean it's pretty weird and this actually probably went on for longer than i care to admit but you know it was relatively harmless it was kind of like escapist fun uh some people watch tv and some people are their own tv yeah so number five i'm going to call stand fidgeting because it's actually three kinds of movements that i did while standing because i hated standing still so much so the first one would be rolling on my ankles um this was more back in like the 90s where some of you will know that the fashion was these very chunky kind of like rubber soled shoes and i would kind of rock outwards on my ankles on them um until my ankles kind of like not popped um but just kind of like popped but not not in the joint so it would be like a rocking movement that i did with my ankles and that would kind of help regulate me a little bit when i was getting bored or anxious or whatever standing up if we had to stand still the second movement that i would used to do if we were forced to stand like quite still you know if we were on a stage or something was actually standing with my feet together but standing with my legs crossed so you know the left foot would be on the right and the right foot would be on the left and that was kind of like a hug for my legs and i used to sort of i liked standing like that the third kind of movement that i would do would be raising up and down on my toes that was also kind of like a stimulation movement that i would do when i was bored of standing now i don't know how much of this um was related to my hypermobility i also have quite flat feet which might be a result of hypermobility i'm not sure but you know i just hated standing still and i still do hate it except i'm in a situation where i'm not forced to stand still that much in my life uh if i'm up i'm usually moving around and obviously if i'm in my own house i'm moving around as i want and it's quite funny because as i was writing the script for this i was thinking about all the atypical ways that autistic people move their bodies and find comfortable positions in and then i looked down and i was sat there at my desk like on an office chair and i had my legs wrapped around me and i was like a big pretzel and that's even with like a growing belly bump which you'd think would get in the way but actually because i'm so flexible i just kind of like wrap my legs around me and so i really think kind of atypical body movements and positionings are are something that is quite quite common in our community so number six is listing tv episodes to regulate and this might be one of the more stereotypical autistic traits i don't know actually i think there's certainly maybe it was atypical where he does that as well not with tv episodes he lists i can't remember what he lists penguins and this has some overlap with ocd traits maybe most people in the population would recognize it more as an ocd trait but it is also an autistic trait i suppose depending on the purpose that it's fulfilling for me i'm not really actually sure about that because i went through this phase where i was convinced my thoughts felt so loud to me that i was convinced that other people must be able to hear them this was when i was at school so it must have been i must have been about 13 or 14 and we had to go to chapel every day which i also hated because i was an atheist but you know and at the end because it was an anglican school we would have silent prayer and so we would have like five ten minutes of complete silence in a room with 500 other people which kind of freaked me out and so during that time i was so convinced that people would be able to hear my thoughts and i don't know why i thought that that i started listing episodes from from friends you know the tv show that was my special interest at the time and i would list them chronologically in order to regulate and then obviously by the time five ten minutes were up i was probably probably just into season two or something um so i would do that to keep my mind on this place because then people couldn't hear what i was thinking of course it never occurred to me that if they could hear what i was thinking and they heard that i was listing friends episodes that might be worse than whatever i didn't want them to hear i was thinking and that was and that was really a strategy to manage anxiety about a kind of irrational fear and i knew it was irrational i knew that people couldn't hear my thoughts but i felt that they might so number seven is rhythmic finger tapping and i don't have anything to tap around me right now but think of this as like piano playing on the desk for someone who doesn't play the piano yet anyway i'd like to learn so i would get a lot of songs stuck in my head i've always got a lot of ear worms going on and i would tap them out uh you know one tap for each syllable in the song and sometimes some taps for extra notes between verses or whatever and that would just be something that i did for fun and it was just something that felt good and it helped regulate and and sometimes actually helped get the ear worm out obviously sometimes i would get the earworm stuck really badly and so i would have like the earworm and the tapping stuck but you know that didn't happen too often but i i stopped doing this when the when the boy i had a crush on um laughed at me and pointed it out and then i felt so ashamed that i just stopped and i didn't actually i just completely forgot about doing it and i didn't uh do it again until when i was getting my diagnosis and i was thinking about all the all the stims i left behind that's actually my alternative title for this video you know all the stims i left behind but you'd be pleased to know that after my diagnosis i remembered it i remember doing it and i remembered that i like doing it and why it makes me happy so i've started doing it again you know there's a happy ending to the story number eight is hiding in small spaces like cupboards or toilets i actually kind of thought it was totally normal to hide in toilets and i kind of figured that probably everybody used to hide in toilets at school but i think i took it to to new levels and looking back i think that hiding in toilets was a response to the sensory overwhelm of the day it was a chance to be quiet away from people and kind of like you know regulate myself again and obviously obviously i had my favorite toilets around school that were the ones that i knew i was least likely to be disturbed in and people didn't go in very often i always picked the one right in the corner and over you know i would have my special toilets but i also liked hiding in small spaces in general i remember i used to hide in cupboards as a child i would also hide in cupboards and wonder how long it would take somebody to find me um like my parents or something and unfortunately i usually got bored before anyone found me or before anyone realized that i'd hid in a cupboard and was wanting to be found so i don't know you know those of you who maybe are watching who knew me as a child probably uh are like wow she was a lot weirder than i thought i just i i lived in my own head a lot a lot so i guess nine requires a spoiler alert about santa like if you have kids in the room spoiler i told everyone rather gleefully at quite a young age that there was no santa um and that he just you know didn't exist i couldn't understand why anyone would believe it or why why anyone believed it why anyone even wanted to believe it i thought it was stupid um and i thought it was more important that people know the truth i may have done the same thing about religion at some point i can't remember uh but that was the kind of child i was i just thought that it was very important that people saw that they were being lied to and this doesn't make sense and but i also was kind of gleeful about it because i just thought it was funny that anyone believed that and i never i don't ever remember actually believing in santa even though my child is now at the age he's he's three this christmas or he was three at christmas um i don't think that he i don't think he really believes in santa other than it's obviously he's obviously a figure that you see on all the christmas specials on netflix so number 10 is probably something that you wouldn't expect and that is that i used to lie but wait a second because what i want to talk about is not just the fact that i lied but the way that i lied all the things i lied about because it was largely it didn't actually happen that often i didn't lie a lot as a child but when i did it was largely covering up autistic traits or my embarrassing reactions to something that happened now i know some people think that autistic people can't lie and that's obviously not true i am diagnosed autistic and i did lie and i think this is probably the case for a lot of autistic people who mask very heavily like i did and autistic actors of course that acting is just lying isn't it but i really think that it is the reason that we lie or the way that we lie that marks it as quite different from you know the neurotypical child liars child liars that's like child actors child liars i didn't really lie to get out of trouble per se um because i never really got in trouble too smart to get caught but when i lied it was normally out of shame so for example i was chronically incapable of doing my homework on time and managing my workload because especially at secondary school i had a really heavy workload and i did a lot of extras because i thought that's what you had to do so i would lie about it and i was ashamed of not being able to do what everyone else seemed to manage quite easily so instead of saying i can't manage my time even though i try really hard which i felt like nobody would believe they would just be like well you're lazy you're not trying hard enough i would say things like oh i forgot my homework which you know isn't actually that much better it's still obviously a symptom of adhd but it's a more easily accepted excuse people forget things but most people aren't as terrible as managing their time as me and if if i'd gone to someone and said that i'm just really struggling and i don't know how to do this i the response would have been to try harder i can't try harder i'm stuck so another example of the lying thing is when i was about 10 i went on an exchange trip they gave me dinner and i was so ashamed of not liking the dinner that i pretended i was homesick in order to explain why i wasn't eating the food so i was like very upset because i missed my parents and i only was i didn't miss my parents sorry mum and dad um but i didn't but to me that was a far better explanation for why i wouldn't be eating food than be having to admit i am really fussy and i only like these things and i seriously will not even eat or try any of the other stuff because that was really embarrassing to me as a child but embarrassment didn't help me get through it also at school i would lie about feeling sick or unwell when i was actually anxious or upset because i knew even then that having a physical illness was far more accepted than whatever was going on in my head if you were upset about something you got on with it you got on with your day you had completely ignored all your feelings inside but if you were feeling sick or if you thought you were going to vomit you can't ignore that can you so then obviously i made my way to the school nurse where i had to lie about being allergic to milk of magnesia because that's what they wanted to give me for the sickness and so i lied and said i was allergic and there was a lot of frowning and looking through my files and i was just like because that was the best thing that i could think of to get out of having to take the milk of magnesia which was a substance of unknown texture and taste and the thought of that was also terrifying to me so i stopped using the tummy ache excuse after that after i realized what would what would the consequences would be but all of these lies didn't come from a place of wanting to get out of trouble they came from a place of shame and wanting to avoid embarrassment i guess knowing that i was different from other people deep down and wanting to avoid other people finding out about that and now i'm talking to thousands of people on the internet about my shame but seriously there's probably a lot more weird things from my childhood that i can look back on and that i felt ashamed of but the important thing that we can do moving forward is we can choose not to be ashamed of them and we can choose not to shame ourselves so let me know your weird childhood habits that you grew out of or maybe didn't grow out of and if you liked this video give it a thumbs up and share it with all your friends and family because it helps to feed the youtube algorithm which is a hungry beast hope you like this video and i'll see you next time bye

Channel: Yo Samdy Sam

Views: 222,435

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Keywords: weird autistic traits, strange autistic traits, unusual autistic traits, childhood traits autism, childhood autistic traits, yo samdy sam, yo samedy sam, yo sammy sam, autism symptoms, high functioning autism, autism spectrum disorder, autism in girls, autism symptoms in girls, high functioning autism characteristics

Id: T2r1B-dkbnk

Length: 17min 25sec (1045 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 16 2021