- Hi everyone. Welcome back to Aspergers From the Inside, you're here with Paul. Today's video topic is part three in this month's Patron's
Choice video series. So the topic is are you autistic? 25 questions to ask yourself, if you're trying to figure out if you're on the spectrum or not. So in this video I'll be going through 25 different questions
across seven categories of common autistic experiences. So we've got feeling different,
routine, communication, sensory, attention, social and emotional. So hopefully by the end of this video you'll get a sense of whether you resonate with these kinds of experiences or not. And that should give you
some valuable information as to whether or not you're
on the spectrum yourself. It can be very helpful
and even life-changing to realize you're on the spectrum, but it's not usually
helpful to tell someone else that they're on the spectrum if they're not open to hearing it. It's all about the inner experiences that autistic people share
that only you can know about. So please don't use this
video in an attempt to try and diagnose someone else in your life. Okay, so let's get into it. So number one, have you always
felt different to your peers? Maybe you feel like a bit of an outsider and even when you're part of a group, you still feel like you
don't really belong, you're not really one of them. Number two, do you worry
about not being believed when you tell others about yourself? Three, do you find yourself
adopting different mannerisms when you're home alone and think things that you don't do in public? It might be some form of
stimming or some other kind of behavior that's just more comfortable and more natural way for you, but you do it only when
you're by yourself. Number four, do you have
gaps in your skill set? You might be talented in some areas, but there are also some simple things that other people can do, other people seem to
be able to do naturally that you find really difficult. Do you like to be prepared and dislike any last minute changes? Are your routines
sometimes seen as extreme or odd by others? I have a practice of eating the same thing for every meal time and other
people can't really believe that it's that extreme, but actually it's completely fine by me. Do you like to focus
on one thing at a time, and find that it takes a
significant amount of time and energy to change gears, switch between tasks
and do something else? Do you go through cycles
of hyper productivity and then burnout, working really hard and then
crushing or just coping fine for a while and then
falling to bits later? Do you struggle to hold down jobs, friends or relationships
perhaps due to misunderstandings or maybe just for no
apparent reason at all? Do you have trouble expressing
what you really mean especially under stress? Are there some common types
of communication that you find extremely difficult or uncomfortable? So phone calls or emails
or SMS, for example. Many of us have a very strong
preference for one of these and severely dislike and
actively avoid the others. Are you sometimes very gullible struggling to tell whether people
are being serious or not? Do you often wish people
would just say what they mean and get really angry when
people don't say what they mean, because it makes you confused and you don't know what's going on? So in terms of sensory issues, are you particularly
sensitive to some things, maybe lights, noise, tastes, smell, and does this lead to
significant discomfort in some typical public
places and situations? Which means that participation
in some social activities becomes very difficult or restricted. Do you feel like dealing
with the outside world can be difficult and stressful and you often have significant anxiety about having to go out and face it? Do you often notice
things that others don't? And sometimes things
seem obvious to others that are not obvious to
you and you're kind of left there thinking, where is everyone getting
this information from? How do they all know this thing? And it just seemed to not, I just missed the memo that
everyone else seemed to get? Do you have uncommon interests or passions that you wish you could share with others but they just don't get, instead they might be
interested in other things that you're just not interested in at all, which makes small talk and
talking with other people really challenging at times? Do you find that dealing with other people can be really difficult or confusing, especially confusing and
you often find yourself over analyzing situations
before and after trying to sort of figure out
what the best thing to do would be rather than
relying on your instincts? Do you feel like it's your job to fit in, in order to find friends
and that if you did a better job in fitting in, maybe you'd find more friends
and have better relationships? Do you find that when socializing
you constantly make sure, constantly thinking about, I need to make sure I'm not
gonna do the wrong thing? Either censoring yourself,
filtering, masking, even with friends because you're not sure if the real you is appropriate. And if you show them what
you're really thinking or what you'd really like to be doing, then you'd be seen as somehow odd or perhaps a risk rejection. Do you often feel overwhelmed
by other people's emotions or do you hardly feel
emotions at all and people are surprised that you're
not reacting in the way that they expected you to react? Are you often surprised
when people tell you what they're thinking and feeling because you just had absolutely no idea until I actually told you? Have you been periodically
labeled with either depression or anxiety or a number of other diagnosis that either keep changing or
just don't quite seem to fit and people are always looking
for a better explanation because there's something there, something different and we
just can't put our finger on what it is? These things that I've mentioned are very common autistic experiences. They are just some of the
common autistic experiences. It was actually really
hard to pick a finite list because I could have picked a
hundred different questions, but I've tried to pick
the 25 that I thought were most useful. So I hope you've found them relatable and if you're thinking that this is you, I would strongly encourage
you to take the possibility that you might be on
the spectrum seriously. And back to my number one piece of advice that I always give is
that meeting other people on the spectrum is probably the best way to learn about autism, right? It's not always immediately
obvious what we have in common, but once you get to know us, you'll get a sense of what we all share and then you'll be able
to answer the question of if you have that too. So anyway, I hope you
found this video helpful. As I said in last week's video, the most reliable way to know for sure if you're on the spectrum or not, especially at the beginning, is if you can relate very
strongly to the inner experience of another autistic person who you know to be on the spectrum and they have shared
with you their experience and you think, yes, that's me. I completely identify with that as well. Now, this won't be your experience with every autistic person, and that's why I recommend
reading resources, reading books, written by autistic people, blogs, videos, and I put some resources in
last week's video for that, so I won't go through them again. So thanks again for watching. Whether or not you're on
the spectrum I wish you all the best for your
journey of self-discovery. And finally, please consider
supporting this channel on Patreon so I can keep answering more of your questions in the future. Thanks, bye.
