 And this is 63 common autistic traits she never realized were signs of autism. How many applied to you? Very popular video from one of my previous podcast guests, Mr. Paul McAlef from autism from the inside. We were talking about, um, elixifying your incognitive empathy, I believe, which is cool. If you're so sad, you can always stop living. That's, that's a really positive outlook to have. I just said, sounds interesting. Yeah, yeah. Well, you've got to get some of them when you do online stuff. 63 things that you didn't realize were autistic traits. How many of them apply to you? Let's go. Hi, everyone. Paul McAlef here from autism from the inside. I make weekly videos sharing the human side of autism. So make sure you hit subscribe to get the latest content. So it's pretty hard to pin down exactly what autism is. But if you get a group of autistic people in a room together, then suddenly there are certain patterns that tend to emerge. So you ask the room a question that sounds kind of innocuous, something like, who likes socks? And suddenly you'll get a slew of very enthusiastic answers in either the affirmative or the negative to otherwise fairly basic questions. So I've compiled a possibly over the top list of 63 things you didn't realize were autistic traits. Let's get stuck into it and we'll see how many apply to you. So we'll do a thing. If you have one of these things, well, obviously there's 63. So maybe that might be a lot by a lot, but let me know if any of them. Let's look for ones that we don't agree with, like that don't apply to us, because I love socks just not in the house. Yeah, well, we'll have a look at these. I'll give my thoughts on which ones I don't know if I'm going to like stop and start the video because there is like 63 squeezed into six minutes of content. So it might be quite jittery if I do that. I'm going to give a thumbs up, thumbs down. So in no particular order, always wearing bright colors, hating phone calls, not realizing you're hungry or thirsty, not replying to a text message, but thinking about it for a week until eventually deciding that it's kind of probably too late to reply anyway. Yes. Hating, wearing socks or just seams in clothing in general, having an atypical sense of humor, telling the truth even when you probably shouldn't, feeling out of sync with everyone else in your group, having an aversion to or an obsession with popular culture, overplanning everything, not having a strong sense of gender, feeling tired all the time for no good reason, not liking being told what to do. Did you teach yourself? That is an interesting one. That is in reference to something called PDA, which is pathological demand avoidance, which is interesting. It's something that you can see a lot more in kids, but like usually people get the wrong kind of end of the stick with it. They think it's like being defiant just for the sake of like someone telling you to do something and you just say no because you've got like an ego or something. It's a lot to do with expectations that people put on you. So in adulthood, it can be a little bit more nuanced, but it's something that I experience like now and again. It depends what mood I'm in and also like, you know, it depends who and like how many times, definitely. My kids have been told what to do. Yeah, you have to give like suggestions to them because I used to be a special needs TA and I used to like have one kid in the class. He was very, very heavy PDA. You just have to like suggest things or say, could he help me with this or like that kind of thing. But it's funny because I was the next podcast that's going to come out was with a guy called Autisticly B and he does like autism fitness stuff. He's really cool. You should check him out on Instagram. But because we're adults, like we know when people are trying to like get around the PDA thing. So it pretty much does, yeah. Maybe you should clean your room so you won't sleep here with roaches. So good or not. To read before your first day of school, finding comfort in repetition and routine, struggling with crowds, seeing people as people and kind of forgetting about social class and expectations and all that kind of stuff, having super sensitive hearing, having a high pain tolerance, over apologizing and assuming everything must be your fault, not caring what people think, being really good at something that is completely useless, being deadpan sarcastic all the time, preferring face-to-face communication to avoid misunderstanding, struggling to find an appropriate gap in group conversation. That is a big one. They're finding a gap in group conversation that is so difficult. Like even if you're a very like socially adept person, it I think is a lot to do with like our processing time because by the time that we see a gap within a conversation that we can join in, it's it's already like someone's already started speaking. So it's we're always like a second or two like behind like the group conversation. I tend not to really contribute that much unless there's like a really, really long gap. I think it's worth saying as well that a lot of these things might not be just because you are autistic, but there are a lot of like co-occurring conditions and a lot of experiences that we can have as autistic people that might like make us more likely to have these constant constant anxiety, brand anxiety, being overly empathic, relating to animals better than you relate to humans, avoiding trying new things, eating the same food every day, finding inappropriate things funny, not liking to be touched. A tendency to notice small details, hating fluorescent lights and downlights, always wanting to understand why, enjoying repetition, enjoying repetition, enjoying repetition. Did I mention having a terrible sense of humor? Yeah, I can thinking in pictures, having a flat affect also known as resting bitch face, preferring to pace up and down instead of sitting still, liking to imitate other people, having a favorite thing that goes with you. I think the pacing up and down thing, I think that's more of like an ADHD thing from my experience. Like I am definitely not a pacer. I'm happy just like sloughing around in a chair or like laying in bed all day. I do not need to pace. But the imitating thing, I definitely did it when I was younger. Like I remember a specific time where I went to like one of the theme parks. Like one of my cousins was like a manager at this holiday park. And I went there and we met this Scottish family. And obviously, like me being me, I was like mimicking the accent. It's like show that I was like wanting to include them in England or something like that. And the Paris were looking like, you know, saying something like, what is your kid doing? Like he's making fun of him. And she's like, oh, interesting. Beware, getting excited and interrupting people. Going over social interactions again and again in your head, even after they've happened, seeing patterns in everything, having a very, very good memory for some things and a terrible memory for other things. Preferring nonverbal forms of communication, elusive, hating to brush your teeth, having a monotone voice, preferring difficulty identifying communication. I swear, like I suppose, like if it's if it's talking about signing, but definitely not like the indirect methods of communication. Those are just awful, awful things. Promotions because they feel like they're all jumbled together, getting overwhelmed by too many tasks at once, watching the same movie or TV series over and over again, feeling awkward in groups, loving to think outside the box, having brilliant ideas that no one else seems to be able to understand, struggling to read between the lines in complex social situations. This is a very written communication. The reading between the lines and social situations. I feel like people, I feel like most people have like I've given this example before, but I'm pretty sure that neurotypicals don't know how to read between the lines in social conversations either to some degree, if it's like a one to one thing. But as soon as it becomes like a group situation, like a lot of people within meetings or like big groups of people, they will kind of feign understanding what's going on and sort of expect everybody to have like the same takeaway message from the conversation. But I've been in situations where I've been in a group like that. I just haven't really understood what was going on, what they were talking about. And then I talked to after like a couple of people like on the round and they have just completely different ideas of it, or they just don't know what was happening and they were neurotypical. And I feel like there's a lot of situations like that. It's just it's it's important for us to understand what has gone on and what has been communicated. Whereas a lot of people they're kind of cool with just taking their own interpretation of things, not necessarily like getting to the reality of it all the time. Gigahorse has a pace and I don't have ADHD as a stem. That's a good point. Yeah, I get that. I think for me, it's more like I tilt my head a lot because it's like a vestibular stem. So I'll just if you watch me in any long videos or streams or podcasts that I do, I kind of shift my head from side to side. And I think that's a vestibular stem because it's like to do with your balance and stuff. I can see. Yeah, I suppose you can see that as a stem. I get that because you can spend hours and hours perfecting and saying exactly what you want to say in an attempt to try and avoid miscommunication. Yes, two speed productivity, either super fast, super efficient or nothing at all. Compartmentalizing experiences from different parts of your life, feeling comfortable being alone, being happy with very few material comforts, always finishing what you start, even when you should probably stop scripting conversations in advance or spending hours thinking about what you could have said even after the moment has passed. And finally, being the kind of person who people think, how could someone so clever be so stupid? Anyway, I could go on, but you get the idea taken on their own. Any one of these traits would not be that uncommon in the general population. But when you put them all together, there's a certain magical quality that emerges and the only way to really experience it is to hang around groups of autistic people. You may have found that you were the exact opposite of some of the traits that I mentioned, which is in itself also a trait of autism, because we tend to be constantly either too much or not enough in any given area. For example, for children, not talking by the time you go to school is a sign of potentially autism. And similarly, talking in full sentences at the age of two is a sign of well, possibly autism. Anything? I actually I could read really well and I could speak really well when I was very young. But when I went to school, I stopped. And I think that was because of the social centre environment. I used to like sit down with my grandad and read like tons and tons of books. I like bring over like a full stack of books and like plonk them on the side of the sofa for him to read them to me. But when I went to school, yeah, it was it was tough. Like all my skills just dropped on my parents like getting really anxious about what's happening at school. Is there something bad and like, you know, how can we fix this? The way to fix it was to get me involved in Yu-Gi-Oh, because that has both written and mathematical elements to it. So it was a good game for me. I mean, probably not good for their wallets, but it was pretty good for me, like keeping up my skills, even though I wasn't really learning much at school. Outside of what is considered normal is a sign of atypical development. So anyway, after listening to this list, if you're thinking, oh, maybe this might be me, maybe I'm autistic myself and you'd like to explore that a bit further, I recommend coming along to one of our social events to see what a group of people look like, to see if you feel like you fit in and try and get a sense of that undescribable autistic quality for yourself. Our online social group has regular Zoom catch ups multiple every week. And there are also fortnightly in person events and you might think, sit, I might leave it there. Let me know what you think of this video. What do you guys think of this? Did you find a lot of these sort of gelled with you?