gestures all around

Uh… Yeah?

In my experience, I tend to feel more comfortable around other autistic people, but there are some types of autistic people where I feel the opposite way. It’s called a spectrum for a reason!

I’m not autistic, but uh, I can see it from my house. Autism runs strongly in my family (enough so that our genetics have been studied). And I happened to marry an autistic woman. She was undiagnosed at the time - we only learned after getting our son diagnosed a couple years ago.

Since we started learning some of the less common symptoms of autism, we’ve started noticing them in family members on both sides. Pretty sure both of our fathers are autistic, for instance.

It’s just that… If you’re “passing” for NT, and/or of an older generation, you probably won’t seek out a diagnosis. Remember, autism was only described a couple decades back. As diagnoses go, it’s still pretty young - we’re still learning a lot about it. Including how prevalent it is.

I understand this post is old, but I tend to flock more with the ADHD/ADD crowd than with fellow autistics. I don’t know what that says about me mentally, but I find it easier to get along with the attention deficit folks. Probably because they talk more which lets me listen more. I do still have friends on the spectrum, but usually from circumstance (coincidence or being in the same places like in school.)

Legit, tho.

I think it’s a multitude of things:

1. autistic people tend to gravitate to other autistic people since we share strong interests and other traits
2. although there is a cutoff for diagnosis, autistic traits are everywhere and if someone has them, they might not be diagnosed but still have some traits
3. autism is hereditary. So some people in your familiy will have it too
4. a lot of people don’t get diagnosed for vaious reasons so they don’t necessarily identify as autistic but they might be.

I could name many more but those are the top reasons I could think of.

Summary: It’s awesome to see that people actually are like you in a way. You‘re in a brave new world. Try to enjoy.

Trans people are said to have a telepathic way of identifying and finding one another, even when they cannot clock each other.

Before I really understood ND, autism, etc. I thought my ‘type’ in romantic partner was… well, essentially females with ADHD.

Now that I understand myself better and have experience reading people, I just intentionally seek out NDs. Like those memes about how introverts don’t make friends, extroverts simply adopt them? I’m the extrovert. I understand my social needs and I can assemble my tower of friendly interactions wherever I go.

I imagine most people flock along some set of similarity characteristics; even if there were no attractive force between neurodivergent people, ND people would flock by the nature of being otherwise excluded, as per hydrophobic molecules

My NT girlfriend has two (other) autistic friends. Apart from that there are none or at least none, who would describe themselves as ND or “on the spectrum”.

There are a lot of undiagnosed autistic people. And you, like all other humans, are going to be more comfortable around people with similar modes of behaviour to yourself.

I find that autistic people tend to attract each other the same way stand users tend to attract each other. It’s a little weird tbh.