As someone with diagnosed sensory professing disorder and suspects more I can definitely recall my childhood memories through my eyes but in the observer mode! I’m also absolutely atrocious at spacial memory, I lose every single item i interact with on a daily basis that I have to come up with rules and systems for where they belong so I don’t misplace anything!
The ineffable delight of seeing yourself in the neuroscience research shines through your comment. Isn't it funny how "seen" we feel when we read research that describes the idiosyncrasies of our minds?
Wow! I honestly thought it was just me. I do have a vague recollection of reading about this after I first discovered I was AuDHD, but it wasn't in depth and mainly academic. Reading your account makes it much more relatable.
Reading this very well-written essay, I begin to think I'm on the spectrum. I have written in a journal every day since September, 1989. It's the only way I can re-trace certain aspects of my life.
I also keep lists of books I've read and I'll look at a title and think, "I read that? I don't even recall the author's name...or title...what was it about?" Many other books I recall only with, "Oh...yes...I enjoyed that...about sociology..." Noam Chomsky has said similar things about himself and reading.
When I sit and meditate about this, I seem to think that vivid memories of my own life don't matter all that much. I dislike the ego and have long tried to keep it under control. I think losing ego opens me up much more to the world and other people's lives. But I'm not all that sure this is the full story.
I have a friend who will often begin his thought like this, "In June 1997 I went to a conference..." I realized just the other day that I had no idea how long I had lived where I live, or how long I lived in the previous place. I thought: If I can guess within 3 years I'm okay with it. Does this seem wrong to you?
On the other hand, if I'm trying to remember where a passage is in Ulysses, or any other book that has meant a lot to me, I pick the book up and somehow find it really quickly. No index, no notes, just...it seemed to be past the middle of the book, left side, lower...ah! There it is! I don't know how I do this.
The philosopher Galen Strawson has written about how most people live within a "narrative" and yet he does not. Neither do I. And I don't think it was a conscious choice. I just don't see myself and friends as living in some sort of tragedy, comedy, drama, or - the worst, and I see it all the time - a melodrama. They are the good guys and everyone else is bad, or against them, or malevolently unsympathetic. I observe and feel like saying, You know...your entire worldview is adolescent? But then, who am I? I live non-narratively. I'm not even in the game.
I always look forward to your comments, Robert! You make such rich connections. Yes, I'm the same way with books. I've even started to reread books (unintentionally) and got pretty far before thinking, "hmm... this seems familiar." I'm going to check out Galen Strawson, I'm intrigued by that proposition. Since I don't consider myself to live within a narrative either, I'm curious to read about what it's like for people who do.
Given that you recognize yourself in this essay, if there are other autistic traits you recognize too, you could be on the spectrum. Autism is a very controversial topic these days, but for me, once I began recognizing autistic traits in myself, there was no question but that I wanted to find out more. Knowledge is useful, and as I mentioned in another comment, I feel like I've unlocked a user's manual to my mind through my autism diagnosis. I keep reading research studies and recognizing myself in them. So, I'd say there's no harm in looking into it, but that's my personal perspective.
I've wondered about the problems with reifying "the spectrum." Of course, the parameters and boundaries seem unknowable. At least to me. I've entertained the idea that we're all - or most of us - on the spectrum, but that renders the very idea of autism and Asperger's meaningless. At night all cows are black, etc.
I've always been happy to sit alone and read books for many hours. At an early age I found this was not "normal." I always had one good, close, best friend, and was never a popular kid, or "social" until I started practicing a sort of fake-it-till-ya-make-it Method Acting in my public, social persona. It must have been some aspect of myself, but I've had a lifetime of being thought of as "the life of the party", while all the while I vividly knew this was a "act", or another social way of being that I picked up by modeling myself after "fun" people. In private - my core "self" - I am decidedly NOT that sort of person. But your topic of personal memory...
...I guess I just never thought events in my own life were all that important to remember. Of course, we want to "reflect" on something that happened, which will seem (for me) to greatly aid in this event to be remembered...We know now that the act of memory changes that memory, which seems like a vastly underrated social fact, and your law background no doubt takes this into account, vis a vis, I dunno...something like eye witnesses? Just a guess.
There's a classic TV show from the late 1970s called "Taxi." One of the main cast members, Marilu Henner, has a rare form of extremely great autobiographical memory. Name a date in the past and she can tell you what she wore that day. I take something like this to be the opposite of what we're talking about. People who are synesthetes or who are like Henner very often recall the moment when they realized other people do not have their "superpowers." You grow up and take it for granted, then eventually get feedback: most people are not like me. I'm like that, but in many other ways. Certainly my autobiographical memory is some foggy, amorphous thing. I tell myself: Who cares? I remember the things that my own negotiated value system says are worth remembering.
And we are not all the same. No two people are. I need to read up on the latest in autism and see how much of myself is "there", but I'm afraid I'm going to see myself there "all over the place" and what does that mean? For one, it means I need to be skeptical? Because: what is the terrain against which I am self-diagnosing myself as having a certain degree of weirdness? I'm basically okay with my weirdness. I kinda like it, even if a lot of other people don't know WTF I'm talking about a lot of the time.
My strong belief is that the current conception of autism, especially the clinical one, is arbitrary and problematic in a number of ways. I don’t have space here to get into all of them, but your concern about boundaries and parameters is spot on. I just don’t see it as an either/or.
Yes, there are problems with how the lines are drawn, with the criteria themselves, and with the way they’re applied. And yet, there’s still something real here--a deeper cognitive pattern that a sizable minority of people share.
That’s what I think we’re hitting on when we talk about “autism,” despite the messiness of the definition.
So, I find your initial reaction about the instability of the concept very insightful. It’s actually been a major focus of my own research and reflection, some of which I’ve shared in posts, but most of which I haven’t written up yet.
What you describe about your social persona being distinct from your private one resonates strongly. I’ve made brief reference before to Erving Goffman’s view that all social interaction is performance. That has to be true since different cultures “perform” social norms differently. But I think for most people, their social performance is automatic once learned. For autistic people, it’s deliberate each time. It takes conscious effort and explains why we feel so fatigued after masked socializing. Also, we’re more likely to build multiple social personas than stick with one. I’ve reinvented myself wholesale depending on context. The starkest was in college. A couple years in, a friend told me I came across as charismatic. I remember thinking, “Me, charismatic? Wow, I’ve really fooled people.”
You’re right that no two people are the same. Autistic presentations are highly variable. And yet, the level of consistency that remains is uncanny. There’s an odd batching of traits that don’t intuitively seem related. That’s what I keep coming back to when I get skeptical about autism as a category. For instance, I never would have guessed that my own traits were correlated: echolalia (repeating phrases I’ve heard), inconsistent hearing (which turned out to be auditory processing issues), difficulty identifying my own emotions, discomfort with disrupted routines, demand avoidance, taking things literally, instinctual bluntness, systemizing nearly everything in my life--the list goes on. And yet, they all trace back to autism. That’s why I think there is a real cognitive pattern that’s consistent in significant respects among a minority of people, which we’re obliquely getting at when we talk about autism.
For me, the label of autism is an acceptance of my weirdness, not a condemnation of it. I know not everyone sees it that way, but I’ve found the diagnosis deeply empowering.
That said, seeking a diagnosis is a personal decision. It could be illuminating in your case, but only if it’s something you’re truly interested in figuring out. Otherwise, letting things be sounds like a perfectly good course.
I find you very likable. I think I'm getting a better idea about what you're going for with your project.
In college - looong time ago - I had a Social Psychology class taught by a really cool Professor, who assigned us The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life and it was a real eye-opener. I think the text felt like I felt when I found out there was a "word for that thing": like a neologism that nailed down some inchoate thought better than any vocabulary I had had for phenomena previously. But the entire book felt like that. I became a big Goffman-phile for a while after that. Apparently he was rough on his students and very competitive and caustic with fellow Sociologists, but I bracketed that off from his body of work. I negotiated his "All the world's as stage" thesis for my own purposes. There were a number of conversations with fellow students and friends in which I talked about Goffman, and they thought he was saying "Every one acts phony." And that presented some very interesting problems which I think I still deal with to this day. It took me perhaps too long - me as autistic? - to realize the Goffman thesis made most people feel really uncomfortable. It was almost in the realm of talking frankly about real human sexuality or something: the population in general, while fascinated by this knowledge, really doesn't want to discuss it openly. While, when I read everything I could find on Sexology from Krafft-Ebing/the Freud school/Kinsey/Masters and Johnson/The Hite Report - anything I could get my hands on: I thought "Why don't people talk about this stuff?"
I learned how to read before preschool and don't really remember the process, but my mom said she read to me before she gave birth to me, and around age 3 I just started reading. I now realize this was weird. (BTW: my whole family used "weird" semantically in a positive sense, which was way out of step with the dead-eyed suburbanites surrounding us. To this day, I refer to myself as "weird" and am proud to be weird.) So: the genetics of weirdness/autism fascinates me. I too don't like my routine disrupted. I LOVE doing the same thing, every day and wonder why. My best friend's brother used to repeat out loud, quietly, words he heard from us as children. I think I always did this internally. Echolalia: I'm attracted to the very word: the way it sounds, is spelled, not to mention what it means.
Two weird things about myself that jump out at me: I won every spelling bee I was ever in, without ever working at it. But I don't "care" about orthography. I think I've caught myself thinking, You'd think that letter would go there, but it doesn't, and that's just the way it's spelled...and I "get it." I have had the odd feeling of hearing a word I've never heard, glossing what it must mean from context, then guessing correctly how that word is spelled.
The second one makes me feel uneasy, and it relates to the Goffman thesis in an odd way: countless times I've said to a confidant that the relationship or marriage of someone we both know was not going well at all. This was often while driving home from a get-together or party in which the couple was playing their role as a happy one. Usually the reaction was: you're wrong; they're fine; what made you think that? And then: 3 months or a
year later: they're broken up or divorced. It's as if I can read body language really well or something, but I never really studied this. Possibly it's my right
hemisphere that notices what others don't. If I "try" to tell if something's
going on between two people - are they putting on an act? - I won't get it. I
have to not try and then I have some weird sort of superpower. I've never
been comfortable with this, and I'm not sure why. Probably 'cuz it's a sort
of intuition?
The systematizing function was always off the charts for me, and I remember being 8 or 9 and spending hours arranging my baseball cards by teams, home runs, batting average, etc. Why? I have around 3,300 books crammed into not enough bookshelf space: a lot of piles atop other books, double-shelving - books in front of a row of other books due to space - and it looks like a shambles, but I know where everything is, because I worked in libraries so have developed my own system of my special interests all go there, or there, or there, and then everything else goes by the Dewey system.
Finally - and I know I write too much, for which I apologize, Laura: from a young age I've had bizarre feeling about personal epistemology. That is: I was always attracted to weird ideas, most that are "wrong" but interesting to think about. And interesting that many others thought and still think these ideas "are" "true." Strange ideas about cryptozoology, certain conspiracy theories, urban legends, religious lore, discarded ideas from medicine, etc: from an early age I was somehow able to "handle" these as
inaccurate ideas but I can see why these ideas caught hold due to how the human mind uses metaphorical assumptions about "reality"...and I also realize that wrong ideas give rise to more accurate ones for interesting reasons. I thought everyone thought this way, but by age 14 or 15, I saw this
Really relatable—thanks for sharing this and the 2022 Westby review. I’m curious about the “why” behind these deficits that you mentioned and am looking forward to your follow-up post.
Thanks Susie! I’m planning to follow up next week and dig into the brain’s biology as it relates to this, which is super interesting! But also pretty dense.
You write beautifully. And this is me. I don't remember my childhood or much of the many books I've read. I don't recall so many of the funny memories my friends have. I remember the bad times horribly well. I have to look through my photos to remember I have a beautiful life. It's not as bad now I have a joy bucket in the form of a mad little toddler but I relate to all that you say. It worries me too. I suppose it's why I write so much.
There is so much that comes with being autistic isn't there? I'm still learning. Thanks for writing this it is really helpful.
Thank you Chelsey! BOOKS. That's a big one for me too. It's happened a few times that I've gotten decently far into a book only to think, "Hmm, this seems familiar." Then I'll check my Goodreads or something and see that I have in fact read it before, I just didn't remember. The crazy thing is how long it takes me to realize it!
There really is so much connected to autism. I was telling my husband just yesterday, in connection with this post's topic, that it feels like I've unlocked a user's manual to my mind. He said he wished he had access to the same sort of manual for his mind. Autism is a challenge, but that made me realize it's also a gift in this very specific way, which is that there is so much research out there on how our minds work.
WOW thank you sharing this…I’m autistic as well, diagnosed last year, and identified with this so much that I got emotional. I have looked up memory issues in autism before but you articulated it so well in a way I haven’t seen (that I remember 😅). I often pretend to people that I remember shared experiences, movies and books, etc and rely heavily on other peoples’ accounts of me and my behavior for a sense of identity.
As someone with diagnosed sensory professing disorder and suspects more I can definitely recall my childhood memories through my eyes but in the observer mode! I’m also absolutely atrocious at spacial memory, I lose every single item i interact with on a daily basis that I have to come up with rules and systems for where they belong so I don’t misplace anything!
The ineffable delight of seeing yourself in the neuroscience research shines through your comment. Isn't it funny how "seen" we feel when we read research that describes the idiosyncrasies of our minds?
This is definitely me!! ❤️
Thanks for sharing, Emily!
Wow! I honestly thought it was just me. I do have a vague recollection of reading about this after I first discovered I was AuDHD, but it wasn't in depth and mainly academic. Reading your account makes it much more relatable.
Thank you Alys! I appreciate your taking the time to read and comment and I'm glad this resonated!
Reading this very well-written essay, I begin to think I'm on the spectrum. I have written in a journal every day since September, 1989. It's the only way I can re-trace certain aspects of my life.
I also keep lists of books I've read and I'll look at a title and think, "I read that? I don't even recall the author's name...or title...what was it about?" Many other books I recall only with, "Oh...yes...I enjoyed that...about sociology..." Noam Chomsky has said similar things about himself and reading.
When I sit and meditate about this, I seem to think that vivid memories of my own life don't matter all that much. I dislike the ego and have long tried to keep it under control. I think losing ego opens me up much more to the world and other people's lives. But I'm not all that sure this is the full story.
I have a friend who will often begin his thought like this, "In June 1997 I went to a conference..." I realized just the other day that I had no idea how long I had lived where I live, or how long I lived in the previous place. I thought: If I can guess within 3 years I'm okay with it. Does this seem wrong to you?
On the other hand, if I'm trying to remember where a passage is in Ulysses, or any other book that has meant a lot to me, I pick the book up and somehow find it really quickly. No index, no notes, just...it seemed to be past the middle of the book, left side, lower...ah! There it is! I don't know how I do this.
The philosopher Galen Strawson has written about how most people live within a "narrative" and yet he does not. Neither do I. And I don't think it was a conscious choice. I just don't see myself and friends as living in some sort of tragedy, comedy, drama, or - the worst, and I see it all the time - a melodrama. They are the good guys and everyone else is bad, or against them, or malevolently unsympathetic. I observe and feel like saying, You know...your entire worldview is adolescent? But then, who am I? I live non-narratively. I'm not even in the game.
I always look forward to your comments, Robert! You make such rich connections. Yes, I'm the same way with books. I've even started to reread books (unintentionally) and got pretty far before thinking, "hmm... this seems familiar." I'm going to check out Galen Strawson, I'm intrigued by that proposition. Since I don't consider myself to live within a narrative either, I'm curious to read about what it's like for people who do.
Given that you recognize yourself in this essay, if there are other autistic traits you recognize too, you could be on the spectrum. Autism is a very controversial topic these days, but for me, once I began recognizing autistic traits in myself, there was no question but that I wanted to find out more. Knowledge is useful, and as I mentioned in another comment, I feel like I've unlocked a user's manual to my mind through my autism diagnosis. I keep reading research studies and recognizing myself in them. So, I'd say there's no harm in looking into it, but that's my personal perspective.
Thanks for the kind comments, Laura.
I've wondered about the problems with reifying "the spectrum." Of course, the parameters and boundaries seem unknowable. At least to me. I've entertained the idea that we're all - or most of us - on the spectrum, but that renders the very idea of autism and Asperger's meaningless. At night all cows are black, etc.
I've always been happy to sit alone and read books for many hours. At an early age I found this was not "normal." I always had one good, close, best friend, and was never a popular kid, or "social" until I started practicing a sort of fake-it-till-ya-make-it Method Acting in my public, social persona. It must have been some aspect of myself, but I've had a lifetime of being thought of as "the life of the party", while all the while I vividly knew this was a "act", or another social way of being that I picked up by modeling myself after "fun" people. In private - my core "self" - I am decidedly NOT that sort of person. But your topic of personal memory...
...I guess I just never thought events in my own life were all that important to remember. Of course, we want to "reflect" on something that happened, which will seem (for me) to greatly aid in this event to be remembered...We know now that the act of memory changes that memory, which seems like a vastly underrated social fact, and your law background no doubt takes this into account, vis a vis, I dunno...something like eye witnesses? Just a guess.
There's a classic TV show from the late 1970s called "Taxi." One of the main cast members, Marilu Henner, has a rare form of extremely great autobiographical memory. Name a date in the past and she can tell you what she wore that day. I take something like this to be the opposite of what we're talking about. People who are synesthetes or who are like Henner very often recall the moment when they realized other people do not have their "superpowers." You grow up and take it for granted, then eventually get feedback: most people are not like me. I'm like that, but in many other ways. Certainly my autobiographical memory is some foggy, amorphous thing. I tell myself: Who cares? I remember the things that my own negotiated value system says are worth remembering.
And we are not all the same. No two people are. I need to read up on the latest in autism and see how much of myself is "there", but I'm afraid I'm going to see myself there "all over the place" and what does that mean? For one, it means I need to be skeptical? Because: what is the terrain against which I am self-diagnosing myself as having a certain degree of weirdness? I'm basically okay with my weirdness. I kinda like it, even if a lot of other people don't know WTF I'm talking about a lot of the time.
My strong belief is that the current conception of autism, especially the clinical one, is arbitrary and problematic in a number of ways. I don’t have space here to get into all of them, but your concern about boundaries and parameters is spot on. I just don’t see it as an either/or.
Yes, there are problems with how the lines are drawn, with the criteria themselves, and with the way they’re applied. And yet, there’s still something real here--a deeper cognitive pattern that a sizable minority of people share.
That’s what I think we’re hitting on when we talk about “autism,” despite the messiness of the definition.
So, I find your initial reaction about the instability of the concept very insightful. It’s actually been a major focus of my own research and reflection, some of which I’ve shared in posts, but most of which I haven’t written up yet.
What you describe about your social persona being distinct from your private one resonates strongly. I’ve made brief reference before to Erving Goffman’s view that all social interaction is performance. That has to be true since different cultures “perform” social norms differently. But I think for most people, their social performance is automatic once learned. For autistic people, it’s deliberate each time. It takes conscious effort and explains why we feel so fatigued after masked socializing. Also, we’re more likely to build multiple social personas than stick with one. I’ve reinvented myself wholesale depending on context. The starkest was in college. A couple years in, a friend told me I came across as charismatic. I remember thinking, “Me, charismatic? Wow, I’ve really fooled people.”
You’re right that no two people are the same. Autistic presentations are highly variable. And yet, the level of consistency that remains is uncanny. There’s an odd batching of traits that don’t intuitively seem related. That’s what I keep coming back to when I get skeptical about autism as a category. For instance, I never would have guessed that my own traits were correlated: echolalia (repeating phrases I’ve heard), inconsistent hearing (which turned out to be auditory processing issues), difficulty identifying my own emotions, discomfort with disrupted routines, demand avoidance, taking things literally, instinctual bluntness, systemizing nearly everything in my life--the list goes on. And yet, they all trace back to autism. That’s why I think there is a real cognitive pattern that’s consistent in significant respects among a minority of people, which we’re obliquely getting at when we talk about autism.
For me, the label of autism is an acceptance of my weirdness, not a condemnation of it. I know not everyone sees it that way, but I’ve found the diagnosis deeply empowering.
That said, seeking a diagnosis is a personal decision. It could be illuminating in your case, but only if it’s something you’re truly interested in figuring out. Otherwise, letting things be sounds like a perfectly good course.
I find you very likable. I think I'm getting a better idea about what you're going for with your project.
In college - looong time ago - I had a Social Psychology class taught by a really cool Professor, who assigned us The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life and it was a real eye-opener. I think the text felt like I felt when I found out there was a "word for that thing": like a neologism that nailed down some inchoate thought better than any vocabulary I had had for phenomena previously. But the entire book felt like that. I became a big Goffman-phile for a while after that. Apparently he was rough on his students and very competitive and caustic with fellow Sociologists, but I bracketed that off from his body of work. I negotiated his "All the world's as stage" thesis for my own purposes. There were a number of conversations with fellow students and friends in which I talked about Goffman, and they thought he was saying "Every one acts phony." And that presented some very interesting problems which I think I still deal with to this day. It took me perhaps too long - me as autistic? - to realize the Goffman thesis made most people feel really uncomfortable. It was almost in the realm of talking frankly about real human sexuality or something: the population in general, while fascinated by this knowledge, really doesn't want to discuss it openly. While, when I read everything I could find on Sexology from Krafft-Ebing/the Freud school/Kinsey/Masters and Johnson/The Hite Report - anything I could get my hands on: I thought "Why don't people talk about this stuff?"
I learned how to read before preschool and don't really remember the process, but my mom said she read to me before she gave birth to me, and around age 3 I just started reading. I now realize this was weird. (BTW: my whole family used "weird" semantically in a positive sense, which was way out of step with the dead-eyed suburbanites surrounding us. To this day, I refer to myself as "weird" and am proud to be weird.) So: the genetics of weirdness/autism fascinates me. I too don't like my routine disrupted. I LOVE doing the same thing, every day and wonder why. My best friend's brother used to repeat out loud, quietly, words he heard from us as children. I think I always did this internally. Echolalia: I'm attracted to the very word: the way it sounds, is spelled, not to mention what it means.
Two weird things about myself that jump out at me: I won every spelling bee I was ever in, without ever working at it. But I don't "care" about orthography. I think I've caught myself thinking, You'd think that letter would go there, but it doesn't, and that's just the way it's spelled...and I "get it." I have had the odd feeling of hearing a word I've never heard, glossing what it must mean from context, then guessing correctly how that word is spelled.
The second one makes me feel uneasy, and it relates to the Goffman thesis in an odd way: countless times I've said to a confidant that the relationship or marriage of someone we both know was not going well at all. This was often while driving home from a get-together or party in which the couple was playing their role as a happy one. Usually the reaction was: you're wrong; they're fine; what made you think that? And then: 3 months or a
year later: they're broken up or divorced. It's as if I can read body language really well or something, but I never really studied this. Possibly it's my right
hemisphere that notices what others don't. If I "try" to tell if something's
going on between two people - are they putting on an act? - I won't get it. I
have to not try and then I have some weird sort of superpower. I've never
been comfortable with this, and I'm not sure why. Probably 'cuz it's a sort
of intuition?
The systematizing function was always off the charts for me, and I remember being 8 or 9 and spending hours arranging my baseball cards by teams, home runs, batting average, etc. Why? I have around 3,300 books crammed into not enough bookshelf space: a lot of piles atop other books, double-shelving - books in front of a row of other books due to space - and it looks like a shambles, but I know where everything is, because I worked in libraries so have developed my own system of my special interests all go there, or there, or there, and then everything else goes by the Dewey system.
Finally - and I know I write too much, for which I apologize, Laura: from a young age I've had bizarre feeling about personal epistemology. That is: I was always attracted to weird ideas, most that are "wrong" but interesting to think about. And interesting that many others thought and still think these ideas "are" "true." Strange ideas about cryptozoology, certain conspiracy theories, urban legends, religious lore, discarded ideas from medicine, etc: from an early age I was somehow able to "handle" these as
inaccurate ideas but I can see why these ideas caught hold due to how the human mind uses metaphorical assumptions about "reality"...and I also realize that wrong ideas give rise to more accurate ones for interesting reasons. I thought everyone thought this way, but by age 14 or 15, I saw this
was not the case.
Really relatable—thanks for sharing this and the 2022 Westby review. I’m curious about the “why” behind these deficits that you mentioned and am looking forward to your follow-up post.
Thanks Susie! I’m planning to follow up next week and dig into the brain’s biology as it relates to this, which is super interesting! But also pretty dense.
You write beautifully. And this is me. I don't remember my childhood or much of the many books I've read. I don't recall so many of the funny memories my friends have. I remember the bad times horribly well. I have to look through my photos to remember I have a beautiful life. It's not as bad now I have a joy bucket in the form of a mad little toddler but I relate to all that you say. It worries me too. I suppose it's why I write so much.
There is so much that comes with being autistic isn't there? I'm still learning. Thanks for writing this it is really helpful.
Okay, now I go to forget it 🙃
Thank you Chelsey! BOOKS. That's a big one for me too. It's happened a few times that I've gotten decently far into a book only to think, "Hmm, this seems familiar." Then I'll check my Goodreads or something and see that I have in fact read it before, I just didn't remember. The crazy thing is how long it takes me to realize it!
There really is so much connected to autism. I was telling my husband just yesterday, in connection with this post's topic, that it feels like I've unlocked a user's manual to my mind. He said he wished he had access to the same sort of manual for his mind. Autism is a challenge, but that made me realize it's also a gift in this very specific way, which is that there is so much research out there on how our minds work.
WOW thank you sharing this…I’m autistic as well, diagnosed last year, and identified with this so much that I got emotional. I have looked up memory issues in autism before but you articulated it so well in a way I haven’t seen (that I remember 😅). I often pretend to people that I remember shared experiences, movies and books, etc and rely heavily on other peoples’ accounts of me and my behavior for a sense of identity.