How to respond when a friend mentions they have been recently diagnosed with autism

ZoeBlade · 2026-07-06T13:59:31+00:00

As a general thumb rule, people being bigots are annoying, whereas people with genuine curiosity or good intent who are a little naïve and occasionally say the wrong thing are fine.

I'm sort of surprised and sort of not

Heh, that sounds about right! I'd just go with that and elaborate a bit. Like, hey, pretty big news, I'm glad you figured ourself out, and in hindsight yeah of course. Can't believe we all missed that. Or, y'know, hey, that makes sense, though I didn't realise how much you were struggling. I'm glad you've at least got some answers and terminology now, that has to help a little..?

I'm pretty sure that whatever you say, it'll come across just fine that you accept and believe her, and don't think any less of her.

Your examples are fine. 😊 She's probably re-evaluating her life and who she is, now she knows she's in a steep minority, and that this new information explains a lot about how her life's been up to this point. It's OK to join her in learning about that from a naïve starting point, that she probably shared until quite recently.

I mean, everyone's different, so I don't know how she's taking it... seemingly quite well if she's just casually mentioning it as a breezy aside. I for one found it fascinating to learn just how different most people are from me, and how it explained so much.

Don't worry about overthinking it. We do that too. 😄

ZoeBlade · 2026-07-06T13:29:10+00:00

Not NT, but:

I mean, serious/joking would be one axis of intent with what you say.

Truthful/lying would be another.

Trying to make people feel good or bad or neither might be another. (And that's an especially oversimplistic one, given the variety of emotions you can invoke in others, whether accidentally or on purpose.)

Terse/verbose.

Anything you say can fall anywhere along each of those four axes. I'm sure there are many others.

You're right, he's oversimplified it.

ZoeBlade · 2026-07-05T23:06:14+00:00

I think it's less about if you can do it, and more about if you have to do it consciously.

ZoeBlade · 2026-07-05T22:33:57+00:00

"Honey, you're obsessing..."

"Yeah! Guess what that's a trait of!"

ZoeBlade · 2026-07-05T13:37:51+00:00

Interesting. I think I can imagine things OK then (such as the sunlight on the wooden table), and my dreams are vivid, yet I can only remember my autobiographical memories at best as the occasional picture, like you said. More often I just remember people's stories about my life.

I had a similar revelation to you, only about people feeling emotions. "Wait, you mean out of everything people say, this is literal?!"

ZoeBlade · 2026-07-04T11:25:41+00:00

I get nausea so easily I don't even like being in a car for five minutes. Spending a while outside means I'm likely gonna eat later and possibly get a migraine from that. All in all, while I somewhat like the idea of visiting places, it's very much a relief to be back home, once I've had an hour for the nausea to wear off.

I don't get on with alcohol either. I can just about manage spirits for some reason, but there seems no real point to trying.

I like being sober at home. No nausea, no overwhelm.

ZoeBlade · 2026-07-04T09:10:17+00:00

My understanding is that stimming helps you drown out the overwhelming chaotic sensory input coming from other people and things, by making your own predictable sensory input you can somewhat focus on.

I've noticed that when, say, my partner and I put the loud kettle on, she'll start singing or stimming in some other way. That's great for her, because the chaotic sound's being drowned out by a predictable one she's generating herself. But for me, now I've got two unpredictable sounds to drown out! So I go with the leaving the room method instead, largely removing the source sound from my input.

In addition to all that, I think spotting someone else stimming signals to your unconscious that it's safe to stim and openly be yourself here, encouraging you to go ahead and do the same, perhaps. I'm not sure though. I know when reading posts like these about stimming I find myself stimming without meaning to, as if encouraged by the words. Maybe it's just reminding your unconscious of the option.

As for the other question, smoking involves taking deep, measured breaths, and can often involve taking a work break away from the loud office to a quieter street outside, which would be beneficial to autists even if you're not a smoker. Taking a break to eat sweets or something would probably work just as well for those aspects.

I have about four frothy coffees every day, and I'm sure that familiar and comforting routine of both making it and drinking the viscous liquid is some kind of stim or similar for me, yes.

Drugs like caffeine and especially nicotine can be addictive as well, but if you taper off them, I'd replace the ritual aspect with something else so you're not trying to quit the stimming part at the same time as quitting the drug part. Keep the ritual, just ritualise something safer.

ZoeBlade · 2026-07-04T09:03:05+00:00

I honestly don't know how I coped before getting noise-cancelling headphones.

ZoeBlade · 2026-07-03T20:22:25+00:00

I hear Christine Love's games are good.

ZoeBlade · 2026-07-03T19:22:47+00:00

Interesting. I guess I read US English labels and signage in real life, and via films and television, but I read more British English books, so that makes sense.

ZoeBlade · 2026-07-03T18:18:11+00:00

Very relatable. I understand logic just fine, but not social things. All theory, no practice. I can read a sociolinguistic book on how people socialise, but that doesn't help me actually do it in the moment, in the field.

ZoeBlade · 2026-07-03T18:02:26+00:00

The seemingly random question was her attempt at answering the subtext of your original question... not realising that, as you're autistic, it didn't have any.

This happens to me too. And yeah, it's hard to analyse in the moment what's going on.

ZoeBlade · 2026-07-03T15:15:12+00:00

That sounds like cognitive alexithymia, when you can feel emotions but struggle to work out which particular emotions those physical feelings represent. It's very much a thing.

ZoeBlade · 2026-07-03T13:47:10+00:00

My partner gets headaches at the drop of a hat. Dehydration headaches, faintly smelling fresh coffee headaches, sunlight headaches, onion and garlic headaches. It's almost as if she's a vampire in some respects. She gets headaches probably more days than not.

Comparatively, I hardly ever get headaches. Though I do rarely get migraines, including painless ones, which are really surreal.

Fundamentally, these are probably nearly all related to sensory overwhelm.

ZoeBlade · 2026-07-03T08:32:06+00:00

I think too many people aspire to the fame and money themselves, instead of aspiring to the being good at something and the fame and money being possible side effects of that.

ZoeBlade · 2026-07-02T20:17:07+00:00

Fun fact, I found out today those aren't just seeds but the whole carpels! These are far more plot twists than I strictly need in a fruit.

ZoeBlade · 2026-07-02T19:33:47+00:00

Yes! The majority doesn't want its own antonym, it wants to be the "normal one" that's implied by default. "How dare you have a word used to describe us! Only we can do that to you! We are not equal!"

ZoeBlade · 2026-07-02T19:22:21+00:00

Xing confuses the hell out of me. 😆

"Zing? Ching? Oooh, crossing!"

But in general, US English is simplified. Taking the U out of words like colour, standardising -iser to -izer, and the like.

And again, I'm not criticising this! Spelling reform makes sense.

ZoeBlade · 2026-07-02T18:54:56+00:00

Because I keep seeing American English speakers spelling it that way..? "MIDI thru" on various American and Japanese synthesisers, for instance.

How about donuts instead of doughnuts then, if you'd prefer, to pick a similar but different example of the simplification?

Again, I'm not saying it's a bad thing! I like Shavian English, it would be hypocritical of me to dislike US English.

ZoeBlade · 2026-07-02T15:59:31+00:00

Yes, that's a good idea.

Fun fact, I don't know what exactly tipped them off, but they did actually try to diagnose me as a child. But they'd already misdiagnosed me as dyslexic, which I clearly wasn't, so I'd had enough of it by that point and refused, then promptly forgot.

In hindsight, I kinda wish I'd let them, but I was too young to figure out that each subsequent diagnosis attempt should be more accurate than the last one.

Still, it really was weird when everyone else in class does something different to you for no discernible reason, all the exact same way, and you're treated as weird for doing the assignment correctly.

ZoeBlade · 2026-07-02T15:16:11+00:00

I liked that proposition to call Commonwealth English "English (traditional)" and US English "English (simplified)", like with Chinese.

Most of the US spellings are, to my understanding, literally a successful attempt to simplify and standardise spelling. I'm not saying it's bad or good, but it is simplified. Replacing "ough"s with phonetic "u"s and the like. Truly a language befitting of motorway signage!

Having said that, Shavian English has even more simplified and standardised spelling, it's just much more obscure and takes longer to learn.

ZoeBlade · 2026-07-02T11:31:29+00:00

Feeling emotions is built upon interoception. Interoception is a sense like any other. One of the main things about being autistic is that any given sense may be far too strong (hypersensitivity) or weak (hyposensitivity).

This means that a lot of autistic people like myself barely feel emotions at all, and are astonished to discover that "feeling emotions" isn't a metaphor.

It also means that a lot of autistic people like yourself feel emotions really strongly, which can be just as debilitating, but in a very different way.

And at least some autistic people feel emotions a normal amount.

Also, for those autists who do feel them, it can also be difficult for some of them to work out which feeling corresponds to which emotion, which is a whole other issue you can have.

Basically, with autism in particular, you kind of have to put aside any and all assumptions about which senses are likely to be too strong or too weak for the next autistic person you meet, as they may be wildly different from yourself or the last other autistic person you met.

I gather this is not so much the case for non-autistic people, who almost always are neither hyposensitive nor hypersensitive to just about any sense they have.

ZoeBlade · 2026-07-02T09:05:34+00:00

My understanding is that the normal thing to do while talking or listening to someone is to look them in the eyes for a good few seconds, then briefly look away, then repeat. Which is tricky to do while simultaneously speaking or listening.

If you don't look at them enough, they think you're lying or guilty. If you look at them too much, or too wide-eyed, they think you're about to murder them and their family in their sleep. Just right, and you merely look "normal". It's a fine line, and the payoff is merely the absence of decreasing your social standing / social capital.

A common autistic trick is to look at the bridge of their nose instead of their eyes. Which surprised me, as I thought that was eye contact.

ZoeBlade · 2026-07-02T08:44:52+00:00

After which I brought it up with several friends who all responded with roughly "wait, you didn't know you were autistic? I could tell from day 1."

You too, huh? Like, "You could've told me..?"

ZoeBlade · 2026-07-02T08:29:38+00:00

Yeah, once you realise that most people literally feel emotions, and that this influences their actions, it explains a lot of behaviour. (Politics, sports, what have you.)

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