You Know You're Autistic If...
NEW! as of 21 February 2021
Summer gives you such terrible sensory issues that you hide from the Sun like a vampire. Conversely, you're so amicable to cold that you can sleep with the window open in the dead of Winter.
Your birthday is your most loathed day of the year because not only do you have to put up with pointless social interaction; pointless traditions; receiving gifts; eating with other people; and all of your other pet peeves, but you're expected also act grateful for it.
You're so attached to inanimate objects that you have sentimental reasons for not throwing away just about everything that you have.
You're such an extremely picky eater (due to how strong all of your senses are) that you make a point of avoiding eating out with anybody simply to avoid the logistics of explaining the situation and figuring out a tolerable meal.
You get perceived as an emotionless robot while feeling strong emotions, and conversely get perceived as being melancholic and/or enraged when you're daydreaming happy thoughts.
You know numerous facts about lifeforms and conditions during each of Earth's geological periods but have a blissful and complete ignorance of popular culture, sports, and whatever else that normies talk about.
You've listened to a song so many times that you've accidentally memorised the lyrics enough to be able to sing along to it perfectly. The song is in a foreign language that you cannot speak at all.
You've somehow managed to repeatedly get lost driving in a city despite using a GPS. Conversely, you've also wandered far off the trail in the forest many times and found your way back each time by recognising a familiar tree from far away.
Being forced to mask as a neurotypical and hide your natural behaviours from early childhood has made you so skilled at faking that you can be piss drunk without anyone you interact with suspecting it.
Older ones
You can unintentionally intimidate a person to the point of them being visibly afraid, and have no idea what you did.
You're pretty sure you know exactly what Ultra Instinct feels like.
Your sense of touch is so strong that you not only get disgusted after someone uses your keyboard/mouse at work, but you can instantly identify exactly who it was by comparing the texture to their natural body odour.
You can accurately predict how food tastes just by touching it, and even distinguish between organic and non-organic fruits.
Cat mannerisms and social rules make infinitely more sense to you than human ones.
A person you know says something about you and you spend 2 hours mentally researching what they
really meant and comparing it to data collected from other human interactions to see if it provides any additional insight on your standing with them.
You make accidental eye contact with a person and your brain reacts as if you literally challenged them to an on-the-spot duel.
You love giving gifts but are so aggressively averse to receiving them that you've actually had nightmares about it happening.
Your empathy is so selective that you simultaneously care too much about the few people that you've gotten to know, yet are as empathetic towards stranger as towards insects..
You are literally incapable of learning how to do things by listening to someone explain how, yet master concepts faster than anyone by actually doing them yourself. As a result, you ditch classes in college more often than you actually attend them.
You do your grocery shopping like you're rushing to get your pregnant wife to the hospital but absolutely need to pick up some food on the way.
You usually make it a point to be considerate of other people, but your sociopathic obsession with speed and efficiency still causes you to be a more aggressive driver than anyone you know.
You've focused so hard on maintaining the proper ratio of eye contact and looking away from someone that you failed to actually hear a single word that they had to say.
You're always delighted to take on tedious tasks that nobody else wants to take care of because it's a free opportunity to completely zone out and just think about interesting things.
You're unable to maintain eye contact with people that you like and have friendly relations with, yet can easily stare someone you're upset with in the eye without wavering for as long as you want.
If you learned that you're autistic as an adult, you relate far too much to Kami and Piccolo learning of their Namekian heritage and finally understanding why they were so different from and unable to connect with anyone on Earth.
You relate far too much to Anime/manga characters in general.
You don't need meth to go from wanting to mention something about an interest of yours, to realising that you've been ranting for several hours straight.
You avoid enquiries about your special interests because you know that indulging is the conversational equivalent of naively unsealing an unstoppable ancient evil from its eons old prison.
You get told that you look depressed, angry, or even murderous while you're staring off into space and daydreaming about pleasant things.
You've learned to live with the fact that people who don't know you are just going to assume that you're some combination of sociopathic, mentally challenged, or insane.
You're so averse to smalltalk and other trivial interactions that some people begin to suspect that you might be mute.
You think it's perfectly polite to respond to someone's request by fulfilling it without looking at them or saying a word, and you have no idea why other people don't understand. I did what you asked without complaint or grumble, did I not? My cat would understand.
You lose all attachment to people after not interacting with them for a month, no matter how fond you were of them.
Reading non-fiction books takes you an embarrassingly long time because you can't help but run every single remotely interesting thing you learn through your brain and see if it provides any insight or has any sort of connection to anything else that you know.
You've come up with a library's worth of unique theories on all sorts of subjects as a result of the aforementioned rumination.
You enjoy blasting music at deafening levels but become enraged at the sound of someone typing loudly.
You hear an ex-convict talking about people being stabbed for glancing into another person's cell in prison and find nothing strange about this.
The sensory assaults of the sounds of other people eating and the smells of their food in the cafeteria make you wonder if a bathroom stall wouldn't be a more pleasant place to eat lunch.
You experience periods of melancholy due to loneliness, yet become exasperated and quickly remember why you isolated yourself so much as soon as you have to interact with another person. Like a starving person trying to sate themselves by eating glass.
You are surprised to learn that headbanging to music is a "metal culture" thing and not a natural reaction that everyone has.
You celebrate upon hearing that the government is now mandating that everyone socially distance, wear a mask that hides their facial expressions, and avoid handshakes.
Your sensory needs and dislike of eating food prepared by other people have led you to become an exceptional chef who nonetheless only knows how to prepare less than ten different dishes.
You refuse to accept "people/society will think you're weird!" as a valid explanation for why you should or shouldn't do something. You're already going to be perceived as a weirdo no matter what you do, so why not just be yourself, so long as you aren't harming other people?
You get irrationally stressed around any kind of social interaction that lies within the chasm between all-business professional interactions, and "let's get drunk and nerd out about astrophysics and hypothetical anime scenarios."
You read about the nuances involved in getting to know another person via smalltalk, and wonder if such clandestine prodding should perhaps be saved for trying to figure out if someone is a drug dealer.
You can spend all day talking in a text-based chatroom but grumble that you're too introverted for this crap if you have to make a brief phone call.
You like the idea of ruling the world, so long as you can do it as a shadowy puppeteer secretly giving governments orders via e-mail. I actually had an idea for a game whose villain involved an ancient cat wizard that secretly ruled the world out of a pyramid floating in a quiet, dark, empty void and had a mummy cat underling who he granted total immortality to in exchange for the mummy conducting all necessary social interactions on his behalf.
