It took me a long time to realize it, but some of the very first signs that I was neurodivergent were things like:

  • When I was a kid, I never really had a crush on anyone – I’d have crushes on things or places or situations, and if I saw someone (or something) that I thought I “should” have a crush on, I would. This would come and go and sometimes involve considerable investment in thinking about who someone was or what they were like, who they might be more or less interested in and so on. As a result I rarely ever got crushes, and I have no idea how people do it and it’s never occurred to me to ask, and so I had no sense of what normal was
  • When I was a kid, I was very easily upset and prone to crying. I was also very sensitive about being hurt (to the point where I didn’t like to be called by other kids’ nicknames, even if other kids did), and was very quick to judge others for being hurt. Both of these are very normal traits, but I didn’t ever really understand what the normal version of each was (and don’t know how to “turn it on” if I want to become less like this. I am told this is normal, but don’t know what normal is, and don’t know how to turn it off).
  • For some reason I had a very hard time getting used to being hugged by people who weren’t family members and so on. I never ever wanted to do it, and tried to escape if I had to, and had to consciously and repeatedly think about “hey, this person is being nice to me! I’m not being horrible to them by not wanting to get close to them, or by having a bad time in this situation! It will be OK if I just let them do this! If this goes badly I can just escape! It doesn’t have to be this big emotional thing where I’m hugging you or getting close to you!” This is a lot of work, as you can imagine – and I did it successfully only a few times
There are probably many more but this is all I can think of for now
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