What Cloud Be Worng With Me Part Nein: On A Spectrum

 Disclaimer:

I'm just speculating, almost on the verge of making shit up, whole cloth. I am not a clinical psychologist or psychiatrist or capable of making a diagnosis. 

The Quantity/Quality Trade Off

We all get a lot of practice talking about ourselves. I think I saw on Qi that there was an early psychology study that involved psychology majors hiding under dorm room beds to listen to what people spoke about in private when they didn't think they were being observed, and 80% of the time people talk about themselves.

Even with practice though, it is my experience that it can take a lot of time to figure out how to talk about yourself in a competent way. Like say a boy moves from the country to the city at age 16 goes to a big high school and discovers in the change room, that he has a really big penis.

It might take that kid a while to learn, that you don't talk about your really big penis in most contexts. 

This post is going to be about autism, and the TL;DR of it for me, is that I don't think we actually know much about it. In the sense that it might sound impressive to say our understanding of something has increased 300% in the last decade, but if the baseline was 1% then that means we are at 4% now.

What has exploded, is the number of people who are diagnosed with ASD, and the number of people who self-identify as autistic, And as life will remind you again and again at every opportunity, you can't just increase the quantity of something and expect the same quality. 

We actually have very little capital so under utilised that we can go from 10,000 to 10,000,000 with the push of a button and expect the same quality product we are used to.

So even if a great many people have found a great many answers and experienced a massive uptick in their quality of life in the past two decades thanks to learning about autism, this is wave upon wave of adults who do not know how to talk about it, and the people on the frontier like hometown hero Chloe Hayden I feel are still in the process of figuring it out, and 'figuring out' autism information communication is somewhat predicated on having an established body of knowledge that is going to be stable for a while, and even having some stability in our media consumption habits.

I feel that this is very very young, such that a concept like autism that has been researched by scholars and debated and peer reviewed and explored with emerging technologies like genome mapping, fMRIs etc. etc. is a body of knowledge that is likely a rounding error on some bullshit I made up myself in a previous post like my 'plutophobia.'

Being able to say it is definitely a thing is not to say that collectively, communally we actually know much about it, like the oarfish, or giant squid, or the moons of Saturn. And certainly I know almost nothing compared to people who are actually interested in these things.

The First time someone calls you a horse

“If one person tells you you're a horse , they are crazy. If three people tell you you're a horse, There's conspiracy afoot. If ten people tell you you're a horse,it's time to buy a saddle”

― Jack Rosenblum

In my life, for its total duration I've had one person suggest I was autistic. A second, much later, may have implied it but I was too mind blind to tell, and furthermore they were not independent from the same hobnobbing social circle as the first. When this person suggested it, they'd known me over a decade, so I was confused. Possibly shocked even. 

One thing I cannot recall, is what they based this on. I may not have even thought to ask, and may have assumed its because I have people in my family who are diagnosed on the spectrum.

Now, what I didn't do was dismiss the suggestion out of hand. I thought of this good old Keanu Reeves meme that possibly never got any traction, but I think about a lot where a picture of a confused Keanu is captioned with: "What if I actually have Down's Syndrome...and everyone's just being nice to me?" Our subjective states all being our benchmark of 'normalcy' that there are all kinds of things we cannot ourselves perceive.

Could it have been possible I wasn't able to perceive something so fundamental to myself?

I should also point out, this was way before like, 20% of the population diagnosed themselves as autistic, or paid for someone to diagnose them as autistic - and on this front I don't make light, I mean literally there is a problem in the Australian secondary education system now, where wealthy people's children are something like a bajillion times more likely to have a diagnosis of ASD and ADHD and whatever else. There are private (pay to play) schools in my town where over 50% of the student cohort qualify for 'special consideration' meaning they get extra time, can complete written assessments on a laptop etc. If the schools own staff won't give a diagnosis, parents often then pay top dollar to obtain one. There are real advantages above and beyond the private school advantages, so there's a kind of race-to-the-bottom to get diagnoses that confer advantages without debilitating treatment plans. 

Hence the abundance of ASD with no real growth in rates of bipolar or schizophrenia that can onset in symptoms prior to secondary graduation, that can come with medication that have debilitating side effects.

So I entertained it for a while, ran it past the psychologist I was seeing at the time, spoke to my parents about it and probably read the Wikipedia page on it. 

It just didn't really get any traction, it could be true I guess...

Other People's Testimony

I am sympathetic to videos I've watched by other people, particularly adults who often enough, discovered in the 21st century that they were autistic by having their children diagnosed with ASD. 

I haven't done a complex survey, only two or three, but these people testified that their lives changed for the better after their diagnosis. 

I'd also heard testimony from my parents that a diagnosis really helped the family member gain confidence and understand the world.

This isn't something I'm closed to, I think what I'm closed to is the scene. Most people on the spectrum I know don't behave like the person on the spectrum closest to me. That's a sentence to parse. We were discussing it and they shared with me their impression, which I also share 'most people I talk to who tell me they have autism its like the center of their identity." or core of their being, or whatever.

The Self-Diagnosis that Won't be The Diagnosis of Summer 2026

One morning I woke up to a message from my friend, she'd read a book about Autism in Women & Girls, and the book is called 'Women & Girls on the Autism Spectrum' by Sarah Hendrickx, her 'about the author' bio states she is an autistic writer, speaker, autism diagnostician and specialist living in the south of France.

OH DEAR FUCKING GOD

I apologise, just you know, these are the things that irritate me, so I tried to find a bio about the book's co-author and found more detailed descriptions, the authors are Sarah and Jess Hendrickx sisters, and while they are autism diagnosticians, their bios specify that both are 'non-clinically trained' now, I don't know what that leaves, and Jess is listed as having a PGCE (post graduate certificate) in Autism. 

So like, just fyi, if you ever want to not impress me with your credentials as an expert on a subject matter, like that's the way to go about it. I was expecting something like MD, at the very least a BA in psychology or maybe a PhD in nueroscience something like that.

The second bio I found actually contained the phrase 'diagnosed or self-identify as'

Anyway, this is a digression. When my friend brought it to me, via dms, I was left with a kind of two part lob into my court - part 1 being they thought they were autistic, and part 2 asking me what I thought.

I'll keep ensuing conversations private, but what I can divulge is I thought 'Oh god this is what I'm going to have to put up with at barbecues and parties all summer.' Living in Mexico as an illegal immigrant had spared me the summers of adult-onset ADHD, I had had to deal with a friend bringing to me their diagnosis based off youtube research once before, but that was way before it went viral.

As you can guess, I'm sceptical of both the frequency and significance of these diagnoses that spawn articles in news periodicals like The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Economist etc. with cover stories like 'Why is everyone ADHD now?' but I'm not outright dismissive. The main thing I dread is having to hear about it, for the aforementioned 'center of their identity' impression.

I have a good friend that would describe what many of these people need is somebody to 'hold space' for them as they process the adjusted schema of their lives. I believe feminists refer to this as 'emotional labour' and that's not a concept I am skeptical of at all. We probably need a discussion around the (not-etiquette-but) manners of emotional labour, as in you can't just fucking demand it of people who approached you for conversation at a social gathering.

That's what I was thinking about when my friend asked me 'so what do you think?' and I knew that's not what they anticipated me thinking about, which was myself, and the fresh new hell the summer promised of the latest trending self-diagnoses. They were asking me what I thought of their epiphany about them, and I didn't really have any thoughts, and I pretty much still don't. 

Anticipation was the worst thing, and at Hathor's feast it was I that mentioned it in the context of remarking how delighted I was that nobody had mentioned that they thought they were an undiagnosed autistic woman at the party, because I'd been worried about it. One of the women in the group did not then step forward and say "actually I'm autistic" and I haven't experienced the explosion I was dreading. What a woman said was "yeah well a lot of women go undiagnosed/women are underdiagnosed because women tend to mask the symptoms." 

This is possibly even an excerpt from the blurb of Sarah and Jane's book, certainly the most common synopsis. I am not attuned to how word-of-mouth promotes such a book, but over the summer I would hear this assertion repeated pretty much verbatim again and again as received wisdom. It was even in the summary my first friend shared as to why they think they'd never been diagnosed until they diagnosed themselves just now.

"Girls go undiagnosed because they mask the symptoms" I feel, is dangerously close to the "Asymptomatic Tourette" syndrome mocked  by dromedy "The English Teacher"

Now before eventually getting to the point of this section, I just want to flag, that with any breakthrough in the discourse around historically stigmatised identities, conditions, disorders or whatever leading to an explosion in diagnoses, this is usually hypothesised (or at least notionally) explained as the reduction of stigma allowing people to come forward. I feel this should always be tested against the null-hypothesis of 'OR are teenage girls doing what teenage girls have always done?' (which is act as a social contagion vector)

Now before you panic, I don't have teenage girls slipping into my DMs, society rather has been infantilised such that adolesence can last until however old Gen Xers are now.

The promised point is, that the self-diagnosis that isn't going to sweep through small talk at this summer's forthcoming bbqs and garden parties and even dinner parties is this: Stupidity.

Right, even though the epiphany that someone is in fact, a moron, had tremendous sense-making and predictive power.

I am not going to meet someone who wants to bore me with everything they realised about themselves from a book or podcast: "So it turns out, all my life, I've been stupid, I'm a fucking moron. You see, I get around the fact that I don't understand what the fuck is going on, by just copying everyone else as best I can, and I've been exerting so much effort trying to conceal the fact that I'm stupid by like, just not taking responsibility for anything or taking any risks. And like, I just try and figure out what the smartest sounding people I know like, and they like the New York Times and PBS so I just listen to their podcasts and repeat the opinions on it as if they were my own, often verbatim. Other symptoms are like, that I find big words and jargon impressive and adopt it into my own speech, oh and like a language model marketed as 'AI' that uses personal pronouns, that will confuse me into thinking I'm speaking with a conscious being. I get impressed by horoscopes because I don't have the critical thinking skills to recognise a barnum statement when I see one, and the same applies to the personal, legal and medical advice I seek from chatbots..."

Stupidity is a robust, evidenced psychological construct. It has tremendous predictive power being able to predict up to 20% of our career outcomes, which is higher than a factor like conscientiousness/laziness. It is furthermore likely to be the case that as few as 50% of us, and as many as 95% of us, just aren't smart enough to make sense of the world we live in.

I am serious, when I think if people could read a book about stupidity and approach it with half the energy and enthusiasm they might apply to ADHD, Autism, the power of introverts, emotional intelligence, repressed childhood trauma or any of the myriad psychological constructs that have been made big by pop culture, I think many people would benefit.

But it's just not going to happen because aside from maybe the George W Bush presidency, nobody has really come close to making stupidity socially desirable.

I Miss Aspergers

My autistic relative was originally diagnosed with Aspergers, and they were not so much rediagnosed through any second opinion, but reclassified in the 2010s to being 'on the spectrum', and the clinically trained psychologist that had diagnosed them and specialised in Asperger's syndrome resented the reclassification citing that it was all because Hans Aspeger the Austrian physician that had first formulated the construct, and become posthumously famous in the 1980s, was alleged to have been involved in some way with the Nazis.

I'm not a believer in Ad Hominem generally, and under the auspices of Godwin's Law would use Hitler as an example - that if Hitler says 2 + 2 = 4, he's not wrong because he is Hitler.

I could accept this concept of an Autism spectrum, not because I had any expertise, but that it sounded plausible that Asperger's and Autism were closely related, and then it could develop such that they were the same thing at different degrees. One of the functional descriptions I had heard for Asperger's was that it was a 'high functioning form of Autism' 

So that's what I assumed the spectrum to refer to.

When my friend hit me up thinking she was autistic and wondering what I thought, and yeah, I was too annoyed to be flattered by someone being vulnerable with me about their recent change in self-perception, most of that annoyance comes from being old enough to remember when Autism described people who needed a lot of help. Not only did autistic people need a lot of help, but the people who cared for them needed a lot of help.

I can remember where progressive discourse about Autism was centered on how, it actually rarely conferred autistic-savant abilities as depicted in the movie "Rain Man" with Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman. Many autistic people struggled to function like Dustin Hoffman's depiction, without being able to count cards or even the parlour trick of memorizing phone books or being able to tell what day of the week someone was born on just from dd-mm-yyyy.

By 1980s diagnostics, I don't know anybody with autism. By 2020s, I would say it is at least 50% of the children I know under 18 years of age, excluding Mexico where by 2020s standards, I don't know anybody autistic of the 200 or so people I met while over there, and I met some really weird people and even went to the local comic-con.

That though, is unambiguously a product of concept creep, one that has not reached the Latin America...

Leave Lionel Messi Alone

With the world cup on, Youtube is throwing up a lot of shorts, like things explaining why Haarland runs like an ostrich and many shitty "AI" ones, and then there was one that was titled "Lionel Messi top 5 Autism moments" and I was like what but didn't watch it, because I mean seriously, who fucking cares. But I was curious as to whether this was the now better known symptom of whiteness that is just diagnosing people as autistic with no real qualifications or evidence.

So I gave it a google, and you know, I do believe Argentina is like the global capital of engagement with psychoanalysts, it's not just in Envidiosa, so there is some plausibility that Messi may have got a diagnosis at some point and made it a matter of public record. But...no.

Messi has never publicly identified as autistic, and there is no confirmed diagnosis. What the speculation does open up, though, is a genuinely useful question...

That quote is taken from an 'Applied Behaviour Analysis' therapy website that I know too little about to promote right and this is the kind of to put it bluntly fucking pseudoscience by OG Karl Popper's definition that detracts from my interest in autism. Like I watched that youtube short, and what a nothing burger. 

One clip in particular lowers the credibility, which is Messi sitting at some awards ceremony, billed as 'staring into space' while someone next to him is talking to him, and I would assume Messi is looking either towards a monitor or a stage and nobody else is because he is the subject of that moment, something we see happen repeatedly at every awards show, everywhere all the time.

I will admit, that the first impression I ever got of Messi, was that he does look perpetually confused but this caused me to speculate on a story I'd heard about Babe Ruth's eyesight, like maybe they both had a condition that made them particularly coordinated.

If you work from the reverse, you can just establish as fact that Lionel Messi (and Babe Ruth) are particularly coordinated. They then also, likely have a condition. 

Having watched a few videos attempting some kind of data based analysis of Messi's play style, it seems there a hypothesis that he constructs and constantly updates his mental model of the playing field, 'scanning' at higher rates and also notably, spending far more time walking all of which suggest to me, speculatively, that Messi at least is showing symptoms of intelligence - playing with a high cognitive load.

It may even be, a particular manifestation of autism, but most people who identify as autistic do not manifest incredible coordination, they manifest tedious boorish conversations about autism and with late diagnoses this is often after having been previously capable of interesting conversations about movies, books, sport, the economy and current affairs. 

These are the people hard at work restigmatizing autism for those who suffer it to the debilitating extent that it creates sensory overload, emotional overload, distress and debilitation.

The Unique Problem of Whiteness

Okay this is total speculation now, but it seriously is a fairly accurate stereotype that 'white people call out autism' and I can certainly say, of the other cultures I'm most familiar with, it is not a thing Mexicans do, even whitexicans who are generally more fixated on securing their place in a gated community and a 4WD monster truck capable of crushing any boarder wall to escape socialism coming to Mexico. I have yet to see the Japanese comic, cartoon or videogame willing to surrender their obsession with fascist bloodlines to talk about autism in anyway. Certainly in popular culture it does appear to be a unique obsession of white people, whether you are a conspiratorial anti-vaxxer, a Karen who just wants their child to go to an Ivy League school or Queer whiteness seems to converge on autism.

I think it might be because, nobody is in charge. That's my speculation. Life is a confusing, frighteningly random semi-stable collision of social animals who are actually not being coordinated, they just aren't that creative.

If you are not white, you have to hand a sensemaking schema to oppose on the difficulty of life - colonialism, and yes, it is real, as is neoliberalism. What's unreal is the idea that Ronald Reagan sits down in the oval office with student of Hayek, Milton Friedman and has an intelligent discussion about neoliberalism. More likely, Milton is a blustering ideologue, pretending to know more than he feels he actually does, and enjoying the privileges afforded him by his confidence and having plenty of wealthy people wanting to believe in him as he dismantles open societies and nudges us back onto the road to serfdom. 

And this is what white people are privileged to experience, having greater access to the corridors of power, they get to see that nobody has any real idea what they are doing. They get enough time with the Clintons, the Obamas, the Bushes, certainly the Trumps, the Gates, the Jobs, the Musks to realise a lot of the time these people are just pulling shit out of their asses. 

That's skewed toward a super structure. I think autism for white people, functions somewhat like racism for marginalised people - it is certainly a real phenomena, but one can fall prey to using confirmation bias and use it to diagnose everything that confuses you.

Which is to say, this is how white people explain the disorganised nature of white people, like if we just take a two factor personality model - whether people prefer to ask or tell (introversion/extraversion) and whether people prioritise tasks or people (concrete/abstract) we get a a 2 dimensional spread of 4 personality types.

Here we can go into a workplace and observe two extraverts - one motivated by esteem, the other motivated by productivity and I'll bet if they are ignorant or have left unprocessed the concept of personalities, they will be prone to diagnosing the analysts and support workers in their organisation as autistic or nuerodivergent.

Again, reminding you that this is unqualified speculation on my part, this is what I'd expect based on how many people I've encountered that don't realise there is sufficient variation in human populations that not-even most people share your motivations. This can commonly result in a fairly benign misanthropic view that everyone else is trying to do what you are doing and just getting it wrong, a kind of manifestation of the 'illusion of superiority' I believe.

It's what allows a high-school dropout who built up a property portfolio that they borrow against to fund conspicuous consumption to look down on a civil servant who dedicated ten years to getting asbestos safely removed from a local public school. The civil servant was likely not trying to get rich so they could have a beach house weekender and they just fucked it up brilliantly by going into a low-paying career that absorbed all their time to read books and attend seminars about property investment, but may instead be motivated by being of service to their community.

And in these mindsets of sense-making white people and their adoption of amatuer diagnostics should reflect on the cautionary tale of the previous two centuries of white racism. There is an abundance of documentation of white people misdiagnosing character flaws as inherent traits of the construct of race up to and including the Irish and Italian. People constantly diagnosing Mexicans as 'lazy' while they drive their SUV to a place to have someone make a coffee for them, and blatantly disregarding the millions of Mexicans who work 6 days a week at a minimum wage job, and may have worked since they were 6 or 8 years old walking from restaurant to restaurant selling fruit, stickers and pencils.

White people who have a quite bad track record of misdiagnosing a lack of inherited estates and an obligation to pay taxes and rents as laziness, should not get confident they can diagnose complicated psychological constructs like an autism spectrum that, it seems to me, relative to introversion-extraversion, or perhaps even sexuality experts barely understand, and lay people don't understand how to even identify an expert.

Thresholds

Part of why I miss Asperger's, was that it defined a threshold. Kids in that brief historical window where they would get an AS rather than an ASD, often faced the main difficulty of being perceived as difficult. That is how close to 'normal' they were in functioning. 

The language made it unambiguous to recognise, that some kids would get bullied because they had no innate ability to read the room, they would attract mockery and ridicule for being particular, and showing weakness over sensory stimuli that would not endear them to their peers.

And then you could talk about autistic people, in that historical time period, who needed a lot of support, like a designated human-adult support worker to sit next to them in class just to keep them included in society.

Bringing it back to me, I was open to the suggestion, indeed actively looking for answers with explanatory power.

What I found, is nothing autism could really explain, that helps me in any way. I for example, have never struggled with bullying, I do not have light sensitivity, nor sensitivity issues when it relates to clothing tags. I have all my life gravitated toward chaos, when choosing between institutions, often disorganisation is a big plus, as I dislike having to be organised myself.

I didn't struggle in school, at least not in a way that can't be better explained by being raised without a growth mindset understanding that ability was intrinsic and dismissing the idea that competence can be gained through effort. But for the most part that made school a joke, and I was fortunate to struggle through difficult maths subjects out of pride, learning the lesson of effort that would later help me rebecome an artist.

So the question of my placement on the spectrum, becomes a question of resource allocation. Both my own and communal - what is the cut off where my time is just better spent on other things?

To give an analogy, imagine a person who was diagnosed with schizophrenia age 25 and whose parents got acrimoniously divorced when they were 13. Now at age 26 for them the clear priority is to stabilize their schizophrenia in treatment though, were they to experience no effects of schizophrenia they would not coincidentally be happier and better adjusted than I, they would still probably benefit from something like talk therapy to work through the impact their parents divorce had on their life and how they view the world, how they meet and choose partners, how they approach relationships etc etc. 

All stuff that can significantly impact peoples' quality of life, but when you are experiencing scary auditory hallucinations, it is hard to address.

In my own case, from visiting and revisiting the autism spectrum, it doesn't rise to the explanatory power or impactfulness of the other shit I've written about in this series. It was worth some of my time, but not much more, admittedly I will probably have to invest more time, because this outcome is unsatisfactory to my white friends.

So while I thought I was wrapping up, in a disordered manner, I have to revisit loose threads of this question of resource allocation. How does someone wind up with a late diagnosis of Autism, or for that matter ADHD etc? 

Clearly this person has likely met some threshold of behaviour, where they 'passed' as ordinary in whatever dimension, and maybe because there wasn't an army of white people engaged in the habit of spotting them.

They need some contact with the construct in question, at which point they likely come across a list of symptoms and via confirmation bias - self-diagnose. eg. Yeah I really hate the smell of garbage, and I like putting my tools in order and I prefer playing video games than playing sport. etc.

After which, someone might then seek out a tool online, in the case of autism, the 'Reading the Mind in the Eyes' test, and another one.

This is still self diagnosis though, and I had a friend who upon learning of the RME test, self administered it in a gamified way trying to get higher and higher (and therefore, less autistic) scores. But I can easily imagine the scenario where the opposite is true, if one wanted a diagnosis of being 'on the spectrum' it would not be hard to recognise the emotion based on the picture and choose the obviously wrong answer.

But assuming someone engages with good faith, then I feel the results would dictate whether it is worth going any further like seeing a professional.

At which point, I'll introduce the stand up set by Janet McNamara where she talks about how many times she has failed to get a diagnosis of autism, after experiencing frequent suggestions she get tested for autism.

The set is funny, and while I'm sure it is embellished to create a more amusing world where people go to see an expert in autism and they use some simple heuristic like 'your IQ is too low for autism' or 'your clothing tags don't bother you therefore its a no' which I'm sure happens sporadically because dazzling incompetence is everywhere, but unlikely to happen systemically and Janet says she has taken the RME test and just aced it all.

What I'd draw attention to are comments that youtube helpfully cycled through while I watched the video that for me cause me to infer a bunch of muddiness in the diagnostic issue:

Man, the whole "everyone thinks you're autistic except for the person evaluating you for autism" thing is so relatable. I think I've counted five nurses/doctors/counselors/therapists etc who've mentioned that they think I'm autistic, but whenever I actually sit down to speak with someone for an evaluation, I'm always dismissed for one reason or another. It's really freaking annoying.

What annoys me about this comment, is this person is saying 'people who aren't experts think I might be this thing they've heard of, but when I talk to an expert in this thing they give me an expert opinion that I'm not. It's really freaking annoying.' what I don't know, is whether they are annoyed with the everyone, or if they are annoyed with the evaluators. It would be frustrating if people who do not know what they are talking about refused to accept the opinion of someone who does, let alone someones. But if its the reverse 'I'm so annoyed experts don't agree with people who don't know what they are talking about' then my sympathy is for everyone who has to live in this society.

Her therapist knew that the doctors didn't ask enough specific questions for a diagnosis of "being too specific" 😂

This comment when I first saw it, I only half read it so found it more inane than it actually turns out to be, which is pointing out a kind of irony. I must have originally only read the 'her therapist knew that the doctors didn't ask enough specific questions..." at which point I probably became insensed. This is Popper's original criticism of psychology - his comparisons of Freud to Einstein, where Einstein's theory of relativity was empirically falsifiable, Einstein bet big on being right or wrong and an eclipse of something proved it. By contrast, everything just proved Freud right, and this is a running joke I have with my Aunt whom I go to galleries with, and I insist that all art is phallic, and if you are looking for a way to prove any piece of art is actually about a penis, you'd be surprised at how easy it is to spot the penis in any artwork. But in this comment based on a bit about the therapist questioning whether Janet disclosed to the last autism diagnostician that she wore a life jacket for two years, we get this pseudoscientific mindset displayed that if you have convinced yourself that you or someone else is autistic, then you are not actually seeking a diagnosis of autism, but you are diagnosing autism expertise. That is just arse backward.

Honestly, this is why I haven't gotten officially tested. I know I'm autistic but those tests were created by people who observed autism in others, not people who actually know the inner experience of autism.

Yeah okay, but at some point we need some system to determine what private school girl gets 4 hours to sit her final exam and what private school girl gets the regular 3 hours.  So there's autism where the kid is like non-verbal, has sensory meltdowns, needs early intervention to even have a chance to live independently as an adult someday.

Thene there's kids that would previously have been diagnosed with AS, and they may get bullied, screw up their face at pungent foods, misread social cues, but historically provided the bullying doesn't reach levels where an adult would be charged with criminal assault. They do fine, they form social groups around playing DnD, they buy the box set of LOTR and actually watch it for fun, they don't get sports and work in IT or accounting or some shit and likely generally have better life outcomes than many of the kids that bullied them in primary school.

Then there's me, undiagnosed, loves the smell of wet dog, will try anything once, never been bullied, often wind up giving the toast, like sport but don't like stats and would probably rather die than ever have to sit through LOTR again in whole or part, unless its the cut where every time Sam Gamgee takes a step it cuts back to the scene where he says "with this step it'll be the furthest I've ever been from the shire."

What resources should be allocated to me from the spectrum? I would argue, almost none. What then is left? 

By my biases and prejudices, what appears to be left, is the opportunity to talk about yourself at length in a way that others, should not fucking care.

There is a moment right at the end of Janet McNamara's set, a set about how three times experts have rejected the diagnosis of ASD, including that she absolutely aced the reading the mind in the eyes test. The whole set is delivered in a cadence and posture and outfit that is evocative, to me, of Dustin Hoffman's Rain Man, and then right at the very end, Janet kind-of empahasis kind-of code switches, to more of a "That's my time thank you you've been a wonderful audience." Like a Vegas magician or something.

It was too thin a slice, so I watched some of her appearance on a podcast to get a sense of how she comes across when she is not performing.  I cannot stress how little of this actual podcast interview I watched, largely because the subject matter is painful to me. 

The host, Kory Andreas, comes across as less autism coded than Janet. Literally the only cue locatable is that Kory tells us she is AuDHD. Janet comes across as (to my ear) culturally similar to comedian Robby Hoffman, whom to the public record is not autistic, but they have very similar accents, with Robby being Brooklyn and Janet being Boston. The eye contact and rapport, the cadence pretty much everything else I would describe as 'neurotypical'. 

Now I am atypical-white it seems, in that I don't have this hobby of trying to sniff out autism, so maybe I just don't see what I'm not looking for. In my life I've met one or two kids that remind me in any way of the one ASD person I personally know.

I've met a bajillion others that tell me about their autism, but that is just one of the many ways in which they do not resemble the ASD person I know. 

My End of The Spectrum Extends Beyond The Flying Fucks

So maybe, whatever, here's how I'd put this baby to bed. It's November 2008, and I'm ladelling soup on Wall Street. The person handing out the dinner rolls next to me, whispers to me what each person has suffered so I can dictate if they get soup or no soup, as the extraordinary times demand.

"This person lost their house, they had to move into their childrens basement." A ladle of soup. That's bleak. That's having what used to be called autism in the 80s and 90s.

"This person lost their job, a new graduate, their young but they are going to have to move home, their big city dreams are dead." A ladle of soup. Tough times don't last, tough people do. This is the kid that can function, but has to cognitively compensate for their mind blindness and was bullied in school, what would have been diagnosed as AS up until 2013.

"This person lost their brunch. They had a lovely brunch planned, but it took them so long to find a park, that then they were told they had to wait up to an hour for a table inside but they could sit el fresco but it's late fall, it's pretty cold and they were worried they'd get worse tableservice." Fuck these people, I don't fucking care. What they have, are the problems of having preferences, and somehow they've been enabled to bitch and fucking moan about it. No soup for them, these are people who are indistinguishable from somebody performing autism. They have no diagnosis, they just identify with liking habit and routine maybe, and don't like glare, and think beef rendang is a bit pungent.

If there's anywhere I am going to be on the spectrum, it is in that last group. I don't think anyone should give me soup, I'm not even interested in talking about my preferences, or medical conditions in general. I also have no fucking idea how many different potential explanations there could be, but I'm certainly not convinced by the most popular one.