I was hospitalized for a seizure recently and the nurse ended up going and grabbing me a little silicon bubble fidget thing because I just couldn’t stop messing with shit.

Edit: exact phrasing was “let me go grab you something to play with”

Does my doctor who stopped in the middle of an appointment, looked at me, and said “you know you’re neurodivergent, right?” count?

I am learning an instrument as an adult and my instructor commented “You’re so good at recognizing patterns.” That comment hit way harder than it had any right to.

My boss has got very high EQ, but tends to have fraught, tense relationships with our female coworkers (I described it to my husband as working with a mother and daughter who don’t get along- they say a bunch of things that seem nice and also seem to hurt each other a lot and I don’t know why).

She sometimes says passive aggressive things to me, but it always takes me too long to parse passive aggression in person, so I respond completely earnestly. This seems to confuse her without being rude, and she’s just vexed by me.

Actually, passive aggression in general makes me feel very neurodivergent.

I dated a girl who worked with elderly neurodivergent people. She was at my place and i heard the dryer was done with it’s cycle. I said i’ll have to go and make my bed, because you know how it is, if you don’t do it right away, you’re not doing it for two weeks.

She laughed and said: but you know why “we” have to do that, right? I was like: what? No. And she said, because we have adhd.

I just laughed and thought: YOU have adhd, i do… Oooooooooooh

A friend posted a link to something and mentioned me saying “you’re hyper literal brain will like this” and when I got done being annoyed about the typo I realized for the first time I am excessively literal.

Another time at lunch with a friend she mentioned in an offhand way that I have anxiety and that was when I first realized what anxiety is and that it’s not normal to feel the way I do all the time.

I didn’t get converted to a permanent position after a whole year at my job. The only negative feedback (among otherwise great remarks) I had was six months in:

1. Be more organized and send updates more often.
2. Speak without tangents or sounding scattered.
3. Improve prediction of how long tasks will take and completion dates when considering other priorities.

Does anyone want to guess my diagnosis?* Lol

The maddening thing is that I didn’t get any follow-up after those comments until five months later, when I got the surprising news that they would not be continuing with me. If I had thought my subsequent med change and work strategies were not, in fact, improving my performance, I would have pursued accommodations.

* It’s ADHD.

My psychiatrist does all the time

I was working on a personal project when a friend visited. I went through a quick series of successes and failures with my project and openly emoted at each, afterward he said to me “I’ve never seen anyone go through so many emotions in such a short amount of time.”

Had 2 psychologists refuse to work with me, after they got to know me

I was at a party just yesterday (very unlike me) that was mostly people I don’t know and within the first hour someone asked me if I was on ADHD medication.

I mean I’m not on medication which is probably how I got pinned so quickly but I still found it funny that in a crowd of people that has never met me I apparently still scream TISM.

I’ve never been diagnosed with anything, but I’m not good with people/the public, I can shake if it’s really bad, and I’m not good with eye contact. I was forced to go to a work meeting and I just could not look at anyone. They started talking to me “soft” and saying that I “speak so well” and that I was a good representation for that “community” of workers. They also told me to speak to my manager if I needed any accommodations.

Probably in K-12? Like seriously everyone in my “friend” groups and half of my classes knew something about me was off, and I believe I was known as the eccentric genius throughout middle/high school (and my HS had a lot of smart students). But the broader culture I was in didn’t believe in mental health so…

Other than that… there were two people I relate to very well on Mastodon (when I first joined), one of whom is very openly autistic; hence why I got tested. That’s probably as obvious as it gets

I have often been asked if I have autism. They often seem ready to wonder this if it seems like a situation is approaching where I can’t, in their eyes and their words, “read the room”. The very concept “of reading the room”, they then have to be told, plays out differently even on a cultural level. I am not of a common cultural background, and this is said to demonstrate itself in, say, seeing someone’s arms crossed. I see crossed arms and, if anything, I’m going to assume “decision maker mode”. They then ask “don’t you see I’m angry”.

For our sake, I’d be lying to say I don’t operate based on “tell, don’t show”, which is the opposite of what others often say, which is supposed to be beneficial yet often gives off the opposite impression because people want to cling to the idea that assumptions are inherent. People often also complain about how complex yet semantically loose (owing to “culture”, but at the same time I wonder why people, again, use their own expectations of verbal norms to assume what something must mean, instead of acknowledging dictionary-described words and sentences are just the word equivalent of mathematical equations) my communication is. Relevantly, that can be combined with my experiences with, ironically, people bashing me for not living up to their “unspoken directives” rather than gentility inspired by how I would say I expect logic to work, to produce the impression in me that maybe neurodivergent people are onto something with their sense of clockwork, placing me in what could be called autistic culture by nurture rather than nature, as is my calling when I’m told I’m only destined to rattle around in the realm of normal people. The neurotypical practice of succumbing to bias based on trained taboo and the infallibility of their dear ones (relevant among the gossipers) has done nothing except disillusion me in the presence of all who willingly exist without a striving for protocol clockwork, and if I had an ark, I would fill it with these neurodivergent people they say they fear.

I don’t think I’m ND even though sometimes I’m a little awkward in person and make up for it in other ways. Unfortunately, one of my aunts doesn’t think so and spent a good portion of a family meeting trying to convince everyone that I have Aspbergers because she had just learned about it and found my behavior odd when she went to ask me a question and started me. I could hear all the shit she was talking through the wall saying how antisocial I was for keeping to myself. Then years later she proceeded to wreck the family but that’s a different story, so I’m left wondering who the antisocial one really is.