alainamarieskeys:

You can read this post on my new wordpress blog (specifically dedicated to my experiences as an autistic person) here at Alaina Marie’s Keys.

While growing up, Amy had a very hard time socializing and was often nonverbal and catatonic. Amy would sit in one place in the same position for hours, maybe only changing it up to rock back and forth. Amy forgot to eat until she was starving. She forgot to drink water and became dehydrated. She was terrible at regulating her own body’s needs and would forget to pee until she was basically peeing herself, and always had trouble sleeping. Amy’s now an adult. She has a hard time expressing her own needs sometimes and doesn’t know how to ask for help, like if she can’t find something in a store. It takes all of her energy to do things that require a lot of senses at once, like shopping. If she is going shopping, she has to take a list and another person she trusts with her, because it is too hard to remember to purchase everything she needs and how to navigate the store and where her car is parked all at the same time. Amy experiences meltdowns if she has too many sensory things to process at one time, and during a meltdown she will scream, cry and be unable to move from the spot until she regulates. Amy frequently experiences burnout when she’s over-exerted herself and sometimes forgets where she is, feels hazy and confused and works basically on autopilot for days or weeks at a time.

While growing up, it was clear that Sarah had a knack for patterns. She could read a story and then create a story of a similar structure even though she had difficulty learning the formal processes of English in class. Sarah could remember endless facts and would recite them ad nauseam to her family and peers. Sarah created elaborate worlds from her own perspective, complete with characters, plots and fantasy elements and she would make drawings and 3 dimensional models to go with the stories. Sarah is now an adult. She’s in the Honors program at her college and is working on an honors thesis, where she essentially creates her own class for 6 credits and works with a professor one-on-one. Sarah is taking 6 classes this semester and has 3 part-time jobs and a 2-hour-per-week internship. Sarah tutors at the advanced level in several places on her campus. Sarah regulates a lot of her sensory issues well, and has turned a lot of her Sensory Processing issues into a running joke with her friends so she no longer feels self conscious about them. She has a lot of friends at school and a lot of people use the compliment, “You don’t seem like you have autism.”

Which person do you think is high functioning autistic and which is low functioning?

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