Interview with an autistic guy

If you need to get around the paywall, you can read this story here.

I recently had the awesome experience of being an autism study subject. This entailed everything from an MRI to an EEG to Raven’s Progressive Matrices, which I’m pretty sure my brain decided to prioritize as an ability at the expense of pretty much everything else.

There was a more life-related interview part that I don’t want to forget about. So I figured I’d write out what I can remember, messy steam-of-consciousness style, in case someone needs to feel less alone or understand a loved one a bit better. Or maybe you’re just curious, which, selfishly, I’m very here for.

This will be a mixture of my real (but probably semi-embellished) words in the moment and some further retrospective enhancements, indicated as such in the text. Regardless of the accuracy of my memory, all feelings are preserved and genuine. So, without further ado, the unrefined ramblings of a bona fide, 31 year-old autistic man:

What was school like?

My words in the moment until noted otherwise (again: not exact, but a good gist):

Oh…hmm…uh.

(My eyes are on the wall to my right, not the interviewer’s. This remains true for most of the session.)

You know how people say, “I always knew I was different?” Well, that wasn’t me. I was always just off somewhere else. It didn’t occur to me that this was a concept, a concern, a fact about me.