Normally, I wouldn't take much from these tests but given that the site I found them linked on (run by a person with autism) didn't laugh them out of the room and some form of ASD is something I've been suspecting in myself for some time now, I figure this at least paints an interesting picture.
Your neurodiverse (Aspie) score: 134 of 200
Your neurotypical (non-autistic) score: 70 of 200
You are very likely neurodiverse (Aspie).
What really gets me here is the spiderweb graph that comes along with those scores. Yes the numbers have a pretty hard split but it's also somewhat difficult to argue much with a strong visual representation of the split. I'm almost entirely on the right side of the graph, save for some social abilities (which I utterly lacked when I was younger).
You'll have to click on this one if you want to read it but the top line (highlighted in yellow) are my scores:
Total: 146.0
Language: 6.0
Social Relatedness: 84.0
Sensory/Motor: 31.0
Circumscribed Interests: 25.0
This one was interesting because it gives you the answer choices 'Never True', 'True only when I was younger than 16', 'True now', or 'True when I was younger and true now'. While it might be a little off because I wasn't a very self-aware kid (which is probably odd in and of itself, to be fair), I think that was a good way to handle this.
From what I've read, this one was originally set up to catch 'sub-threshold autism' or to screen adults who showed signs of being on the spectrum when they were younger but those faded as they grew. This is especially interesting to me as I'd wondered about being 'sub-threshold' myself not twenty minutes before stumbling across this one. There's also the fact that we do change as we grow and it's possible that behaviors which might have strongly indicated ASD in children would have softened as the child grew.
Now, compare my scores to the average scores of neurotypical females (I wasn't given a gender-neutral option and am faab (female assigned at birth)):
Total: 82.2
Language: 5.7
Social Relatedness: 41.1
Sensory/Motor: 20.2
Circumscribed Interests: 15.0
That's, again, quite a gap.
So, yeah.
That's where that is.
I'm actually kind of glad to know that this is potentially something I could be diagnosed with. I mean when I was just thinking I was weird, it was very rough on me when I couldn't just stop being weird long enough to do things that would really help me either then or later on. If I'm just being 'weird' then I should be able to knock that off for a while when I want to, right?
Right. So the next obvious thought is that I'm not just 'weird' but that there's some other reason for my behavior other than just being quirky. Nothing wrong with being quirky, of course, but it's nice to have something concrete.
For right now, though, I think the trick is to figure out how to work around my various issues rather than just trying to force myself to act in a way this is so far off of natural to me that it's actually stressful in and of itself.
Or something.
I'll get things sorted out, is what I mean. For the immediate future though, I think I'll curl up, write about vampires and plan a story involving catboys at a Victorian music school with a friend of mine from England. Awesome.
Bye for now, everyone~ Bye for now.
