@Littlemissknowitall: Glad you can understand your son some more Meltdowns/shutdowns sometimes lead to panic attacks for me too if I can’t “stop the snowball”. Either way, I still end up hyperventilating almost every time.

@Jeremy: haha. I like when people think I do stuff like that on purpose too. Try not to feel stupid. Wish I could tell you how, but it happens to me too. Still, it takes a lot of smarts to live in a world where people’s brains do not work like yours and you have to find a work-around for just about every single thing!

On the matter of masking one’s own weirdness, for years I mispronounced words, acted intensely odd & purposefully acted inappropriate to whatever social boundary I could get away with without alienating my core friends and family.

Years later I realized why I did it. I am different. I do stumble socially. I do forget words, names and inexplicably create words to finish sentences when my memory stops. The thing is though, people who know me think I’m doing it on purpose. My plan worked!

But why do I feel so stupid? Oh, it’s because I can’t seem to remember ANYTHING anymore and I have the attention span of a goldfish. But nobody knows unless I tell them.

I wanted to comment on the chosen non-conformity. I have something called inattentive ADD, which is rarely diagnosed in girls and most often not until they are adults. Especially since I grew up in the 70′s and 80′s when they never looked at girls for ADD! Anyway, I did adopt a ‘silly’ and non-conformist personality to help me feel better about not being like other kids. My brain doesn’t function like other people’s brains, and I chose to be one of the non-conformists at school. I remember being happy to find friends who didn’t care that my brain worked in so many random patterns!

I was in a complicated situation in adolescence, too complicated to describe here. But some of the results of parts of that situation were choices in appearance, combined with an increase in various actions (or inactions) that I couldn’t help, none of which were for any particular reason related to social anything.

However, I saw from the reactions of those around me, what they assumed and thought about people who looked like I did and did the things I did.

I’d inadvertently stumbled across a look — that had more genesis in fairy tales plus sensory preferences than anything else — that other people considered stereotypically hippie-like.

And combined with the actions of your average autistic kid, this led to a lot of people assuming I did drugs, among many other things.

And other people respected me for “not caring what people thought”, and actually tried to develop friendships with me.

I remember at some point trying to convince myself that all of my difference was this kind of by choice thing.

And while that on one hand terrified me, it was also in a way liberating to feel like I had a choice about it. So I convinced myself that I was not “abnormal” and “defective” and “different because I couldn’t help it”, but rather “free-spirited” and “different because I want to be”.

(Although this then of course led me to question — of the elements of my involuntary difference that I really didn’t like, like speech trouble and special interests and stimming and freezing up and stuff — why would I want this? Keeping in mind that at the time I viewed these things as horrible. And then developed a whole theory about how my subconscious must hate me, like Arnold Rimmer’s in Red Dwarf.)

And since one of the expectations people had of me was “druggie”, it was inevitable that I’d be offered drugs at some point, and more or less inevitable that I’d end up taking them out of accumulated curiosity.

Although I didn’t really find as much acceptance among other drug users as some autistic people I’ve known. I did find a little.

But not just that particular kind of thing…

…I know autistic people who (especially as teens, but even after) hide out, or hid out, in assorted other “subcultures”, like goth and whatnot.

And certainly among geeks my weirdness had a certain amount of coolness to it, enough that I even managed to date for awhile, but I was still on the outside a lot there. (More than I knew, really. I’ve given up by now being startled whenever I hear “[insert name here] didn’t really like you, you know,” because I’ve realized my obliviousness to that at the time was sky-high.)

Other people I know or know of, have become criminals at some point in their lives.

But, yeah, when it seemed like my kind of difference meant defective, then the idea that a person could be different on purpose felt wonderful as a hiding-spot. And there seem to be as many ways and directions to be different-on-purpose as there are ways people can behave. So the part I wrote about that, is very true of one point in my life, but also drawn from many other people’s lives that I know as well.