>>914I took a test for it online, just for fun. Which obviously it's not a real diagnostic tool but I looked it up later and it's apparently common for aspergers people to use online tests to self-diagnose and its fairly accepted for adults who suspect they have aspergers. Anyway, I thought my result was gonna be normal but I got a score in the "higher than average; you may have some asperger/autistic traits" range. So, curious, I looked up the traits of a person with aspergers and it fits me very well, e.g. I can't for the life of me detect sarcasm/"jokes" from people at my job, I never look in people's eyes despite dealing with hundreds of people a day, often at work I have to lock myself in the bathroom to hide from all the people/noise because I feel like I'm gonna cry, I really love doing the repetitive filing tasks that everyone else for some reason finds boring, I try to never talk about stuff that I like because I have a tendency to not be able to stop and to just steamroll people with information about my interests...apparently these are all traits of it. I have others too but no point in listing everything.
It's a relief because, if I do have it, it explains why I have all of these annoying traits, which I just thought maybe I was a selfish person or an asshole or something, or that I didn't try hard enough to pay attention to people's needs, and I thought something was really wrong with me for needing to hide in bathrooms at work or one time at 22 years old I even hid in a closet for an hour because too many people were at my cousin's wedding. Now when people confuse the shit out of me at work by "joking", which they always apologize for or seem disturbed by my awkward responses/my total belief in what they said, I can tell them that my brain actually doesn't process tone of voice normally so that's why I have no idea that the shit they tell me is supposed to be a joke, and to stop trying to tell me to do things via facial expressions and just explain with words, because apparently that stuff is harder for me than for other people. It feels nice to have a possible explanation for all of these random quirks and deficiencies that I never saw any connection between before, I just felt like I had a bunch of weird qualities that I was probably just making up in my subconscious and could eventually escape from, and I thought the hiding and crying at work thing was some hormonal bullshit based on me being female, or I was just immature, or something was subconsciously wrong with me where I was being over dramatic, but apparently "sensory overload" is very common for aspergers and needing to hide out in a quiet place is normal.