Not me reading the Artemis Fowl books (back when there was only two!) in third grade so often I personally wore the teacher's copy out in a school year. xD
I stopped counting how many times I'd read The Outsiders when I got to 68 times, and The Princess Bride I stopped counting at 45 times. It never occurred to me that other people didn't do that. Up until I was 15, if I felt like reading, I reread my books that I'd had for years. I knew that wasn't normal, so i didn't tell anyone.
Well done, Serenity. Thank you for helping spread awareness of not only autism traits in general but of how traits in older generations might differ due to culture.
This could be titled "autism traits that got missed in the 2020s"! I wish it weren't true, but I had all of these in abundance growing up, and got much the same reactions you did
The difference is that in 2020 you CAN get an autism diagnosis. That was not an option in the 80s outside very select areas and with overwhelming symptoms.
My second grade teacher put me in a refrigerator box to stop me from "daydreaming". While in it, I couldn't see the board & couldn't interact with anyone else in class. When my mother, a teacher, found out, she was PISSED! She went to the principal who wouldn't do anything, so, the next year, I went to a different school on a boundary exception. I've been mistreated by A LOT of teachers over the years before *finally* getting diagnosed with ADHD in my 30s. My children & I all have that, and one of my children is also on the autism spectrum. Crazy, crazy smart, but socially several years behind their peers. BTW: I'm gen X, so ADHD & autism wasn't a thing yet
@@Est.4_14Yes, they were around, but HIGHLY stigmatized. And professionals didn't even know how to really help people back then. Often professional help was more harmful than helpful. Sadly, it was often safer NOT to be diagnosed back then.
I think these signs were missed long after the 80s too. I feel like this didn't become common knowledge up until very recently, now that autistic people are finally being given a voice on the internet. Teachers and parents were blind to these signs in the 2000s.
I was shamed so much in kindergarten for “spacing out”. When I would snap out of it the teachers would be looking at me with a look of disbelief or disgust. I feel like that set the tone for my elementary school experience. That was in the 90’s. It’s so mind blowing that teachers and doctors didn’t “know better.” I feel like they still knew enough to treat children nicer and with more patience.
They were also missed in the 90s. 90s kid here who is definitely autistic and no one caught it even though it was so obvious I may as well have been wearing a neon sign.
That first one really hit me 😂😂 my parents would constantly be calling my name and when I eventually hear them asking where my head is... i was too embarassed to tell them i was making up stories in my head about dragons and pirates, or fantasising about the characters in the latest book i read. What was worse was when I learned to nod and vocalise basic answers to conversations while being entirely in another universe. I often had "conversations" like that with the people around me and then had no idea what they were talking about.
I'm a level 2 autistic human, undiagnosed during childhood (in the 80s). I can totally relate, especially when everyone tried to force me to socialize.
@@HyLo-ruleIt shouldn't. The "level 2 autistic" is from the DSM-5 (ie. the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition), which contains 3 levels when it comes to Autism: Level 1, Requiring Support, has some difficulty but otherwise may be independant; Level 2, Requiring Substantial Support, has more severe difficulties and may require assistance more often; Level 3, Requiring Very Substantial Support, has the most severe difficulties and must be assisted at all times. And the "human" part? Well, that's just general anonimity, because why should it be our buisiness what their full identity is. Honestly, it's a good practice to have when the internet just loves to suck up every drop of personal data you're willing to let leak.
OMG, Elf Quest! Read the comic for years! ADHD helped with some of that (AuDHD myself), but it was still an issue. Mirroring? Yep, did plenty of that, got called it for it, learned how to be more subtle. I also did theater, and later, improv, those helped It was easy being someone else. Being myself, that's still difficult. So many books I've reread, movies and TV shows I've rewatched.
ELFQUEST!!! 🤘🤘 This was one of my two first favourite comic titles (the other was Marvel's Conan the Barbarian.) I used to love going to the one comic shop in town because they still had a few arcade games there and I loved hearing the Bubble Bobble theme playing incessantly in the background as I browsed.
Same! Had a seven 11 or something similar. They had a comic rack and a shelf for the larger Conan comics. I would collect empty cans as a teen and turn them in for the deposits. I would save up and buy Elfquest and Conan every month. Sometimes others if I had enough. At the time they had Jello pudding pops and I would get one then go somewhere quiet to read my comics and eat the pop. Man, those were the days.
@@SkitSkat674 SSOC was even better, I loved the magazine format and the stories were grittier but the higher price and my limited parent-dependent budget meant I always had to pick and choose my titles for the month. Capitalism is a mangy cur!
I was diagnosed at 52. Serenity, thank you. I love Toren's content too! It's just really nice seeing the perspective of another late diagnosed woman. It's nice to feel understood.
In middle school one of the ta’s said to me while I was daydreaming “take whatever is in your head out of your head”. If I was confident enough I’d say sarcastically “thanks I’m cured”. I’m not throwing shade at any of my teachers I just wish they understood that they’re never going to make me into something I’m not. I wish everyone in school that tried to make me neurotypical would just make peace with the fact that this is who I am and fake it till you make it can only go so far.
Thank you for sharing more of your life and journey, Serenity. I am 60, you and your son are helping so much with these videos. I hope someday soon to be able to get a formal diagnosis. It will give me peace. 💜✨ELFQUEST!✨💜 It is still the only comic book series in my world. I love it so much, I also still love The Grateful Dead, attended shows from 1983-1994. Took my first born to her first Dead show when she was a month old in 1986. I still have all my Elfquest original black and white issues, color compendiums, novels, fan posters signed by Wendy Pini. Also have all my GD tix, albums and CDs, books and posters. I will never give them up for anything.
EQ came out the year I was born, though of course I didn't encounter it until I was ten or twelve when a friend got Hidden Years and the cassette for their birthday. I was instantly enthralled, got up early (it was a sleepover) to listen to the cassette again, and soon enough I had some of my own copies and was practicing drawing Strongbox getting telepathically attacked... those same three panels, over and over and over. EQ still forms the foundation of my art style and comic preferences (in terms of art, characterization, pacing, worldbuilding, etc.). It was the reason I turned every conceivable college project into something to do with elves (art, writing, programming, Japanese, etc.). I put together a whole set of characters for what amounted to EQ AU fanfiction that I'd intended to be like a tie-in comic (before I understood the logistical issues with that idea), the cast of which is so practiced in my head that I can write out all 33 at a moment's notice (and part of that programming practice was a database that printed out the genealogy for any elf I typed in, going back through 230 years of who-begat-whom in my tribe). ...I suppose it's fair to call it an obsession 😅 It's only in my 40's that I'm acquiring the knowing and terminology to grasp how Neurodivergence applies to me. That I am Neurodivergent is obvious to anyone who knows me at more than a cursory level. At present, my confidence level is like, 95% for "I'm ADHD", 80% for "I'm Autistic", 100% for "if it's not ADHD there's still an Executive Function Disorder in play." And it bugs me that I spent 40 years knowing damn well I'm "weird" and "scatterbrained" (terms I adopted to describe myself) and outside the social norm in so many key ways, yet getting such a mangled explanation of ADHD and Autism that I never in a million years would've concluded they had anything to do with me. And the more I learn about Neurodivergent obsessions and special topics, the more I pick up on how strongly that factor applies to me -- the most notable one being Language/Linguistics (e.g. having studied over 50 languages (none to fluency) and being able to sing in over 20 (as showcased in my "Arkylie Sings" milestone videos)).
I'm jealous! I found ElfQuest at a rough time, I had no money, so I couldn't get all the things I wanted. I moved often enough that I had to get rid of a lot of things. One thing I regret is getting rid of my ElfQuest comics
Yep. You just described me. I’m 46 and my entire life has been not fitting in even though I’ve tried so hard to do what everyone does. I wouldn’t read a book unless it was by rould dahl or Stephen king and I only had one friend at a time. My Mum was told by by teacher when I was 7 that I’d never amount to anything because I always daydreamed and never listened.
Back in the 80s, my so-called “diagnosis” was “shyness.” You know, if my pediatrician didn’t know what it was, he could’ve just said so. Also, my mom didn’t think that my brushing the raindrops off of my boots was a sign of anything, either. She thought it was just cute 🥰. She also couldn’t understand why I hated tags on towels. My family often got annoyed with me, for being so repetitive. Between the 80s and the 90s, I hadn’t received an Autism diagnosis, but I did receive plenty of academic help, anyway. It wasn’t made official until 2000, except at the time, it was referred to as Asperger’s Syndrome. More recently, a new therapist told me that the term was abandoned in 2013, and is now referred to as Autism Spectrum Disorder. I used to have a diagnosis of OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder), but my therapist had told me that I no longer met the criteria for it, so it was removed. She had also removed my diagnosis of PDD-NOS (Pervasive Developmental Disorder - Not Otherwise Specified), from my records, which were from 2015. I’ve outgrown most of my behaviors and I’m in a much better place now.
weird side note but as a kid my mom was neighbors with the author and artist behind elf quest, the Pinis. there’s a “behind the scenes” panel where the author has a cat attached to his face and is on the phone saying, “why yes mrs kilmer, we have seen your cat,” (or something like that). my grandma was mrs. kilmer lol, the cat was my mom’s malevolent cat who really did wander around and terrorize the neighborhood. elfquest is kind of niche so i rarely get to tell this story, but as someone who knows elfquest well i thought you may be familiar with it lol!
Okay, A little unnerving. But also reassuring. Have experienced all of this. I relate to this woman so much. I see myself in her expressions. It's almost like watching an alternate reality of myself it's so relatible. It feels like I'm watching a documentary on myself. I haven't ever seen anyone I have related to that closely before.
Your videos are making me cry. First the other one where your mother was sharing her parenting experience, it was so overwhelming for me I feel like having Panic attacks. And now this. This is my son 😢😢
Yep, got them all. Despite the fact that my mom is a psychiatrist, she doesn’t believe I’m on the spectrum. Its funny in a way, bc people that don’t know me well pick up on it right away, even if they don’t realize what it is specifically. The only slight variation is that while I realize I only want/need one friend, I don’t mind it if that person has other friends. In fact I enjoy it, because that way if I go through a period where I need to be alone, they’re less likely to need me.
So, I'm not trying to be a prick, but is it possible you just had a vitamin deficiency or something? Those will mess you up in ways that could be blamed on something else. Even something like a Vitamin D deficiency can look like depression.
My life has been a lot of obsessions that started with getting introduced to something, being either Immediately Enthralled or Vaguely Skeptical, having it become a key fixation, then finding out that the very friends who introduced me to it have moved on. It always feels so weird to have someone lose interest so dang fast... but then, I also commonly join the party late, so it might just be mismatched time zones, as it were. I can most clearly recall this with Guitar Hero and Rock Band (I wanted to keep playing them long after my friends didn't care; one friend gave me his entire set of peripherals and games 'cuz he was done -- oh, and because I didn't have the system, I'd practice drums by drumming along to RU-vid videos), with Zero Punctuation, with Beat Saber (my friend telling me how boring it was to have me play the same small set of songs every time). But that's just within the past... has it been two decades yet? That's not counting stuff in my childhood (which included EQ).
...come to think of it, my library experiences might count. I'd check out the same cassettes, the same YA books, the same graphic novels once *those* became a thing... a small selection that I went over and over and over until I had basically memorized them. I can still quote significant parts of The Secret of the Sword (the He-Man and She-Ra pilot movie) from memory due to having heard the cassette so many times. Several of the books I own are simply because I'd checked out the library version so often that at some point I blinked and went "huh, I could actually buy that now."
Also in the 2000s 😭😭 just barely getting diagnosed in my 30s and I’m shook I “went between the cracks” or whatever because I was not good at hiding it!
Born in the late 70s, every time I see one of your videos I share it with my family (a bunch of AuDHDers 😊) because it’s so on point! Thanks for sharing it with us Serenity!
I was in special education for dyslexia and all of the early coordination and communication stuff that comes with ACC.. I display a lot of autistic traits as well but it never came up because back then the only autistic kids were nonverbal or destructive.. they lumped all of us in the same class regardless of cognitive abilities, even kids with Cerebral palsy and perfectly functioning brains got tossed in the little class with us Ah new jersey public education, I don't miss ya..
ELF QUEST!!!! That's the best one of the books I've had a chance to read so far, too! Definitely have experienced a lot of these. IBS took a long while for me to get a handle on, as in decades. Only some of it was psychosomatic, most seems to be diet/hormones for me. I didn't obsess about friends in this way, that I remember, but I rarely can enjoy more than two friends around at any one time - it's overstimulating and draining. Thanks for sharing!!!!!
Me, in spades, and I was a boy. That scene with the nagging about social prepping and masking is the worst, though: that guy is absolutely infuriating. There’s something fundamentally wrong about criticizing you for trying to “get it right,” instead of blowing it. That does, however, reflect my experience with one social issue: sports. When I actually took a game seriously, or was unhappy about losing, I remember being teased for being a “ poor sport.” But when I did adopt the attitude that winning wasn’t important, as opposed to playing the game, I had ma gym teacher demand to know if I was taunting him, or trying to hurt his feelings. I just couldn’t win.
"A pleasure to have in class but day dreams a lot" was what was written by the teachers on all my report cards as a little girl growing up. I was so quiet they'd miss me in attendance call. ☺️
Fun fact: 85% percent of people with ASD develope some GI problem by age 30. My thing is knowing what no one wants to,I have to learn all day everyday. Mother encouraged it so I know all the stuff, especially since I work in a school that's really good.
I‘m about the same age and in my childhood there was also no understanding for my weird traits. After decades of suffering I still can’t get the help I need. How do we survive on this planet?
Is it only suffering because society has told us to not be ourselves? Finding yourself again is not easy but it is a journey ✨️ you deserve Peace and to know what happiness actually FEELS like 🎉
This hits me hard. My childhood was very similar. I was adopted by an older couple, so my biological parents are your mom’s age. I was “corrected” whenever some arbitrary social rule was recited. Who made these rules?! They’re dumb. But alas, I have extreme anxiety around being myself in front of humans. Rejection means loss of access to resources and shelter. (Literally homeless at 18.) But I am making steps into being myself and allowing myself to stim in public (with great difficulty).
Elfquest! Didn't think there was anyone who read that besides me. I have the colored full volume versions also. I read the marvel comics version that were colored so had to collect the colored full book volumes as well.
From age 4-18, I had one friend, my BFF… around 15 I found out she had other friends, that hurt deeply. Even as an adult I struggle to make friendships. I feel like an idiot when I see/hear them interact with others on the same friendly level as with me. I feel jealous and betrayed. I realize how irrational my feelings are, but it still hurts.
I feel incredibly uncomfortable because this is also my experience... It feels relieving to be seen and no be alone in much of my experience. I wish I could should these to my doctor. He knows I already have ADHD, but he's not 100% convinced I'm on the AuDHD spectrum. I know it's not really going to change much if I have a diagnosis and label, but it would help people understand better if I can tell them that.
My son was missed- not diagnosed until he was about 25. This despite his parents being a pediatrician and a sped teacher. And being tested a couple of times. 🙄
You remind me alot of me and my mom ive come to realize that i am likely autistic. Unfortunately my mom went the self medication route and refusing to listen to possibly being autistic as when she HAS gotten a diagnosis (for bipolar disorder) instead of trying to understand and help her people have ussed her diagnosis against her.
I have those same problems! No body ever believed me that I was autistic because I was high functioning. It was awful because then I suffered in silence.
Autism and it's broad spectrum.🙄 Everone must be labeled. Stomache issues, perhaps nail biting, sounds more like anxiety. Teen hormones going berserk. .
I relate to this so heavily as someone with ADHD. "You're being weird, stop it. Just focus. Just be normal." I was a child of the 90's, and I definitely suffered from the ADHD-but-also-a-girl problem that affects kids now but especially affected kids back in the day. That's a boy disease! How dare my neurodivergent brain have a boy disease!
Same!!! I was a 90s kid. I managed with some help because my mom taught me what she figured out, not realizing she's also on the spectrum. But I had all of these situations despite that.
I could space out and completely keep up with whatever BS was going on. Teachers hated it. I had gotten so good at it that by high-school the teacher would make it a point to call on me to read because I was asleep and she thought she could embarrass me thinking I would not be on the same page as the class. I'd pick up right where the last person left off. After a while she gave up and would just give me a B. I wouldn't do half the written papers but she absolutely knew I had all the abilities and was bored.
When I was younger I would copy who I thought was cool in film and tv. I had an identity crisis at 22 when I realized I didn’t know who I was because I was pretending to be someone else all the time. At 32 I still struggle but it’s a daily work in progress
Ugh, having teachers call me a daydreamer in the middle of class and not understanding why. I didn't know then but thanks to aphantasia I had no real understanding of dreams at all so I always just assumed that I didn't, so the concept of dreaming during the day while I was awake made absolutely no sense at all. 😂 And I ALWAYS used to check out the same book from the library every time we went. I do not remember what it was called any more, but it was always the same book. My mother and sister would give me such a hard time about it but I loved that book and I didn't want any others.
I was talking to psychiatrist about potential diagnosis and she said that she doesn't really comfortable to diagnose me with a disorder on autistic spectrum. Tho she also said I could have general anxiety disorder. Or don't have any of those. She said there should be more sessions to confirm. But I was tired after session and it cost rather expensive so I didn't come again Maybe I'll try again in the future. I don't know
There is definitely a right amount of eye contact. Too much is challenging, while too little is too weak. Let people know the list you’re going over in your mind and suddenly everyone thinks you care crazy. But anyone who has to do this knows the feeling of someone else figuring out you are not neurotypical, become progressively more uncomfortable for some reason they can’t express.
Typically, too little eye contact is seen as disrespectful. Like you're not paying attention. As far as I'm aware, anyway. Too little eye contact isn't my problem, my problem is I can stare directly into your soul without trying.
I daydreamed a lot but I think my name always got my attention right away. I did get in trouble for daydreaming. Even worse, by 4th grade my dad started suggesting i was fantasizing. I didnt even know what he meant at the time. (he never did anything to me but he sure made me uncomfortable a lot). I did have stomach issues - i eventually as an adult did extensive allergy and sensitivity testing and its a lot better now. Mirror talking? I do that more to review after the fact. I have come up w pretty good scripts for social events - ask someone what brought them here, or what they think of it, or how they know the host, or something like that. get them talking - that way there is conversation and i'm not oversharing (yet!). I once saw that autistics like choir (I do! but havent had time recently) because they can participate in a group activity without having to make small talk
As someone with ADHD, I just wanna point out that the second one is also sometimes a thing for us, and the first one is pretty much our entire existence
Classic Definitely related to a lot of that but my distractibility I wouldn't call maladaptive daydreaming, more zoning out. Especially when I was at primary school.And I think the teachers were exceptionally harsh offering detention in the first place, never had that. Just getting shouted at and called names or colourful phrases use sometimes at home. Limerance definitely an issue too. But anyway tI'm feeling generally angry just now coming off Facebook comments , so stopped on "you can't predict what people are going to say, just relax and go with the flow!" Because of angry amusement at contrasting experiences when the tables turn. Thinking about those, it's a bugbear of mine, a pass time or pet hate. But yes - it's important to note that it's such a totally different story (😂) when I talked about the content of a joke, or answered a rhetorical question!! 😂😂
Ah, memories....none of which are pleasant I never fixated on any one person. Well, unless you count the one that literally hated me me with every fiber of his being. Hard to fixate on a friend when you don't have any.
