Published: 2025年4月5日
Word Count: 1,298

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Recently, I stumbled across this post on Tumblr featuring daily writing prompts to respond to for the month of April, which is Autism Acceptance/Awareness Month, and thought it would be fun to take a crack at answering them. For the sake of personal convenience, I've decided to post my responses in batches of five, so here's the first of those.

April 1st: Do you have trouble recognizing emotions in either yourself or other people? Do you ever find it hard to tell how you're feeling or even to describe how you're feeling to other people? Have you ever had trouble properly expressing your feelings? Do you have trouble recognizing what other people are feeling? How does this make life difficult for you, if it does?
Yes to both. I have the double whammy of alexithymia and choice paralysis, which means it's practically impossible to get an answer other than "I don't know" when you ask me any sort of question. Emotions are very hard for me in that even if I recognize that my emotional state has shifted outside of its usual neutral range, it's still difficult for me to fully comprehend the emotions that I'm feeling, which can make trying to regulate and remove myself from stressful situations a struggle. For example, if I get angry, I may be able to understand that something is making me feel strongly in some way, but because I can't tell the specifics, I may continue to perpetuate whatever's making me upset, or worse try and actively chase the feeling in an attempt to try and comprehend it (which happens often...).

As for others, I think the only people I can get a decent read on are my family members, and even then I'm still far from perfect. I think I tend to interpret negative emotions in people's facial expressions more often than they actually appear. Whether that's because it's a defense mechanism I developed from committing one too many social faux pas, or it,s just that my only frame of reference for what positive facial expressions look like is "person smiling," I'm not sure. But it's very much not helpful for the lingering remnants of my childhood anxiety disorder.

April 2nd: Dependence. How independent are you? Are you able to live alone? Have a caretaker? Live with a relative? Is there anything you need help with in your daily life? If you live alone, does being autistic make anything about it more difficult? Do you wish you lived with someone?
I spend most of my year in a college dorm without roommates, so technically I do live alone. However, when I'm not in school, I stay with my parents. Under certain circumstances I might be able to one day live fully independently, but as it stands, I think it's safe to say that I need some sort of assistance to help me thrive in my day-to-day life. For one, I can't drive, and my hometown is so car-dependent that it's practically hostile to pedestrians, so I need someone to drive me pretty much everywhere. At school this isn't much of a problem, but there are still things that I struggle with like filling out important forms (i.e. taxes) that make me feel like I would be better off living with someone else.

And that's not even mentioning the potential stress of having to transition to living completely independently.

April 3rd: Talk about family. How are your relationships with your family members? Are they generally supportive of you as an autistic person? Are they accommodating to your needs? Does being autistic affect your familial relationships in any meaningful way?
I'd say that overall my relationship with my family is pretty good. I think I've spent enough time around them even before I was diagnosed with autism for them to at least grow accustomed to the quirks in my behavior. However, sometimes (a lot of the time) when I'm with my grandmother she'll start asking me a bunch of questions, which overwhelms and stresses me out, and when I inevitably start responding bluntly she'll say something along the lines of, "oh, I see. I'll stop asking questions now," in a way that feels very passive aggressive to me. I get that she's just trying to start a conversation, but I wish that she'd understand that I'm not trying to personally sleight her when I don't respond in a way that doesn't satisfy her. That, and I wish she'd stop buying things for me that I didn't ask for. But I think that has less to do with my autism and more to do with her shopping addiction.

April 4th: What are your current special interests if you have any? What are some positive ways having special interests have affected your life? What are some negative ways that they have affected your life? How long do they tend to last for you? You could even talk about past special interests if you want.
FLAPS HANDS. DEVIL SUMMONER RAIDOU KUZUNOHA. I mean, it doesn't exactly take a genius to figure that out, given the whole... (gestures vaguely at my site). It's probably my most intense special interest to date, but also I feel like I say that every time I get a new special interest. I swear I mean it for real this time okay.

Special interests make up a huge part of my day-to-day life; I'm always super focused on One Specific Thing that I constantly yap about, and they tend to last for a minimum of two years. I never have more than one specific special interest at a time, but sometimes I'll have a secondary hyperfixation or two that will take center stage for some time, usually no longer than a month or two. Sometimes special interests that end up getting replaced will re-emerge as these hyperfixations every so often (i.e. The Legend of Zelda, Castlevania), otherwise I'll end up dropping them completely with no desire to revisit them and, in rare cases, even grow to dislike them (Pokémon). Once something becomes a special interest for me, it becomes the primary thing that I think about almost every waking hour, and often influences the choices I make.

Because of how much of my life revolves around my special interests, they're pretty much the main way that I regulate my emotions. This can both be a good thing, since it means I can easily cheer myself up or de-stress by simply engaging with them, and a bad thing because my dependence on my interests leads me to get very defensive about them and lash out at others if I perceive them as attacking or even sometimes just not understanding the things that I love (ironically this happened to me last night after I finished writing my response to this prompt... it would almost be funny if it didn't still hurt).

April 5th: What are some ways that the neurotypical people in your life can help you specifically with the challenges you face as an autistic person? Ways they can accommodate you? How can neurotypical people help the autistic community as a whole?
I think the best thing non-autistic people can do is just be patient and understand that I don't communicate or process the world in the same way as them. I don't know what the Single Best Way for all neurotypical people to help all autistic people would be since I'm only one person, but I think that trying to have compassion and recognizing that not all autistic people have the same symptoms or behave in the same way would be a good start.

This goes for other autistic people as well, really. If you've met one autistic person, you've met one autistic person, and that includes yourself.