10 Things You Didn’t Know About Autism

One year ago, at age 23, I went through a long process of speaking to various doctors and other strangers and filling out forms and questionnaires. After about a month, they diagnosed me with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). As a strongly empathetic and emotional person with “artsy” interests, I had gone through life thinking of autism as the disorder I could never have. After I understood what ASD meant, it became the disorder that explains 99.9 % of what went wrong in my life, and this realisation brought with it the start of a new and healthier section of my life.

A (shockingly) high share of my closest friends have the same “disorder”. Through my own life and watching my friends, I experience how misunderstood this condition is. This article should be a small contribution to correcting some common misconceptions and revealing unknown facts.

1. We CAN read faces.

Many people on the spectrum can actually interpret facial expressions without a problem.

When I tell people I have ASD, they often try hard to act non-judgmental. But while I go on about how it’s a spectrum, in their heads, they’re like: “Oh my god, you can’t read my face right now, can you?” They’d feel shocked and slightly betrayed. “What face am I doing now? And now? What about now?” I can see how secretly, they are…