Does High IQ Mask Autism? | Unedited

things I heard growing up: you think too much

Having a high IQ makes it easier for others to ignore issues. That has been my experience. It only goes so far before folks like us crash and burn.

High IQ helps you to fly under the radar during your academic years, especially if you have good memory as well. You get good grades which "helps" you to get away with being quirky and weird.

Imagine my surprise - being an almost all As student in college- entering the work force and realizing I’m completely dysfunctional. It’s devastating. I look back and realize how hard I’ve had to struggle my whole life, and it just gets more difficult. Maybe one day I’ll find my niche.

I just realized I am a copypasta behavior person. I thought that is how everyone learns to act around others 🤷‍♂️ no wonder it always felt weird when I did that 🤣

Girl, I feel like you just completely described my childhood. Complete perfectionist, teachers pet, people pleaser, overly sensitive, etc. Even to the point of shutting off emotions when they become overwhelming. I am 50 and was diagnosed with autism at the beginning of August. It is such a relief to be able to look back through the lens of ASD and understand why I was the way I was. I learned a long time ago that I was "different." That I thought differently. I remember arguing with math teachers as I tried to explain that their process was inefficient. In the end, I had to give up and do it their way or fail the assignment. I am just starting out in this journey and honestly scared to unmask for fear of not knowing who I really am... Thanks for all you do and share with the world.

Yes, high IQ makes me a better actor, better to predict what other people expects of me, what I should be saying or do, when to STFU (instead of saying the first thing that comes to my mind), etc. Even the psychiatrist wasn't quite convinced I was on the spectrum. It also makes me more aware of how fundamentally f*ck*d up I am.

I relate to this SO much it is eerie. I am the girl who "ruined the curve" in my classes by getting 100% on the tests. I was described as shy and quiet, etc. I am 62, at this point I am self diagnosed ASD and am in the process of scheduling a professional assessment. I flew under the radar my whole life and am burned out by a lifetime of masking. I have lived with Crohn's Disease since my 20's and now know the correlation between auto immune disease and ASD. This journey is quite a trip and I am so relieved to now have a "map".

It's so funny to me how many women on the spectrum I have heard mention band/choir/drama groups and how being part of them greatly helped their school experience. It's almost like we intuitively seek out the activities that will help us learn to mask and blend in with others and come with built in friends who have similar interests (and are probably neurodivergent too). It definitely helped get me through my school years 😅

At 5th grade graduation, I was given an award for being the only person in the whole school to get 100% on every single assignment and test and didn't miss a single day of school in all 6 years. I had no idea why I was getting these awards and had no idea that it was a big deal. They even gave me money. I just went on with my day. The rest of my school years were average. But I thought it was funny that I was the top student but was just in my own little world and had no idea.

Yes, I've done the "Okay, I won't" reflex an infinite number of times in my life, and my innards have long paid the price.

We had this gifted thing in the UK too. It was so bizarre, "let's take the most intelligent people from each school and then put them all in a room and have them do undirected group work without a concrete aim". What the hell were they hoping would happen? It was pure hell for me.

The idiom you were looking for is “It’s like nailing Jello to a wall.” Autistic infodump: I know you didn’t go into this, but for anyone interested, the history of IQ tests is pretty bleak and sad. They sort of developed around the time eugenics became popular, and to this day there are giant problems with how they are presented and used. Some issues include how economic status affects your score, and being able to get a better score by taking it more than once. If it really measured generalized intelligence, then external factors wouldn’t affect the score as much as they do. I don’t think I have to explain how bad eugenics was for autistic people... Anyway, “The Mismeasure of Man” is just one book that delves into the problems with quantifying intelligence and how it’s been used to exclude certain groups of people. 🌟 The More You Know 🌈

In 10th grade Biology class, way back in 1973, the kids in the class were supposed to divide into groups of four each or so and embark on a month-long science project raising fruit flies and keeping records on their features, the colors of their eyes or something like that. Now, for me, until about 12th grade when I learned the trick of dispensing with the confusion by efficiently getting the "rubrics," as you put it---until that major "aha!" moment, all of my school life can be summarized as an endless tide of confusion, disorientation, an awareness something was going on here, in school, in the world, that was a closed book to me. So in 10th grade when the teacher told us to break into groups, I just...didn't. It didn't register with me. I didn't know why I would join a group, or how, or what I'd do even if I did, hadn't the least notion what the need was for me in all this. And so, bizarrely, during the entire process of this class project, in biology class that met, what, three times a week, over the space of a month or so, while all the other students were busily huddled in their groups over their fruit flies, I was doing, essentially, nothing. Walking around, lost, occasionally trying to look like I was in this or that group when the teacher looked my way, but fundamentally existing completely outside whatever this thing, this structure was, they had going. It was, yes, humiliating, and bewildering, and inexplicable because I couldn't tell how it happened, what my responsibility in it was, why I was the only kid in the class not in a group, or why the teacher never said anything. It was the teacher's atrocious failure, of course, in letting that happen. But now, since my ASD discovery, experiences like this, and there are so many others, have all suddenly exploded on my life's memory screen with clarity, comprehension, and, yes, healing and integration.

I really like the unedited format! Seeing you work through your thoughts in a similar way that I work through my own is so comforting

With one sibling diagnosed with ADD and another that constantly tested boundaries, no one bothered to check how the straight-A student was doing. And because my school was large enough to have a whole group of neurodivergent kids, I was just fine. It wasn't until I terribly burned out in college that I needed any help, and it was several years after that before I suspected I was differently wired. It's a strange and somewhat disappointing life trajectory realignment.

"you talk so fast" me, speeding up the video 1.5x 🥹

I was the scape goat, unfortunately and a target for bullying and teasing. I wish I had that capability, but I did not. I didn't learn to mask until 7th grade. Things did improve because of the masking. 😢

I spent my entire life watching people and wondering "why the f**k are you doing that?" and not understanding how they simply couldn't see the patterns and how what they were doing was inefective. Also couldn't understand the massively negative response I got off them when I suggested there may be a better way. Constantly told "you make me feel stupid" and why everyone was so insecure instead of grasping progress. I know I could be wrong and embrace being shown something better, I don't take anything personally. Got to my late 40's before the penny dropped. F**king exhausting...

Did you ever have the subtle feeling that doing really really well at everything was your counterintuitive kind of revenge on a world that refused to ever stop and acknowledge you actually dwelt in a whole different kind of processing? For me it has been like that in life. It's a variation on "Okay, I won't." It's like, okay, there's no room for me and the world the way I'm taking it, then I'll dispense with your world and the way you take by excelling where I can, the way I can, in one, two, three fashion, and as for the rest of it, it's just none of your business then. So that's the deal. And of course all this was going on in the dark, without knowing WHY. Only at the age of 65 did I finally understand WHY.