- [Instructor] Hi everyone,
welcome to this month's patrons choice video
with the topic of early signs of Asperger's.
So if you're new to this blog, my name is Paul,
and I am currently 33,
I discovered I'm on the spectrum about three years ago now,
you can check out my diagnosis story video
if you're interested to hear more about that.
So when I walked into the psychologist's office,
apparently my autism was obvious
within the first 30 seconds or so.
So how was it obvious?
These days, it's common to diagnose autism
as early as preschool or even younger,
so surely, looking back over my life at that age,
there must've been some signs for me too.
So this video is not a list of early warning signs
or anything like that,
and it's definitely not intended to be used for diagnosis.
Instead, it's actually something a lot more valuable,
it's the story of one person
and how all of these seemingly unrelated
little peculiarities that you'd think every child has,
when you put it all together,
makes a completely different picture.
So I've broken it up into four sections,
so we've got sensory sensitivities,
uncommon interests, my learning styles,
and then finally how all of these
led to an array of social challenges.
And for each of these,
I'll be telling a couple of short stories
to get a sense of what I was like at the time.
So this is by no means an exhaustive list
of all of the early signs of Asperger's for me,
but hopefully it'll give you a sense
of what I was like in those early years.
So to start off with,
sensory issues were probably the easiest thing
that others could see from the outside.
So I was clearly very sensitive
to smell and noise and touch, and certain textures.
So this is me at the beach as a baby
trying my very best to avoid touching the sand.
So I used to be kind of proud of this super power
of being able to hear things
that other people couldn't hear,
specifically higher frequencies.
But actually, in real life,
it's not so much that I could hear it,
it's more that above a certain frequency,
I stopped hearing the sound and I started just feeling pain.
So a good example of this
is squeaky brakes in a car, for example.
There are some frequencies
in the audible range that we can hear,
but then it comes along with some higher
that actually just cause pain.
I remember one time at a birthday party,
I must've been maybe seven years old,
and I drank half a can of fizzy drink.
I was so proud of myself because previously,
even the tiniest sip
was massively overstimulating for my lips,
so being able to sit there and slowly sip it
and get all the bubbles out and get through half a can
was like the highlight of my whole day.
I also had some strange food sensitivities,
for example, I couldn't stand the taste of rice,
like plain rice by itself, but at the same time,
I would eat lemons when I was really young,
apparently one of my first words was more,
as in please give me another slice of lemon to eat.
For sure that's a little strange I guess,
but don't all kids have funny eating habits?
How is this any different?
So in terms of my interests as a kid,
they'd probably seem quite stereotypical on the outside,
I mean, I was really into dinosaurs
and outer space and things like that,
pretty common, right?
The only thing is I took these to a bit of an extreme,
I mean, I was writing out tables
and listing the distance from each planet from the sun
and how long it took them to orbit
and how long they would take to spin on their own axis
and things like this.
I remember a time when I was in,
I probably would've been about seven or eight,
and I was chatting to a friend at school,
and in those days we were taught nine planets,
you know, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars,
Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, right?
Pluto being the furthest one out.
And so, I was having a discussion with this kid at school,
and I was trying to tell him that Pluto
has an elliptical orbit, which means at the moment,
it's closer to the sun than Neptune is.
And he wasn't having a bar of it,
he said no, no, no, no, Neptune is closer to the sun
and then Pluto's further away.
So anyway, we ended up making a bet,
for lack of a better word, and I said look,
I can prove this, I've got a book at home,
I'll bring it in, I'll show you.
So I did and I brought it in and I showed him,
and he just didn't listen and didn't care
and he didn't follow through with what we bet on.
I think he was gonna give me a book,
or something small like that.
So that feels like a really stereotypical scenario for me,
and I really hate being right.
I feel like if I know something is true,
it's because it's my special interest
and I've researched it to death,
and when other people don't listen or don't care,
it can be really difficult.
Another example of getting slightly obsessed with something
is one day I learned about different paper sizes,
like A4, A5, B4, et cetera,
so I went home and I made all of them,
like gluing pieces of paper together
and putting them all together and cutting them out
and folding them.
So, that's the kind of stuff I was interested in,
really, really structured stuff.
Another interesting thing is my playing style.
So, in hindsight, I was always more interested
in the physical properties of toys
than what they were supposed to represent.
I once had a baby's toy that I played with until,
you know, I was quite old,
and it was a weighted ball that I would just spin it around
and watch how the angular momentum worked, right?
So this ball was supposed to be
for like a two month year old baby,
and here I was at the age of like 10
still playing with it 'cause it was cool
and it had a funny weight to it.
And in a similar way,
when I was playing with things like matchbox cars,
I would just smash them into each other
and watch them bounce off
and see which one could flip the other one.
So that's not really using them as cars,
I wasn't holding it in my hand pretending
this was a car going down the road, vroom vroom,
oh this is a firetruck, it's gonna go put out a fire,
I was like oh, this is a firetruck,
it's gonna slam into a school bus
and see which one flips over or not.
So it was very creative,
but it was almost like I was creating an imaginary world
that was a lot more interesting than the real world.
So when I was five years old,
I changed schools halfway through the year
in my first year of school.
So interestingly, I just discovered this now
that on my report card from that first school,
it said that I had a learning disability.
So on the same report card,
it said Paul is a high achiever
in all areas of the prep curriculum,
and then later it says Paul has a learning problem
which is quite noticeable in the classroom.
With background noise, he's often oblivious
to any statement made to him.
Now, in hindsight, that explains a lot,
because so often my experience of primary school
was asking the question how do people know what's going on?
How do you know what homework we have to do?
How do you know where to line up?
How do you know what we're supposed to be doing right now?
Because I would get distracted by something
and I literally wouldn't hear
what the teacher was trying to say.
Apart from this though, my experience of school
was that it was mind numbingly boring.
I remember coming home from school one day,
I was probably six or seven, and saying hey Mum,
did you realize that some people
actually find school difficult?
Like this was blowing my mind,
I just assumed that everyone else
was having a similar experience to me,
it's just that I was having such a different experience
to all the others in my classroom
that it put me on the outside
when I was trying to understand them.
So to combat this boredom, I had a habit of trying to find
the most creative answer to a question that I could think of
that was still a correct answer.
So if the teacher was saying
can you please name all these animals,
I would say something like okay well,
so this one's Lucy and this one's Harry
and this one's, you know,
instead of like dog, cow, sheep, whatever,
so this kind of creativity, for lack of a better word,
was getting me in trouble sometimes at school.
I remember one day in grade three,
and we were learning how to cut shapes in half, right?
So what we were supposed to do
is cut them in half like this.
Well, incredibly boring.
So what I decided to do instead is look for another answer.
How else could I cut this shape in half
other than just drawing a line through the middle?
So I thought well, I could do this, right?
I could cut it like this
so long as this length is the same as this length,
I thought that was a perfectly valid answer.
But apparently no, no, what I should've done,
clearly, was gone from corner to corner like this.
So as you can see, at school,
I was typically a frustrated, bored child.
So another story that I remember is from kindergarten,
and we were learning about shapes.
So you can imagine we're all sitting on the floor
and she holds up what's this?
Triangle, what's this?
Square, and then she holds up one
and it's like half a circle,
and I thought oh, what's this?
I know the name for this, what is it,
like hemi, demi, semi, semi circle, that's it, semi circle.
And I was really excited, but unfortunately,
due to all that thinking time, I was a little bit slow,
and she assumed that no one knew the answer to this.
So I was completely fine with that
because she was about to tell us the answer,
and she said it's a half circle,
and I thought what, are you serious?
And so I can remember being three years old
and getting really frustrated.
The name for half a circle is a semi circle, get it right.
Okay, so maybe we'll leave it there for today,
I hope you've enjoyed this video,
I hope you've enjoyed these pictures,
these have been just a handful of little anecdotes
from my childhood that will hopefully give you
a little bit of a sense of what I was like back then,
and some of the things that I was struggling with,
and some of the early signs
that I was on the autism spectrum.
So thank you to the Patreon community
for voting for this video.
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Otherwise, I will see you next week for another video
from Asperger's from the Inside, thanks, bye.
Okay so finally, all these differences
in sensory sensitivities and my learning style
and what I found interesting,
they all led to challenges trying to relate
to the other kids my age.
Why is trying to play with the other kids so hard?
What am I supposed to do, what am I missing here?
If I'm not allowed to change the rules,
why are you allowed to change the rules?