If any of you are neurodivergent or at least believe they are not neurotypical, I would love to hear whether my experience matches yours. A disclaimer: I do not want to self-diagnose. I just want to find out whether my experiences are common for neurotypicals or not.
Most of my life I’ve been aware that I am different than other people. As a kid I always thought other kids were weirdly childish. I was always more interested in learning new skills, learning to write (age 5) and talking to adults. As a young teen I had to force myself to learn social norms so people wouldn’t reject me or think I am weird. Funnily enough I’ve always been a social butterfly, and after observing on and learning from other people’s behaviour I myself have become very socially competent.
I have also always been highly sensitive, and empathetic to a point I can feel people’s energy from just looking at them or being near them. This can often make being around a lot of people very overwhelming for me. But when I drink or purposely go out with friends I usually don’t feel like this (for a while and then I get really drained suddenly).
Meeting me in my teens/young adult years you’d never think something was different about me, apart from my high activity level which is obvious to people from just 3 minutes of spending time with me. I mean people do think I’m weird but not anything extraordinary. Sometimes I don’t think there is anything different about me either, but whenever I have an in-depth chat with someone close about the way my brain and emotions work, I see that mostly people just don’t get what I am talking about. I am hyper aware of everything that goes on in my head and have this great interest into analysing and understanding myself, my thoughts, other people and what they are communicating, or not communicating.
This analytical way of thinking makes me interested in many subjects and finding out how things work, and it has been like that from a very young age. Although I do have a typical “hyper focus”, it is not consistent across certain subjects. And yes, usually focusing is either hard or very easy, depending on how much I like the subject in hand. Also I have always been so good at school, learning and education in general - which makes me think “well I guess I’m just like other people then”.
Also I have insane intuition. Eg (and sorry this is going to be a bit disturbing) someone poisoned my kitten the other day, and for a couple of days prior I had a feeling like something bad was going to happen to it. (We have a garden, it wasn’t a house cat.)
So what are your experiences? Do mine sound anything like yours? If I told you this about me - would you think I am neurotypical, or if you’re neurodivergent, would you think we are similar in some ways?