Autism

There's so much.

• My sports- all of them are things I got into and hard- They became my special interests. I'd get so deeply into whitewater kayaking that eventually I would paddle with professionals and other experts, become an instructor and influencer myself- and then, move on to other so-called 'extreme' sports like backcountry skiing and rock climbing- and today, competitive cycling.

• My ability to disappear into writing code for hours without awareness of time elapsing.

• That I've figured out I need a place to retreat to in social situations when I'm out of social energy, but didn't understand that was a thing for neuro-spicy folk. When attending social occasions with my wife, we've figured out it's best to take 2 cars so I can bail on the scene when doing that becomes a matter of self-care.

• The experience, when trying to explain my experiences, of my brain opening multiple browser-tabs as mental placeholders for tangents the conversation has taken or might take

• The experience of understanding an idea or dynamic in terms that aren't language-bound (like it might have a shape, or play out as a dialectic, or have tensors representing oppositional vectors in its space), then having to translate it into language regular people find accessible

• The constant concern about being misunderstood because it seems to happen so often

• The white-hot sense of justice and how not living up to my own standards can be intolerable