Are You Autistic, Too?

There is a strong genetic link in autism. I suspect multiple people in my family are diagnosable with autism (more than the three that openly embrace the diagnosis). But it wasn’t until the younger generation began to be diagnosed, and then treated, that (some of) my generation began to be more honest about our own autistic traits. I’m not saying that every autistic child has a parent with autism, but if your child is diagnosed with autism, you might begin to look around your family and reconsider who your “weird uncle” is or why your grandmother is always so blunt or yes — why you yourself have always had such a strong dislike of perfumes.

I try these days not to diagnose other people with autism. I really do. But sometimes it is like chewing on my hands, watching parents of autistic children talk about how difficult it is to deal with autistic traits, when it feels obvious to me that the parents have plenty of diagnosable traits themselves. Not always the same traits, but variations on the typical traits that often come up as red flags. This is largely because when autism was a diagnosis from the 60s to the 80s, it was largely with a certain subset of what we now consider autism: nonverbal, head-banging, repetitive behavior. We were fascinated with autistic savants by Dustin Hoffman’s portray of Rainman in the movie, but we still thought of it as very rare, not something we’d ever come across in our own lives.