Autistic

I’m autistic.

Don’t panic.

If you’ve known me for some time, I’m exactly the same person I’ve always been. There’s a wide consensus that people are born this way and remain this way for life. The only difference is that now you and I know that my kind of personality was described by some doctors in some books, and they gave it a name.

I was formally diagnosed by a doctor of psychology in January 2026, which is also the month I turned forty-six. For a bunch of reasons that are too long for this post, I’ve suspected that this is the name for what I am since at least 2015. I became almost sure about it in the middle of 2025, which is when I also decided to get a formal diagnosis. Some friends to whom I spoke about this ask me what led to this, and I’ll write about it separately someday.

Some people who know me may be very surprised to read that I’m autistic. Others will be surprised that it took me so long to figure it out. I understand both. When I read old posts in this blog, for example, I see how many of them are very typical autistic things to write, and I just wasn’t aware of it. Maybe I’ll make a list of those posts someday.

Humanity comprehends autism better these days than it did forty years ago. But not all people comprehend it well yet. I barely comprehend it well myself, as I’m only in the beginning of the journey to really grasp it. It’s quite possible that I’m writing some nonsense in this post! If you think that I’m wrong about something, do feel free to send me a correction as a comment or a private email.

Autistic people who are more similar to me are often told that they “don’t look autistic”. I don’t like hearing it, and the same is probably true for most of us, but I do understand why people think like that. Autism looks very different in different people. Some autistic people aren’t able to speak, and some do; some aren’t able to have families or jobs, and some are. And so on. That’s why it’s called a “spectrum” these days.

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So what does it even mean? Autism is complex to describe. Compare it to left-handedness, for example: a consistent preference for using the left hand for writing and other fine motor tasks. That’s it, one short sentence. Autism is described as a much longer list of traits, and, very importantly, they must come as a bundle.

Described narrowly, and closely following the definition in the DSM, the guidebook that psychologists in the United States use to classify conditions, my kind of autism basically means the following seven things:

One: I have various difficulties with talking to people. They are not always huge, and perhaps if you talk to me, you won’t even notice them. Or perhaps you will. If you don’t notice them, please trust me that I do feel them constantly. Lots of people throughout my life, including people who love me, pointed out the unusual nature of my communication style to me, sometimes more kindly and constructively, and sometimes less so.

I often have great difficulty starting a conversation, especially when there are many people around. Or even when there’s just one person, but I’m not sure about something. And when I do speak, I sometimes say things that people get offended by, even though I absolutely didn’t mean to offend or patronize—I just meant to be direct or precise, which is supposed to be a good thing, but in that context, someone decided that it’s bad and misunderstood me. I completely fail to understand small talk in all languages (although perhaps it’s more related to item 2 or 3 in the list).

You may think that it’s just “shyness” or “awkwardness”, and in simple human language it’s kind of correct, but “autism” is more scientifically defined, and here’s the really important part: since it comes with a bunch of other traits, which are described later in this list, and which aren’t obviously related to “shyness”, it is, well, not just “shyness”. (Also, someone once described me as having “the opposite of stage fright”, and in some contexts this is a very good description, so I’m not always “shy”.)

Two: I have various difficulties understanding nonverbal communication. I usually understand spoken and written language well, often too well: I understand what people say literally, and I don’t easily “read between the lines”, whether written or spoken. It also repeatedly frustrates me that people read too much between the lines of what I said, which results in their “hearing” things I didn’t actually say or mean. I intensely crave harmony and coherence between what is said or written and what the reality is.

I’m also often bad at understanding facial expressions, hand gestures, and other elements of body language. It’s not like I don’t understand them at all, but throughout my life, people told me countless times that they tried to hint something to me, and I didn’t understand what they thought I should have. I also have trouble making gestures or facial expressions myself: people very often say that I have a weird smile or that they think that my face is angry, even though I’m totally not angry at that moment.

Related to this is also the fact that I cannot maintain eye contact for more than a split second with anyone except exactly three people: my spouse and two children. (Difficulty with eye contact is probably one of the best known autistic traits, but in the DSM, it’s a part of this wider trait.)

Three: I don’t entirely understand relationships, both professional and personal. Even with people I love the most. I have some friends, but not a lot. It’s not even necessarily bad, but it’s definitely noticeable. And if I wanted to make more friends, I wouldn’t totally know how; it happens according to some magic that I don’t get. It’s kind of easier for me to make friends based on shared interests (more on that later), and while having shared interests is probably helpful at making friends for all people, it’s much more acute for me. When I do get closer to a person, it’s hard for me to understand if they are a friend or just a good acquaintance with whom I have a shared interest. I also get fatigued after meeting with many people, for example, at family gatherings, or work and school events—not because I don’t like those people, but because being next to people, even people I love, quickly tires me.

Four: I often make all kinds of seemingly meaningless repetitive movements or sounds, and over the years people have told me many times that they are unusual or even disturbing. A few examples of repetitive things that I do are shaking my fingers and hands, especially the middle and ring fingers on the right hand; drumming with my teeth (if only I could record the amazing jazz, funk, and classic rock beats I make there!); twisting my facial hair; repeating weird words, usually when no one is listening; fidgeting with coins, guitar picks, nail clippers, or other small things. (If people tell me that those things are disturbing, I do my best to stop myself when I’m next to them. Autism is not a good excuse to disturb people if the autistic person can reasonably avoid it. But note that the word “reasonably” does a lot of work here: I can usually do it, and if I can’t, then I can usually just walk away. But some autistic people cannot, so please treat them with understanding, patience, and kindness.)

Five: I really love routines and certain ways of doing things, and I really hate being forced to change them without an exceptionally convincing reason. Example 1: I go to the same supermarket most of the time, and my shopping list is organized not just by the things I want to buy, but also by the sequence in which I’ll find them on my way from the entrance, through the aisles, and to the cashier, and I get horribly annoyed when a product I often buy is moved to another shelf. Example 2: I do most of the kitchen work at home, and I have a very specific way of organizing everything in the drawers, cupboards, and the dishwasher, and if something is not in its right place, I’ll get either horribly confused and dysfunctional, or very upset and possibly screaming (which is not good, but it may happen, and I cannot quite control it). Example 3: I hate moving to a new house or even moving furniture within the house. Those are just three examples out of dozens.

Six: I am very interested in certain things. Like, very. Some of those things are nearly lifelong, most notably languages, music, and public transit. Some are coming and going, like dog breeds (early 1990s), the history of Russian nationalism (from 1999 until 2004 or so, and occasionally coming back), Pink Floyd discography (coming and going every year or two), history of Scientology (coming and going from 1997 until 2014 or so), Free Software (since 1998), the Perl programming language (from 1999 until 2012 or so), editing Wikipedia and related projects (since 2004), Belarus (since 2006, and still intensifying), Catalonia (since 2007), and various other things.

(Comment 1: To avoid any misunderstandings, it doesn’t mean that I am, or ever was, a Russian nationalist or a Scientologist. Comment 2: I don’t really know why some things become a special interest and others don’t. As far as I know, no one does. I think it’s one of the most interesting questions about autism.)

Seven: I experience sensory perception of some things that is different from the way most other people experience them. There are sounds that I hear well even though people next to me hear them very faintly or not at all. Sometimes those sounds greatly disturb me, even though they don’t disturb anyone around nearly as much. For example, the noise of aluminum snack packages and plastic bags makes me either unable to do anything or very irritated. And lately, as my son got into solving Rubik’s cubes, the sound of those things has been the absolute bane of my existence. Those things, which to most people are not much more than easy-to-ignore rustling or whirring, make my ears feel they are being jackhammered. Headphones sometimes help with this a bit, but not always.

Another related issue is that lightbulbs above a certain brightness (above 3000 K and 1000 lm) make me nearly blind and cause me great discomfort, even though others find them pretty usual or even convenient. Strobe lights at concerts are a disaster, too: I love concerts, and most concert lighting is fine, but strobe lights make me unable to look at the stage. And the smell of some home or office cleaning supplies completely overwhelms my senses to the point that I can’t function very much, even though other people in the same place barely notice it.

I also easily notice wrong spelling, punctuation, or fonts in texts—I wrote about an example of this here a few weeks ago. This may sound unrelated to other things in this list item, but my psychologist told me that it is related, so I guess it is.

And that’s the end of the list.

See how I said that I’m describing it “narrowly”, and I still had to write a list of seven items, with many sentences in each of them? That’s what makes autism complex, and it’s just the tip of this iceberg. The list above goes according to the seven basic autism diagnostic criteria in the DSM, which is the mainstream scientific, academic, professional definition. Those seven criteria appear on the first page of the Autism Spectrum Disorder description in the DSM; there are ten more pages of details, a lot of which are very interesting, and to a lot of which I conform, too, but this post is already getting too long.

But I really should also mention that in addition to the formal academic definition, there’s also the autistic culture, or, more widely, the neurodivergent community culture. It has loosely defined its own informal, but pretty well-pronounced traits, such as wearing (or not wearing) certain clothes, eating (or not eating) certain foods, having certain relationship practices, etc. It also has its own jargon words, such as “catastrophizing”, “delayed processing”, “double empathy”, “monotropism”, “shutdown”, “spiky profile”, “stimming”, and many more. I can’t find any of these terms in the DSM (although maybe I didn’t search well), but they are making their way into academic articles on the topic, and some of them may become completely mainstream and scientific someday. (Here’s one glossary of this jargon, here’s another. I love glossaries! Maybe I’ll compile one myself.)

This culture has developed in the last few decades, as the autistic community came together online and in real life and started figuring out things about itself that mainstream scientists and therapists were too slow to get. While it definitely doesn’t mean that the informal autistic community is right about everything or that its members agree about everything, I do get the impression that even though most people in it are not professional psychologists or neurologists, it is remarkably robust at understanding itself. Discovering this online community in 2025 was one of the most empowering things that ever happened to me; I feel like I absolutely belong there.

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Autism explains a lot about me.

My love for editing Wikipedia, for example: a broken link, a poorly organized category of articles, an incorrect reference, a typo, a missing article about a topic I am familiar with—I’ve always known that I have a heightened sensitivity to those things, and I just couldn’t give it a name. When I saw that wikis let me easily correct them, I started doing it, and couldn’t stop. I’m certainly not saying that one has to be autistic to edit Wikipedia, but I’ve heard lots and lots of people saying over the years that there is a disproportionate number of autistic people among Wikipedia editors, and many of them possibly aren’t aware of their autism, just like I wasn’t aware of mine. (A lot of these claims are hypothetical or anecdotal, but I could find two data-driven surveys that substantiate this: Dutch Wikipedia editors survey 2018 and German Wikipedia editors survey 2025; if you know about more research on this, please do tell me.)

The same goes for my enormous love for languages and letters and texts and books—I learned to read early (thanks, mom!), and reading and writing were a fantastic way to learn and communicate at my own pace, without having to synchronize with people who keep talking and saying unexpected things. Books—and later, websites—have always been wonderful for me because I can reread them if I didn’t understand something, and they won’t get tired of my clarification questions.

Language in general fascinates me because it is the infrastructure of people’s communication, and I love how it is completely arbitrary, yet systematic; studying Linguistics in the university explained it all so well to me. Different linguists have different reasons for going into this field, but for me, an easy explanation is that trying to understand something about this infrastructure is my overcompensation for having frequent misunderstandings with so many people. And foreign languages are wonderful, too, because I’ve always felt different from most people, and foreign languages are one of the most notable and beautiful ways in which people are different and diverse. Each foreign language is a puzzle that can be solved with some effort, and solving this puzzle is endlessly rewarding. Put those things together, and bam, I became the specialist on languages in Wikipedia.

Same for music. Music is a sensory delight, and I now understand that I probably experience it far more intensely than other people do. When it has any kind of rhythm, it stimulates my body. When it has no clear rhythm, it stimulates my thinking (my favorite example of such piece of music is Piece for Jetsun Dolma by Thurston Moore, but there are many others). That’s why, for example, I love going to concerts, but I usually (albeit not always) prefer to do it alone: I’m there for the music itself, not for socializing. And that’s why music in general, and specific artists in particular (not only Sonic Youth and Pink Floyd, far from it) become my special interests and I easily learn their discographies, including full track lists, by heart. Is it any wonder that the first articles I edited in Wikipedia—in English, in Hebrew, and in Catalan—were about musicians?

Same for public transportation systems. Those are systems, they are largely predictable, they aren’t chaotic like cars, their maps and schedules can be learned by heart. When I was eight or so in the late 1980s, I learned the map of the Moscow Metro with around 120 stations by heart. It wasn’t even intentional—I just wasn’t able not to learn it after taking the metro frequently and looking at this map. I could also take long bus rides in Moscow with my eyes closed and say exactly where the bus is at any time because I feel all the turns and stops. Like, I actually did it several times for fun, and my parents and friends were weirded out.

And the smell of subways! It’s more or less the same in the whole world. Some people don’t enjoy it, and I can understand why, but to me, it’s wonderful. When I moved to Israel, which didn’t have a working subway at all in 1991, I missed it, but when the Carmelit, the subway in Haifa, was reopened, I entered it and felt that wonderful aroma again. I’ve always known that it was not nostalgia for Moscow—it was the aroma of a system that I can appreciate. (Theoretically, I could put this special interest together with Wikipedia, too, but I don’t actually do it much. I only contribute a little to writing about subways and other public transit systems on Wikipedia. The people who do it are absolute heroes. I can’t tell for sure, of course, but it is quite possible that, um, some of them are autistic.)

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Ironically, my great and prolonged interest in Wikipedia is perhaps a thing that delayed my realization that I’m likely neurodivergent. Being in the Wikipedia community and interacting with quite a lot of people who openly call themselves neurodivergent made me repeatedly wonder: “What’s special about them? Their description of how they experience the world is very similar to how I experience the world, and I’m not neurodivergent.” That was a mistake: I experience the world like that, and my neurodivergent friends experience the world like that, but most other people don’t. Which means that I am neurodivergent. I fully realized it only in 2025.

And one more thing. As I was reading the seventeen-page report that the psychologist gave me in the end of the diagnostic process, I found the part called “Behavioral Observations” particularly fun to read. It described how I behaved during the evaluation process in the psychologist’s office and how I filled the online forms for it. Among other things, it said:

He used the word “curious” many times throughout the evaluation.

This is a very good description of me, because I love being curious! I love discovering things, being asked an interesting or relevant question, and enthusiastically and explicitly acknowledging that something is, as a matter of fact, curious. At least to me. Some people would also describe this as a “verbal stim” in the autistic community jargon, and it’s perhaps appropriate. However, verbal stims are sometimes meaningless. While I do say meaningless words sometimes, when I say that something is curious, I mean it. And that’s also the most central thing that Wikipedia is about: truly endless curiosity, wanting to learn things, adding pieces to the perpetually incomplete puzzle, and sincerely wanting to help other people to learn those things more easily and freely.

Am I going to write a lot about autism here now? At the moment, I don’t plan to start writing explicitly about autism a lot. I mostly plan to keep writing nerdy things about Wikipedia and languages and maybe music and maybe random things from my life. In a way, this blog has been mostly about autism all along, just without calling it by this name, because I didn’t know it myself. But go figure, now that I know that it’s an important part of my personality and identity, perhaps I’ll start writing specifically about it.

Am I happy that I got the diagnosis? Yes, I am. Perhaps someday humanity’s attitude to this will completely change, and the diagnosis will have a different name, or become completely unnecessary. But with the way we work now, I’m happy to understand my personality better and have a name for it.

How is this understanding going to change my life? I don’t know! At the moment, I just hope that the few more decades that I probably have in this universe will be easier to navigate now that I know all this stuff. And maybe it won’t be much easier, and that’s OK, too; I’ve learned something, and if you’ve read at least some of this post, you’ve learned something, too. If it makes you behave more kindly to autistic people or to learn something interesting about yourself, that’s already a good thing.

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(I was also diagnosed with ADHD, but I don’t yet have an idea of how to write a blog post about it. Trust me, however, that it’s very meaningful, too.)