working on a highly speculative theory that a) autism is a developmental disorder of the nervous system *in general*, include the PNS and b) this accounts for all of my medical problems (sleep apnea & a. fib are neurological, seronegative arthritis is a bigger stretch but the actual cause is an open question)
and that really changes my perspective a bit? b/c it would mean that I am pretty damn autistic, I just got most of the outright disorder parts in my body and not my brain.
as opposed to "high functioning", imbalanced IQ / learning disorder genius with a bunch of sensory issues and incompetence around social situations, who *also* coincidentally has a bunch of random but serious health problems
I'm not "autistic, but mildly b/c no cognitive disabilities", I'm "autistic, moderate/severe with disabilities weighted towards somatic instead of cognitive"
it's something I can own, ties everything together with a handle to hold it by
@octopus *nodding lots*
Also brings to mind stuff like the extremely high % of digestive/gastro problems among Autistic folks, a bunch of Dyspraxia-related stuff, sleep pattern differences being v. common and such..
(Also reminds me of ppl treating PTSD as a 'just brain problem', rather than something that causes physical change to your nervous system as a whole, and how that affects treatment and social attitudes)
@pastelbat , and tried to work out what an "environmental pervasive development disorder" might look like
except instead of specifically the types of issues associated with C/PTSD I ended up deriving my own health problems / those that are associated with autism.
I wrote it up intending it to be part of something else, but it didn't end up as part of the main point - I can show it to you if you're interested. Between 1k-2k words.
(there are a *lot* of nerve endings in the gut / digestive system!)
@pastelbat yeah! the train of thought that lead to this was explaining why it would make sense that (esp. people growing up with) PTSD would have whole-body disconnect issues like numbness, digestive problems, etc
I started with the position that a sufficiently pervasively hostile/traumatic environment ought to be able to pervasively disorder development (= integration) of the nervous system in general, to the extent than everything is some combination of environmental + genetic factors,