meirl
Wednesday, 12 Mar 2025
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They locked them in asylums n such mostly
I remember reading up about the old concept of “changelings” — children who looked normal but acted in an abnormal way, whose parents thought were fairy imposters who had replaced their “normal” children — and thinking “Yup, that’s definitely autism.”
Yeah your grandpa with the basement-sized model train set….. nothing to see there.
My grandfather who wore the same outfit almost every day, ate the same thing for breakfast every day, loved rules, hated noise, and went to the garage to build birdhouses whenever there were guests over.
When I was in school, if you were 1% outside of “normal”, you were tossed into Special Ed, never to be seen again. If there was anything about you that was different, you tried like hell to hide it. Gee, no wonder nobody was ever diagnosed with anything. I was funny, because I made it my secret coping skill. But I was also a “dingbat.” I’m sure my inability to remember things was just “me being me.” No ADHD here.
We stopped calling the autistic uncles eccentric
*Mozart* “Am I a fucking joke to you. If so, it’s a bad joke because it doesn’t involve poo”
Your definetly not autistic grandfather ate the same lunch every day for 45 years knew every baseball stat and loved to info dump about trains.
Tesla, Isaac Newton, most of our greatest thinkers were most likely autistic who hyperfocused on something and were good enough to warrant being taken under the wing of some rich person to profit off of.
Yeah, these random prodigies who only cared about their passion, never got into a relationship with anyone and would get very upset if things weren’t the way they liked exactly… I wonder if those people had anything?
Yeah, I also remember the 80’s
Not every eccentric person is autistic. Chicken nuggets didn’t exist in the past. Autistic people wouldn’t survive
Nobody can convince me that at least 75% of Greek philosophers and more people like Raphael or Newton were autistic
Cluster Headache sufferers in the past absolutely would have received exorcisms, and it might have actually helped a couple thanks to the placebo effect.
Nikola Tesla was definitely autistic
In ancient Rome you could just abandon your child and someone would come along and make them a slave. It was considered a normal thing to do.
Edit: completely forgot Rome still exists and I need to specify ancient Rome lmao
Increasing incidence of autism diagnosis strangely coincide with fewer instances of “that boy ain’t right”.
My family STILL complains about my grandpa. The man was autistic. He never bothered me, but I never had expectations of him. We just vibed out, watched movies, and ate good food …mostly in a comfortable silence. My family wanted him to be someone he wasn’t, and they just couldn’t let it go (still can’t). It’s bizarre.
We were everywhere, but because autism doesn’t manifest the same way, they were all called something different. They were Birders, cartographers, astronomers, hermits, wildly productive knitters, solo log cabin builders, as well as being called cold, changelings, difficult children, schizophrenics and possessed by demons.
When you read about a random guy who would take 3 years cataloguing every type of beetle around their small German Town, they could have been autistic. They would have been the same people who would make a series of multi-hour explainer YouTube videos on how to get every collectable of their favorite obscure video game.
The real question is how come there are still people today who think demons are a thing?
Great Aunt Linda just walked to the beat of her own drum 😀
**Henry Cavendish is credited as being the person who determined the weight of planet Earth, and is likely the most autistic genius who ever loved.**
**He was terrified of people and public speaking, is never known to have spoken to any woman (including his own housekeepers), and fled from his own house rather than speak to an admirer who wanted to discuss physics with him. If you wanted to talk to him, you were advised to wander near him at a geography society meeting and talk like you were thinking out loud to yourself and maybe he might mutter something, but would just as likely run away.**
He also is the first to discover multiple elements and chemical and electrical principles, but never published or explained his work, so others got the credit first. People going through his papers after his death realized he probably would have advanced all of chemistry have a century forward if not for his crippling fear of people.
His experiment to measure the world required him to take measurements through a keyhole by telescope because bwing in the same room as it would change the results.
Asylums were often filled with people who were simply different, including women experiencing periods, labelled ‘hysterical.’ It’s no coincidence that ‘hysteria’ and ‘hysterectomy’ share the same root etymologically.
Henry Cavendish is always my go-to example.
I had a hyper fixation with jesters for a time. There is solid evidence that court jesters were mostly people on the autism spectrum. The motley attire they wore was to show to any guests that this person is not like the rest, and one should not be insulted by what they say. Kings would keep them as advisors because jesters were mostly unable to hold titles because they were essentially wards of the state due to disability and they were honest. Honesty without ulterior motives
Old people that ONLY eat well-done meat, some version of potatoes, iceberg lettuce “salad” with ranch dressing. Everything extremely under-seasoned.
And / or
Certain days are for X food and we can’t deviate from the schedule – “Taco Tuesday,” (non-Catholic) “Fish Fridays,” must make x for breakfast on Saturdays.
Dinner MUST be at X time or else they’re having a meltdown.
Oldins definitely don’t exhibit spectrum eating habits. /S
Watch American Pickers & tell me some of the people they buy from are not on the spectrum.