This short post contains two concepts that have been known to me for a while now. I have wanted to get them in public text form since I created Aurelia Under the Radar, even putting the idea on my Blog Ideas list, and now I am finally doing it! Throughout my life, I have noticed two phenomena that occur when multiple autistic or otherwise ND people meet, and the best way to explain these is through stories.
The first incident begins with the Technician, who is a beginning, if not the beginning, of all of this. My first text conversation with him took place at 1AM a couple of days after we had encountered each other on the bus. After an exchange about our respective high school experiences, he told me, “I’m an autist, by the way. Are you?” He told me that he had felt, somewhere in his intuition, that I was similar to him, that we were on the same wavelength. It turned out that he was right, I was a lot like Tech, and that included being autistic. This is radar, the way of recognizing other NDs through observation and intuition. It is kind of like gaydar, but for sideways brains.
The second story concerns someone I met while exploring dating apps, which is a gold mine of stories in itself. While lurking his Instagram profile, I found a photo of a “Please be patient, I have autism” button, with a caption about how he should not have to wear a badge in order to be treated fairly. My first thought was that I wanted to shake his hand for the great point he raised. My second thought was how remarkable it was that I had matched with and become comfortable with this guy, this fellow autist, without either of us disclosing our condition in our profiles. Looking back, most of my friends from when I was a child and teenager were probably neurodivergent in some way, even if I was unaware. This is magnetism, NDs being drawn together despite not knowing about each other’s diagnoses.
For the most part, my radar is not very good, and was inactive for a long time. This is because I spent very little time with confirmed NDs, so I did not learn to associate certain behaviors with labels. I also viewed autism as something outside myself, something that did not apply to me. If anything, I recognized other kids (and adults) as “weird”, in a good way, and gravitated towards them because of that. By contrast, Tech’s radar is pretty spot-on since he was in classes almost entirely made of autistic students for quite a few years, so he had time to learn to recognize all kinds of behaviors. I did not get an experience like this until the past year when I began to spend time in an autism-centric Discord server. After a year, I have started picking up little cues that have helped me identify people like me, including stimming, being unusually dressed for the weather, speech and typing patterns, and the same strengths and weaknesses in communication that I have. I remember how proud I was the first time I successfully radared someone: we were in a school Zoom call for meeting new friends during quarantine, and one person I was paired up with was looking off to the side instead of directly at the camera, and I felt instantly comfortable rocking excitedly as I infodumped to them about the horrible adaptation choices of the Ender’s Game film. I later learned this new friend was diagnosed with autism, ADHD, and dyslexia. An autistic demigod! My magnetism, like I mentioned earlier, has always been strong. When I worked at my local grocery store, my two closest coworker friends were both ND, and I seem to subconsciously befriend the other NDs in whatever class, club, or online community I enter. I believe this is because of similarities in communication and shared experiences. I have less to worry about in terms of phrasing things for accuracy over subtlety, being anxious around the concept of a new friend in general, having over-the-top reactions and then apologizing, or getting extra fired up about my favorite topics because they are doing it too. I sometimes get worried about not being able to make friends with “normal” people or becoming elitist in my friendships, but I remind myself that friends are friends, and NDs probably find each other for a reason. Everyone needs people they, as the cool kids say, vibe with, and the people I have encountered through radar and magnetism have mostly been that for me.