@packbat i played myst, riven, and exile with my dad as a kid. it’s one of the only video games i ever remember him playing- i really don’t know why he even decided to play them. i loved them and i think it had a huge impact on my imagination at that age

also i remember him always looking at some geocities-ass website with solutions to all the puzzles, so we didn’t actually do those, lmao

@tully i feel like at my job it just popped up out of nowhere and now everyone is acting like it is the best most inclusive term

while i’m over here like “wh… who told you to say this??”

@cakefordogs this is all so so relatable to me

i’ve been often called too clingy as a friend or told i’m coming on too strong to new acquaintances

and i think a lot of it is i just don’t know how to tell the strength of a friendship/what “friend level” the other person is comfortable with. so i misjudge, constantly.

@mokosh i relate to a lot of this! it’s also tough for me to read books these days, i have serious executive function & concentration issues with it now for some reason. but i also read random articles and stuff a lot, and i still do read very fast.

i almost included the “reads every sign, sticker, box, ad, etc.” thing in here bc i also do that but i’m genuinely not sure how abnormal that is?? i’ve gotten a bit of a sense that some people can see writing but choose not to read it, but for me the instant i see something, it is Read. but i’m not sure.

@packbat yeah exactly. just because i could read very well very early didn't mean i was some kind of kid genius who was wise beyond my years. i was still just a kid taking a kid's understanding of the world to the books i read.

my mom's story is about how i read a business sign saying "Save $$$!!" as "Save [hiss]!"

my first word was supposedly "brick" which is... such a strange first word. not mama or dada or any of those repeating words for kid-appealing subjects. Brick.

@naga oh my god same. i skipped a single grade, i think the only reason i didn't skip further was that i wasn't very good at math. i might actually have dyscaculia, which is really fun

and i also read things i did not understand as part of the "gifted program" i was in in school. maybe i should make a follow up post about a few more school things like this.

@twistylittlepassages ah wow cool! i'm glad it was relatable.

i'm not saying every hyperlexic person is autistic, but i think it is underdiagnosed. like, there's a whole hyperlexia "type" which is "kids who display autistic-like symptoms but then grow out of them." i feel like it's highly likely that those are just autistic kids who learned to mask symptoms and thus went undiagnosed.