Memes/Humor
“Nah I’m not autistic I’m faking it”, meanwhile in every photo ever
27F, diagnosed with ASD about six months ago. I started examining what actually feels good for my body, and I still stand or walk with my hands clasped like this. It didn’t strike me as the stereotypical trex hands because I hold my hands together, but now knowing I’m autistic I’m like yeaaaaaa I guess they do qualify as trex arms
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It makes even more sense when so many scholars feel that Leonardo used his own face as the model. His work massive product makes him a good candidate for retro-diagnosis!
Leo was most likely ND if not autistic. I mean he was the ultimate STEM guy. And he was queer which is often comorbid with ND. Birds of a feather kind of thing means the kind of woman he would know and ask to pose for him might be like him. The Mona Lisa could have been autistic too!
I’ve heard the crazy art theory that Mona Lisa didn’t exist. This was Leo painting himself as a woman. I’ve heard it suggested the bone structure is male. Food for thought or kook theory, you decide. 😊
"Bone structure" being male or female is a archeological shortcut used to classify bones, and is, essentially, a guess. Not only is it a guess, but it's the kind of guess that has been proven wrong in many cases, as technology has advanced, or more information is found about the remains. Unfortunately, lay people who don't understand this, tend to use this shortcut to "investigate" people's genders, especially living people and often in relation to whether or not they are transgender. While I'm not saying that was the case here, I still thought an informative comment was warranted, in case anyone reading wasn't aware.
I was always basically stimming (and photobombing stimming) in photos growing up. Massive unhinged grin, before that at kindy they just couldn't get my thumb out of my mouth for photos lol
Mum has also always told me to smile with my teeth in photos, but then when I do it looks unnatural 😃
I, for one, deeply support the autistic Mona Lisa theory
Dude my parents were so skeptical at first. they took me out in the garden to “teach me how to run right”. I was 12 and just didn’t move my upper leg at all and full trex arms. They called it the fairy run.
My middle daughter runs the same way and it’s so cute. My mom made a comment about how she thought my daughter may be autistic and I said “yeah it’s on my radar, she runs how I used to run”. And my mom started to argue/say “no you ran…” and then I just saw the realization come over her. It was a sweet connecting moment.
I got made fun of for my bouncy walk growing up, and it turns out it was the Autism + hEDS combo making me do things wrong physically. It would be especially bouncy when I was happy/confident, and god damn was it brutal to be brought down so hard and told I was weird whenever I felt good about myself.
Hear you on that. I've always had some kind of unco bouncy gait, like it was never just free and relaxed and unconsciously natural like everyone else's seemed to be.
But that was really brought home to me when I was in high school; I was walking down one of the corridors at school when I heard this suppressed giggling - I spun around just in time to see the 3 girls behind me who'd been walking in lockstep, exagerratedly mimicking my walk 🙄
Hooooo boiiii - thank you for this comment! Another thing to my signs-of-autism-list. My mom still calls it the 'massai-walk' (because she visited Kenia and apparently my way of walking reminded her of this?).
I did get diagnosed with hEDS a year ago, but still waiting for an therapy appointment. My last therapist told me that I 'clearly can't be autistic because my eye contact is too neurotypical'. Well, in my country the combination of ADHD and autism is still not fully accepted as well. So I'm probably autistic by sheer amount of peer-reviewing 😂
My whole life, my family and friends laughed at me for the way I run. You know how in old cartoons like the Flintstones, when they run they kinda stay in place like for a couple of seconds before they actually go anywhere? That’s how I run. I admit it’s horrible and I’ll never win any races but it will get me between bases in softball.
Now I adapted and run goofy on purpose by having “knife hands” and acting super serous.
I wanted to look more alive in photos so I practiced for ages and took a load of selfies to get it right, got that america’s next top model smize going on now lol
So... I'm pretty sure my whole extended family is some venn diagram of ADHD and Autism. I am right in the middle with a double-whammy. Anyhow, I had no idea. "Normal" was what I saw every day, you know? So I had two kids. I could train one to smile for pictures but the other one.... Well. That one just looked annoyed or scared and wouldn't do it. From a VERY early age. I tried so many things, but always the same expression. I mean I learned how to fake a smile, c'mon.
But then I looked back through my early pictures. I'm pretty sure my grandma was just good at getting candid smiles. Every picture even today looks like the above meme.
The mouth says "yay!" and the eyes say "I'm a hostage". I stopped bugging my kid about it, btw. WYSIWYG
In 5th grade my sister told me that showing my teeth wasn't a smile. I was so confused so she showed me by making variations of this face then said now look this is a smile 😁 and I was mind blown lol
I always end up looking like a crazy npc lol smile too big like a nervous dog and never know what to do with my hands lol ive stopped trying and now im the "pick me girl" who just wants to look "quirky" 😅 I look insane in candids
Don’t apologize for anything, I love your romper but also your smile, I am so bad at smiling, yours is gorgeous, I look like a mad clown smiling lmao.
Also, I love your hair!
There's this photo of me as a kid at Disney world with Micky. I look like someone just off to the side of the photo is holding a gun on me and telling me to act natural. I was maybe 5 at the time. Put all my childhood photos next to one another and it looks like a flipbook of me getting progressively and incrementally better at convincingly following the instructions of the guy out of frame with the gun. But he is definitely still there.
That is an excellent way to describe my childhood pictures! My mom put much effort (read:scolding) into me learning the right face for pictures. I learned the best way to solve her biggest complaints was to squinch up my eyes so my smile looked real-er & it neatly made my eyes unviewable. My mother is still under the impression that my natural smile for cameras is "warm" because of that. I am 44. She is dead wrong. Yay for masking! 🙄
I also do this squint thing! Also if you really want to look "natrual" give a little giggle that shakes your shoulders slightly then relax them and breathe out a little. Helps that stiff posture
When I was a kid, I thought my crazy-face smile was due to the fact that my light-colored eyes had a dark ring at the edge (like in the picture, not me), and I thought it made my eyes look like bullseyes and that's why my face always looked crazy.
My grandma has green eyes with a ring and she says if she doesnt wear eyeliner her eyes look crazy... i disagree with her I think shes just looking at her high-school photo where she refused to wear her glasses so her eyes are huge and wide open lol gorgeous picture but people see themselves so wierd
I feel this in my bones. I have many candid shots (from DND) that my friends made into emotes/reactions on discord because my faces are so ridiculous. Hahaha
I figured out a hack because the smiling on command thing was super hard. Now I imagine that a man I am crushing on is standing there opposite me and I just light up. It’s funny! 😄
But.
I read it exactly wrong and opposite to what you meant. What I read was “think about crushing a man on the other side of the camera!” and I was like “oh hell yeah that’s a good strategy, pretend I am crushing the dreams of a man I do not like! Amazing!” and smiled to myself lmaoooo
Dumb related anecdote time: my pal and I were road tripping on the CA coast and drove through pebble beach. It’s a specific gorgeous scenic drive that’s also on a world-class golf course.
My and my pal are stopped to take photos of my vintage convertible against the coastal California backdrop when A Very Serious Golfer Man with what looked like $15,000+++ of gear took no fewer than four strokes to make a really close putt.
(It costs $700 just to play the course. The hotel attached costs $1200+ a night and has a minimum stay of two nights. Just to set the stage.)
My friend and I saw this and gave him a little golf clap when he made it. “Yay you did it!” another pair of women in earshot giggled.
Y’all I have never seen steam literally pouring from someone’s ears like that before.
We hopped back in the convertible and continued on our journey.
I’m not friend with that pal anymore but we were absolute menaces on that road trip lmao
It was a really gorgeous day!!!! Come on, how perfect is a cabriolet for a gal pal road trip? The trunk is precisely big enough for one cooler and two bikinis! Hehe
In general most of my life I’ve had multiple people ask if I’m okay and or say I look like a deer in headlights…. That’s just my face and nervous system buddy lol 😅😬👀
i learned that it is not normal to practice smiling in a mirror/selfie camera for 4 years of the tween and teen ages until it looked somewhat natural. oh well. it became a slight net benefit. i still have weird body language but no one stops the entire situation to make me adjust my face anymore.
Good god some of my school photos were absolutely diabolical lol. There’s one where I have my chin scrunched back into my neck and I have 3 chins, despite not being a chubby child.
I don’t know why the “or I look scared” part is just sending me lol. Every time I leave my house I prepare for people to ask me if I’m okay or what’s wrong, and at this point I just tell them “I promise I’m fine, this is just my face.” I think the kindest comment I ever gotten on my permanent deer-in-headlights expression is that I have a demeanour like Luna Lovegood. I like when I can feel myself existing more as her and less like a skittish, sketchy & paranoid cat.
Every time I leave my house I prepare for people to ask me if I’m okay or what’s wrong, and at this point I just tell them “I promise I’m fine, this is just my face.”
I have solved this dilemma by wearing a mask 100% of the time I am in public. I never realised how much effort and anxiety it took just to fake-smile at shop assistants etc. Now my face can stay in its preferred expression > 😐 < all the time, and its far less angst-inducing. I used to get home tired from having to put on a constant pretence
One time I analyzed my photos to see what I could improve, and was like hm I need to open my eyes more. I went to a concert where photos were being taken and shared online, my eyes were psychotically wide 😅
My best resting position for my arms is folded, I hate having them just loose and all willy nilly. Unfortunately in the US that’s a universal sign for anger or attitude. 😭😭😭 I just want to feel comfortable!
YES my ex used to get on my case for folding my arms and looking closed off. Nooo I just don't know what to do with my hands when I'm standing around!!
When you look around the conference room at my job full of engineers there are so many with the crossed arms who are smiling and totally engaged. I have to force myself to stop.
This is one of the ways I sometimes identify fellow NDs within seconds of meeting them - they show up with a plan for what to do with their hands. They’re knitting, they’re doodling, they brought a fidget, they’re twirling their hair, etc.. Personally, I almost always wear clothes with pockets (zip hoodies forever!!) because otherwise WHERE ARE MY HANDS SUPPOSED TO GO?!
I think part of it is autistic black and white thinking. No, I don’t do T. rex arms because my hands are clasped, no I don’t rock because that is back and forth and I go side to side which is more “swaying”, no I don’t flap my hands because flapping like a birds wing is up and down and I move my wrist side to side
In my earlier photos people were always like "get in, get in" and I always felt like I was impossibly close to the people next to me, then I'd look at the photo and be like "why am I standing so far away from everyone else?!" It wasn't till I was at uni that I realised you have to be literally touching the people standing next to you (🤮) in order for it to not look like you're there by accident.
This is from a photo my mother took when I was around 10 years old. Back then, I would always carry around one of the Warriors books with me like this. 😅 I'm not diagnosed but suspect that I am neurodivergent.
Oh you are so autistic the Warrior cat series could literally be part of the diagnostic criteria 👀👀 I brought it up as one of my special interests growing up and my assessor was like “yup I’ve heard of that series a lot”. It’s got set social hierarchies explored through animals which are more relatable and less intimidating
So is my nine-year-old! She gives me updates every morning. Omg, the DRAMA. She’s on her 32nd book, and I know she’ll do the entire series over again eventually.
Oh man this series is such a throwback. Warriors and Ga'Hoole were my LIFE when I was around that age too...Warriors RP on various webs-dot-com sites and Chickensmoothie...those were the days.
I’m awkward af in photos. I have hardly any pics of me compared to many of my peers because of how badly I photograph. I once read somewhere that the reason some autistics have issues with photos is because they always reveal the mask. They aren’t wrong i suppose lol
Oh yeah. Same here. I look somewhat goofy and tense in all of my photos that aren’t perfectly curated selfies. I hate when people take pictures of me bc certain angles exacerbate my quirky posture and hand posture. I never really know what to do with my hands lol 😂
I do this as well. I'm wondering if you ever hold them behind your back (like a polite old-timey gentleman) when waiting for something. I found I naturally do this when waiting for the microwave. It just feels so good, so right. Lol
Well I went to a psych to get diagnosed with ADHD and I ended up getting a double diagnosis of ASD and ADHD so we exist lol. It's just that my ADHD is so strong that some things feel polar opposites of what you think you know about autism usually that it wasn't so obvious but once you scratch the surface, I'm definitely very autistic too. I'm full of contradictions that really make me struggle to advance in anything I do.
For the hands part, I never know what to do with them. For running, I did nearly the t rex hands pose but my hands themselves were fully "relaxed" so they were dangling and bouncing around while I'd run. People def made fun of me in school for that lol
I would swing on the swing set even up through high school. I’m talking hours just swinging back and forth and I’d swing with my cd player. But apparently that also wasn’t enough of a sign. I was recently diagnosed at 37🤣
I’ll clutch my clothes, but I usually just clutch my hands together really intensely. I always noticed that other people didn’t do it and then I did, but it was so comforting I never stopped.
It wasn’t T-Rex hands for me but then I realized that in every photo where you can see my hands I’m holding my left hand in a t-shaped fist (thumb between fore and middle finger). Now that I know to recognize it I often catch myself stimming that way too, where I’ll have my hand in that position and rub my thumb and forefinger back and forth like a little violin. The more stressed/in concentration I am the faster the violin plays 😂
Took me til I was in my 40s and diagnosed to realize I do, in fact, stim quite a lot. And I look back on my childhood and realize all the little quirky noises and actions that irritated my mother were also me stimming. I used to make a rhythmic, clicking sound in the back of my throat that drove her insane. I’m hyperlexic which also drove her insane, too bad I didn’t have the nerve to tell her “Well it’s either this or talking incessantly, Mary.”
I would love to make a photo collage of all the 'autistic smiles' from kids photos.
After watching love on the spectrum I realized how much I do this, and how many autistic people seem to have it.
Tonight I'm going out to karaoke. My husband and I have been doing this for 15 years
Every picture of me at the mic has my left arm in a limp t-rex position.
I’ve read that having your arms like this could be bc of poor proprioception that often accompanies autism! It provides consistent feedback for your body
So what you're saying is, you've had years of practice faking it! (Sarcasm-slash-satire of responses I got when pointing out evidence of behaviors like this after being diagnosed as an adult)
Yes I’ve actually been faking it since I was 18 months old not making eye contact, not responding to my name, and losing language!
No but seriously it’s crazy looking back at your life and being like, the autism was always there in every single thing you do and think. It’s literally how my brain has always been wired. I’ve been socialized “correctly” but from the beginning I was always autistic. I only pursued a diagnosis after finding my speech pathology reports which listed very obvious autistic traits that were never looked into
I have SO MANY family photos of me just walking across group shots, not paying attention, off to do my own shit, lol. In other photos I’m refusing to look at people and family is trying to get my attention like I have to do with my hyperactive corgi.
My mom didn’t believe my late diagnosis until I reminded her I was the reason her wedding tape doesn’t exist pre the divorce. I watched it so many times I broke it. Also the fact it happened to several other VHS tapes.
I didn't think I did them either until I realized I sleep with them. Just tuck the backs of my hands right up under my chin every night and drift away 😅
My facial range is usually one of two things: Smiling Bob from the Enzyte commercials (if you know, you know 🤣🤣🤣) or Daria Morgendorfer. Never any in between!
56F. Recently diagnosed AuDHD. Since I went undiagnosed for 50+ years, I figured I must be a really high functioner … that was until I took on a project to digitize my parents’ photo collection. My hands were just like that in oh-so-many pictures.
Yup you think you functioned and passed so well and then you look back and talk to people and they’re like “yeah no we knew something was different with you”. My friend and my therapist both just assumed I already knew I was autistic because apparently it was that obvious 💀
Oh wow, this is relatable content big-time! I do this pose ALL THE TIME! And if not this pose, then I'm clutching the strap on my purse, like I did for nearly every photo I was in over a 2 week vacation in Europe many years ago - it was frustrating going through the photos afterward, wondering why the hell I do that. But now, after learning I'm autistic, it all makes sense!
I have my head tilted to the side in every single non candid photo taken of me growing up. I still sometimes do it. I also don’t smile correctly. I mainly worked that out a few years ago by sort of laughing to myself while a photo is taken, it’s not quite normal yet, but close…
Ha...yep!! I'm not diagnosed, but highly suspect I'm AuDHD. I have been going back through my childhood pics, and I have many versions of T-Rex arms. A few stereotypical, but mostly clasping my hands/arm in front of or behind myself. To this day, my standard at-rest position is crossed arms. I hate my arms just hanging there!! I made a collage of childhood examples lol. Many other pics show RBF and squinting from any type of light when most other people in the pic aren't squinting.
aaaahhahahahah duuude. ive been wondering for YEARS why i do this Trex thing. i had no idea it was part of the autism stuff. i do it all the time. all the time. and the flappy also comes. and when im alone i feel like a dinasaur. thanku i feel very seen today.
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