#Introduction with a billion #hashtags...

I'm Alba, a #trans #nonbinay #bisexual #autistic #vegan #antifascist #activist from #Nijmegen, #NL. In addition to my #autism, I've also got #ADHD, #hyperlexia, related auditory processing and executive function issues, #aphantasia and #SDAM (Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory). I'm an IT #tech at a large #international company, a volunteer for the #radical #intersectional #anticapitalist #political party #BIJ1 and a freelance #translator. I speak #Nederlands, #français, #English, #Deutsch and #Esperanto. I play #saxophone - I have a bari sax, a tenor sax and a soprano sax. I also have a #flute and a #ukelele but I don't play those nearly as well as the saxes. I love playing #TTRPG like #DnD5e and #PF2e, and I have two #cats, an orange slonk called Hobbes and a void chonk called Nita.

I used to hang out on mastodon.lol until early 2023 when that instance shut down. I then moved to todon.nl and recently decided to hop on to blahaj.zone ​​

I learned to read when I was two or three. I suppose that means I have/had hyperlexia. My vocabulary has gotten me in trouble. I've been accused of being pretentious, but there's no pretense. I know what the words mean. I was also accused of plagiarism in university because "no second year student can write that well."

That accusation resulted in serious writer's block. I did the research for my paper, but I couldn't make myself write it. I was worried I'd just be accused of plagiarism again.

Another time I wrote a paper and a prof was upset that I used uncommon words without defining them. I didn't know which words she meant because I read a lot and know a lot of words. I wasn't sure how I was supposed to know which words needed to be defined.

When I don't know what a word means, I look it up. I love learning new words.

I was a very unpopular, bullied child, and I learned my vocabulary from all sorts of books. I read pretty much everything with words, from toilet cleaner labels to Regency romances to westerns to dictionaries to Beowulf. And when I was in high school, I read medical journals for fun.

I guess it should be no surprise I ended up being a writer. #hyperlexia #ActuallyAutistic #WritingCommunity

I'm now on a Wikipedia streak on all things autistic. It's been a while since I did this kind of thing in Wiki and I'm loving it. Personal discovery of this morning is that hyperlexia, precocious reading, usually without training, highly overlaps with autism.

I learned to read when I was four, spontaneously. I don't remember this myself but my mother later told me how I was standing next to her while she was sitting on a chair, reading a letter from her friend. Suddenly I started to read out loud what was said in the letter.

Been fascinated by language since then, especially in written form.

I just came across this image in my folders and it still cracks me up.
"Mommy, what is pathologization?"

@ActuallyAutistic @actuallyautistic@a.gup.pe #hyperlexia

I'm hyperlexic. It comes with my autism. It was fuelled by my mother giving me a dictionary the size of a gravestone when I was four years of age. Now she maintains that my struggles with people are my fault because I'm "intimidating" and "try to make people feel small by using words they don't understand."

Make it make sense.

(In case it needs said, most of my struggles with people come from feeling like I'm in a game and nobody will tell me the rules.)