So anyway, my sense now (since Covid went "long" in my brain, destroyed my personality, and left me to form a new one, from perspective of which I realized the old one had been well-"masked" autistic) is that autism is a matter of the personality constructing itself such that it has no role for pre-rational, pre-human "animal instinct", and thus must do everything (including further self-construction) by conscious logic alone
(Like, I don't know how social species without language would organize themselves if they couldn't parse each others' feelings directly, and we come from a long line of such species)
Autistic people aren’t more rational than allistic people. I don’t think you had autism to begin with, I think that the old you was just kinda obnoxious.
It’s hilarious to me that your story is “Praise Long Covid, for He cured me of the triplet demons of Straightness, Anxiety, and Autism” and somehow the part of that that I believe completely is the part about Straightness... if for no other reasons than:
+ there are people who are bisexual
+ I feel like someone would know if they went from wanting to suck no dicks to wanting to suck some amount of dicks
Sexuality seems more measureable to me than autism. Also, I have a hard time believing that you have zero anxiety? Just because I can’t imagine that. Less anxiety, maybe...
BTW, have you gone to a neurologist about any of this?
I can literally feel other people’s emotions empathetically now (which I always thought was a metaphor for being so moved by the intensity with which they were displayed to imagine for yourself what others were feeling), there are some other differences, things I hadn’t picked up on before because I had always taken them as constituative of like, reality or the human experience that, noticed as distinct things, were textbook autism.
And like “I had autism”/“you were obnoxious”, like yeah, dude, you ever known autists?
And like, yeah. I’ve seen stuff suggesting the anxiety-processing center of the brain is a regular Covid target, maybe because it’s close to the nerves it gets from the lungs by way of or something.
And yeah, absolutely zeroed. Last time I was manic for some reason it all came back (I hope that’s not a regular thing) but then it entirely vanished again afterwards. I am physically unable to worry about things, like I can evaluate them and judge that a negative outcome is possible or even likely, but then that thought gets filed in memory and my mind doesn’t return to the topic unless I consciously direct it there. I’m similarly immune to guilt, shame, regret, or loss, it’s really quite nuts.
And no, from what I’ve heard from other brain-Covid sufferers online, a particularly decent neurologist would at best say “hm, yeah, that was a brain infection alright”, and I already know that.