hello!! sorry to hear about The Horrors, i hope they ease up for you soon. sorry it’s taken a bit to get round to answering

most of these are just going to be assorted headcanons but if you’re looking for anything in specific feel free to ask!

• i think canon hotch is 100% one of those people who goes through life undiagnosed, mainly because he finds a career that works for him and falls into a lifestyle that accommodates the majority of symptoms
• (divorce notwithstanding, but in all fairness, the “you’re more invested in your work than the marriage” happens to allistics in far less all-consuming jobs than FBI agents lol)
• Sort of like this, except very much subconscious:

• he was also one of those kids you hear about who don’t talk for ages and when they do it’s in proper little sentences
• criminal psychology + criminal justice was his biggest special interest since he was old enough to understand it
• the very first one was the coins he talks about in early on in s1 (I believe?). in part because i think that’s adorable and also because i’m going to take whatever crumbs of information about his childhood we get
• (he still has the collection somewhere. it hasn’t been much of an interest in decades but he’s kept them)
• also the flat affect and somewhat monotone voice? been with him since he was little and got some quite confused responses from people insisting he was bored (maybe, but he wasn’t intentionally being rude about it) or sad (no, that’s just how he is?) or tired (again, maybe but that’s got nothing to do with what his face is doing), though it also proved quite useful when it became apparent people struggled to read him as a teen and later, working in law and profiling
• (I maintain that he’s really not that difficult to read at all, you just have to look at his eyes, but I might be biased)
• if we want to go angsty for a minute, i like to imagine a lot of his autistic traits are ones he shares with his father :)) for double motivation to mask them
• also why i use the idea of jack being autistic in fics sometimes because i think it’s one of the more realistic ways to get canon hotch to engage with that in himself - if you’ve ever heard the stories where a child is diagnosed and a) it was difficult because a parent or parents saw nothing unusual because they’re also autistic or b) it becomes evident that the traits in the child are very much present in the parent? that.
• Used to drive Haley mad (affectionate) because if left to his own devices he could go ages doing the same sort of things (listening to the same albums, eating roughly the same things) while she would go for more variety a lot sooner. not always, but often.
• i think pre-foyet hotch would get the best night’s sleep of his LIFE if someone introduced this man to the concept of weighted blankets
• post-foyet… not so much :(