This is scary because I know that disability, especially autism, can face significant stigmatisation, so I wanted to tell people about it, and about me. Being autistic had never crossed my mind. If someone had suggested it, I’d say “No, me? I can’t be autistic. It must be something else,” and that is exactly what I did for years.
My parents, friends, teachers, work colleagues never questioned it, never thought it, so why would I?
It turns out I spent my whole life feeling different, like something wasn’t quite right, thinking everyone else around me must be going through life with these same difficulties and feelings as I was, but apparently not everyone was feeling that way.
Being assessed for autism gave me access to a language, to questions I never had the ability to ask or to answer before:
- Why would I struggle to make friends or any lasting connections?
- Why would I always feel placed on the outside of conversations?
- Why did I struggle so much in a world when no one else seemed to?
I can only ask and answer these questions now that I have the voice and the language to understand them.
I spent the past few years visiting doctors, mental health professionals and more recently a private therapist and psychotherapist, being sure it was anxiety, or social anxiety, or generalised anxiety or whatever name I could put to my problems. I was searching for something that could be fixed. That was all that crossed my mind. That there would be a fix and it would be gone one day, and I’d feel ‘normal’ like everyone else.
I was told to try breathing techniques, think about medication, expose myself to things I feared or triggered me. Some of these things helped, but all the struggles I felt when I returned to ‘normal’ life stayed with me and didn’t disappear, because guess what? There is no cure for autism. There are no pills to take these feelings away. My brain is wired differently, literally. There is no changing that, and I wouldn’t want to change that.
Growing up, leaving education, struggling to craft a career and moving away from where I grew up exposed how much I was masking. The feeling of putting on a show anytime I went outside or met anyone was something I didn’t even realise I was doing until I found the language to see it.
Existing was, putting it frankly, exhausting and after so many years, I couldn’t pretend anymore and something had to be done. I reached my limit and I needed answers, no matter what those answers were to be.
Going to therapy was one of the most alien and difficult things I’ve ever had to do. To sit with a stranger and speak so openly took so much energy from me, but I’m thankful I did it, because it allowed me to question things about my life and upbringing and once I started, it opened up answers to why my life had taken the path it had. It helped me realise why I was seen as an easy target growing up. Why every person I’d ever met would describe me as shy, or quiet, even though I never felt that description was accurate of me, but if everyone around was saying I was, why should I ever question it? Maybe being shy was easier. It meant less expectation of me, fewer questions asked. It meant I could be left alone. An easy description to settle into.
I’m early into this new world. Being assessed and told I am autistic means I have a lot of learning to do and maybe if I wrote this later down the line, I’d word things differently, but I can only express what I feel in this moment.
I have lots of mixed feelings about it, some anger about it not being noticed earlier. I find myself questioning how different my life may look now if someone had given me this language all that time ago. But I also need to be thankful I could get this answer at all, because not everyone who is struggling will have that chance or the resources to find out. After all, it’s better late than never.
I wanted to post this publicly, because I spent too much of my life trying to hide who I was, so the last thing I wanted to do was to do that again. A friend online posted something similar awhile ago, and reading their experience made me question my life as well, so if this post awakens something in you, to seek some answers then it’ll be worth it.
I hope this doesn’t make you see me differently than before, and if it does, I want you to remember that I was always like this. It’s just now I have a word for it, a new language. Nothing has changed, just my understanding of myself.
