Six Months Public

I don’t have time to write a long blog post right now as today I’m going out into the world to play music, to continue the process of discovering just how much I can push myself to do things and what adaptions I might need in order to be able to live the best life I can, and to keep rebuilding my life, which fell apart so spectacularly in the latter part of 2016.

However, I wanted to post something, to mark the six month anniversary of publishing The Discovery, which was the post in which I disclosed my autistic identity to anyone who cared to read the post. Only two posts preceded it, an introduction, and a bit of background, and I could never have imagined, six months later, just how much I would have learnt and written and connected with other bloggers and people in the autistic community. On that day, back in December, I was, to put it mildly, extremely nervous about what might ensue, and I still, at that stage, had no idea that the responses from most people I know would mainly be of the form “Well, of course you’re autistic, you mean you didn’t know” or “Well that makes total sense”!!!

I wrote about Disclosing Identities back in January, and I stand by what I wrote then. For me, full disclosure has been relatively smooth, although I am still getting back out into the world (like today) and I am still working on getting a smooth and brief script together to talk about being autistic in ways that are most likely to be understood and appropriate when discussing with people out in the world. I’m also still very much at the start of the process of working out what adaptions I might need in order to successfully participate in various activities and not end up having a meltdown or ending up too ill to function.

But, six months on from what was the real start of this blog (and might, at the time, also have been the end of it), things are OK. I am yet to be told that I “can’t be autistic” (or any similar phrase) and I’m still wondering whether that’s because I do, in some ways, fulfil autistic stereotypes (I do rock back and forth quite a lot, I am fairly random with eye contact, I do sometimes have full-blown meltdowns in supermarkets, and, yes, I do like mathematics and find it calming), or whether I’ve just been monstrously lucky to be surrounded by such supportive people!

Whichever way, six months from the nervous day on which I posted that first post, life now feels very very different. Still very much a work in progress, but a long way from how it was back in December.