Although the notion of me being autistic had been suggested by several people throughout the month of August 2016, and I’d started to research the idea seriously on the 23rd August, and then been to see my GP to get some sort of outside opinion on 16th September, by this time last year I hadn’t yet actually admitted to myself that this whole “autism hypothesis” thing was anything more than, well, a hypothesis!
I had, however, assembled a really tiny chat group on facebook, because I needed somewhere to be able to talk about what was going on, and the thought of declaring myself autistic on my main facebook wall (where most of my social life takes place) was WAY too much for me at that point. Furthermore, nobody outside of my immediate “every day” circle, or who hadn’t been there over the summer, knew what was going on. I was still getting used to the idea, and trying to explain to other people something that I barely understood myself would have been utterly impossible.
So, a few days after seeing the doctor, I set up the tiny chat group, and added just a very few people – really those who had happened to be in the right (or maybe wrong) place at the right (or wrong) time. Several were people who already knew what was going on, some had already helped me in some way, some had been through the same process, and some were folk who I simply knew I could count on because I’d been able to in the past.
The group became a sort of journal for me, although this time a year ago I didn’t know it was going to be that way. It was also, between September and December 2016, an absolute lifeline. I needed to talk about what was going on, and not just to my husband, and, thankfully, I found a way of doing so. There were around half a dozen people who endured hour after hour of me going on and on, and propped me up and kept me going through those times. I shall be forever grateful to them.
I hadn’t, at this stage, even discovered that there were autistic groups on facebook, neither had I found blogs by other autistic adults. That would come later, and even then I joined one or two groups and lurked silently, not even daring to comment, because somehow I felt like I wasn’t allowed – the groups were evidently full of “proper autistics”, real grown-up ones, not like me, who was just some random person who was a bit odd! They all seemed to know stuff I didn’t, so I silently read and learnt, because that was all I could do at that stage.
When I eventually did discover blogs, the best I could do was to follow their facebook pages if they had one. I didn’t, at that time, have a blog account that I could use, because I hadn’t set this one up yet, and, again, like the facebook groups, I wouldn’t have dared to comment. I’m still struggling a bit with the interaction element of blog commenting and even responding to comments on this blog – I need to have a very high energy day to be able to respond to comments (which, I assure those of you who have made them, I have read and will respond to) in the ways that I’d like as it takes many more spoons than simply writing a post and putting it up. This is my equivalent of presenting a paper, which I can do relatively easily on about 50% of days, but taking questions afterwards I’m still finding challenging, as I mentioned in Responding and Communicating.
So, for the time being, it was my tiny group of trusted allies, some autistic, some not, and, of course, the ever growing pile of books – once I’d bought the first couple from Amazon, the Amazon “suggestions” did much of the rest of the work, and buying books from Amazon was something familiar and easy, so that was what I did!
And, it was one year ago today, in that tiny group, that I first typed the words quoted at the bottom of The Discovery, and, after just a few weeks of suggestion and investigation, started to identify as autistic. It’s almost as though today is the first anniversary of me disclosing to myself!
I actually accepted the idea rather easily, mainly because, once I started to discover what being autistic actually was, it became really obvious that I was it. Although only months earlier I’d still just had some vague notion that autism was mainly something to do with small boys who didn’t talk or brainy computer geeks who took things rather literally or some sort of special educational needs thing or savants (yes, I was as susceptible to absorbing the stereotypes as many other people are, and I certainly didn’t believe any of the above related to me in any way, and neither had I ever had reason to wonder), as soon as I started to investigate and learn the full reality, it was obvious that it applied to me.
Interestingly, looking back, what I didn’t know a year ago was just HOW MUCH autism applied to me. I had yet to discover things that my mother was eventually to remember about my early childhood – things that I would never have discovered had I not gone for an autism diagnosis. At the time there was still a long way to go with the process of discovery (and I suspect there still is – I’m still getting moments where I suddenly realise something I’ve always done is not just “me” but is an autistic trait).
And although it felt weird because it was new, I had no problem with the idea of the identity “autistic”. I pick up from various places online that there is, apparently, some sort of stigma attached to the word, but I didn’t feel anything bad about it. I suspect that’s partly because of where I live and the people I come into contact with (there are very few of them and many are also neurodivergent or allies), partly because I had already had two decades with several mental illness labels so “autistic”, although new, and different, was, to me, just another thing to add to the list, and partly because I’d been used to being different from other people for so long, that actually it seemed pretty cool to have a name for the sort of different that I was! Furthermore, discovering that I wasn’t naughty and lazy, as had previously been thought, was such a relief that I embraced “autistic” with open arms!
And so, a year ago today, I typed the words that I’d realised, only a few weeks after the first suggestions, were absolutely correct. It did feel strange, unfamiliar, and new, in the same way that “I have bipolar disorder” had felt strange nearly a decade earlier, and “I have depression” had, a decade before that, but it also felt right, and still does. However, a year later I don’t have to type the words on a tiny chat group on facebook, and I don’t then need to then jump up and down going “fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck” to recover from the experience. I can type them on open facebook, on a public blog post, and I can even, now, relatively easily (as long as my words are working) just tell people.
That feels like quite a big change in the past year. And it had to be a gradual process, while my brain adapted to the new identity and I got used to the knowledge of what sort of brain I have. But the same words still apply, and these days they’ve lost almost all the “this feels a bit weird” stuff, and are now just a factual description of my neurology coupled with a big part of my identity.
I am autistic.
Finally Knowing Me: An Autistic Life 