Blog Birthday!

A year ago today I shared the link to the first entry on this blog, having put it up the night before but not yet told anyone it existed (I wanted to “sleep on it” before sharing). My facebook memories stated that I was “really really nervous” about it and I certainly remember it feeling like a “big thing” at the time and hoping that people would treat me gently.

I didn’t actually state that I’d discovered I was autistic until the end of the third post. The first one was hastily written and rather patchy, and I wasn’t in a great place mentally at the time. I’d originally intended to wait until I had a formal diagnosis before I “went public” about being autistic, but my first assessment going so badly wrong meant that I had to change plans.

When I first set the blog up the title was simply “Finally Knowing Me” and I didn’t add the subtitle “An Autistic Life” until after I was formally diagnosed and started to become much more confident about the whole thing. I also didn’t know about tags and categories on the blog – just posting at all was a massive deal and I had to get my spouse to sit with me throughout the entire process in order to be able to do it at all.

Initially I didn’t post anything at all without him reading it first. I wasn’t confident enough. I was afraid of getting things wrong. I still am sometimes, and I want to write all sorts of posts about all sorts of things, but I also need time to absorb everything that has happened during the last 16 months – I find it hard to believe now that just 17 months ago I didn’t have the first idea that I was autistic and had very little knowledge of what autism even was. It has been a steep learning curve.

And I’m still learning. Following my diagnosis, just under 10 months ago, I became more confident about joining autistic groups online and interacting with other autistic people. Since then I’ve also been through an ADHD diagnostic process as well. There is a constant stream of new information, of new things, of articles and tweets and facebook posts and blog posts and so on. I have hundreds of links saved, so much still to learn and analyse and think about.

And I still wonder where I might fit into this world of neurodiversity, and what I might eventually contribute and how far autism will continue to be an interest I pursue in that “very interested” kind of way, and so on. For now I’m blogging less than I was, partly because I have needed a break for the sake of my health (I was beginning to become exhausted) and I’ve needed to take a step back, partly because I’ve become aware of so many more issues since I started blogging and I want to start to investigate and research more thoroughly (I need to read, I need to think, I need to learn – then I’ll be in a better position to analyse and write), and partly because I’ve been starting to rebuild my “real world” life a bit (getting back to music and running and seeing a few actual people from time to time).

I feel I have time to do some of those things now, in a way that I didn’t this time last year. I got frantic in October as I saw the number of views here plummet (as they would, since I wasn’t generating new material, and I was engaging less and less online as my health took a nosedive – I’m also a terrible publicist and not very good at publicising this blog beyond sharing each new post to facebook or twitter) but I forced myself to stop fretting. If only two people read each post then so be it, if someone “unlikes” the facebook page each time I post then so be it!

Which takes me back to a year ago. To the point where I decided that I HAD to start explaining what was going on in my life, and that I HAD to be openly autistic. And to the point where I concluded that even if nobody believed me and all my facebook friends unfriended me and dumped me for claiming the identity “autistic” for myself without official permission, then that was the way it would have to be.

That was the point at which I could no longer pretend. I saw it as a two way choice – either live openly and freely as an autistic person (and probably go on incessantly about it for a while), or kill myself. The former risked me ending up getting laughed at or disbelieved or alienated (all of which were potentially reversible), the latter ended up with me being dead (which, of course, is irreversible). And so this blog was started, as it was the best way I could think of of making the information available to people.

As it turned out I wasn’t disbelieved or anything else, rather the opposite. And this blog has since grown into something I’d never have expected a year ago. I wrote 170 posts in the first year of its existence (this is the 171st), which I’d never have imagined when I started out.

Who knows where it goes from here. I know it’s not finished yet. I know there’s more I want to do. I know I need to give my head processing time and that life continues to change. I know there is SO much more to learn, and that some of the issues surrounding autism and being autistic are complicated and that many are controversial. I don’t cope well with conflict, which means that I have to consider how “activist” I can be before it becomes seriously detrimental to my mental health.

I know that lots of people also produce vlogs and that accessing information presented only in speech is exhausting for me because where reading is something that takes very little processing for me, speech takes a great deal and I tend to save my “speech processing spoons” for real life interactions, which is when I need them most. Perhaps as I continue to recover from burnout this will improve.

My own life is also still very chaotic. We live in chaos, in a constant state of mental fragility, on a financial knife edge, everything precarious and uncertain and unstable. I’d like to use some of my energy to try to improve that a little if I can. The burnout of 2016 meant my life almost completely fell apart – I’m still picking up the pieces and trying to stick them back together in some sort of sensible order. It all takes time and energy.

My spouse assures me that it will all be sorted eventually (he’s an optimistic type), and also reminds me that as far as autism and autism advocacy and so on is concerned, it’s still really early days for me. I look at the work of others and feel very far behind, but then I realise they’re often months or years further along their own journeys and I’m still really new to all this.

To those of you still reading, and particularly those who’ve been reading from the beginning, huge thanks. Sending virtual first birthday cake to you all!

A Big Kid!

A few days after the appointment outlined in Still Complicated my spouse received an e-mail to say that somebody had been found who was willing to see me. An appointment was made. I wasn’t sure whether it would lead anywhere, and I wasn’t quite sure how to respond to the situation, so I went for messaging a few of my friends, in what I guessed might be a gently humorous way, explaining what the next stage was:

In a twist to the “autistic adults don’t exist” scenario, instead of pretending I don’t exist (since I evidently do), or that I’m not autistic (since I evidently am), they’re now pretending I’m not an adult instead (which is probably closer to the truth anyway) and I’m going to see a child psychiatrist!

The appointment was set for the beginning of November, and since we were, by now, starting to figure that the only way to convince the medics of the “ADHD hypothesis” (although, unlike with autism, which had been a sudden thing, awareness of my ADHD traits had developed over many months and it was more of a self-diagnosis than a hypothesis by this stage) was to do the research and present the evidence, we set about doing just that. By the time we got to the appointment we were even more convinced, though, as usual, trying to translate this knowledge into spoken words to people who need more than “Well, y’know…” (because they can’t see the pictures in my mind, which I often forget) was going to be something of a challenge.

I liked the child shrink from the off. She didn’t treat me as though I was five years old, which was a relief – I’m not the most mature fortysomething, but being spoken to like I’m a kid drives me bonkers. She asked if it was OK for her to sit where she hoped to sit. She was wearing a calming black outfit that didn’t distract my eyes, she spoke calmly and clearly. And the stuff she asked was clear and generally stuck to things that made sense and were in a logical order. When she sensed I was getting overheated on something she changed direction and diffused it, and the result was that I managed to stay in the room for the whole appointment. She’d also clearly read a lot of what we’d sent, so had quite a lot of background information to start with. And she asked before shaking my hand!

As in the previous post, I’m not going to go into details right now because my head is still processing, and I’m trying to make the best use of the available energy I currently have. Those of you who read October will know that I’m still recovering from the energy running out, and that the fact that I’ve now returned to being able to blog again is a significant shift from how things have been for some while. I AM recovering, and we seem to have stopped my mental health taking a significant downward slide again, but I’m trying to take things gently and getting used to things being different, yet again, from how they were until recently.

I’d been massively stressed when we arrived at the appointment and although the appointment eventually went well, my stress levels remained high. My regular psychiatrist was also present, and the interactions with four people in the room (two psychiatrists, my spouse, me) were sometimes complicated and tiring. Fortunately my spouse was there to pick up on the bits I missed or the bits I couldn’t manage, and at some point towards the end of the appointment (although I almost missed the details because I was having to concentrate so hard), the child psychiatrist confirmed that had I been younger I’d have been diagnosed with ADHD as a child. The flippant suggestion in my earlier blog post had turned out not to be so flippant after all!!! And, on top of that, having discussed how my ADHD traits impact on my life NOW, I was given an adult diagnosis too.

Then things felt like they started to move rather fast. Health questions happened, medication was discussed, and my regular psychiatrist left the room and returned with a prescription! There was talk about it being something I might like to think about for a bit, and it being a big decision and so on. My spouse and I had done the research and had the appropriate discussions and considerations weeks before. We already knew what the answer would be.

And so, on 1st November 2017, at around 10am, I was diagnosed with ADHD, another diagnosis that I would have received decades ago had circumstances been different. The time and date get added to 20th February 2017, at around 1.30pm (when I received my autism diagnosis) as a significant point in my life.

It felt a bit odd. And several days later I said to my husband how strange it was that I was quite comfortable going round telling the world that I’m autistic and that felt pretty much normal to me, but that it felt a bit odd saying that I had ADHD! However, a week and a half later (probably almost two weeks by the time I manage to publish this post) it’s starting to feel right and OK and fine and much less odd. I already knew I did have ADHD, but the official confirmation, like with autism, made a big difference to me.

And I now have some medication that might help to make a bit of my life a bit easier. There’ll be a blog post to write about medication at some point I imagine and it’s still really early days on “the stuff” as I’ve been calling it, but so far signs are very promising. I’ve only been taking it just over a week and we’re still analyzing effects and there will be discussions in the future of dosages and so on – yet more things for my mind to process, yet more things to learn and observe and so on.

And it’s another beginning of another thing, a new thing. In true autistic style I’ve become “interested” in ADHD (“interested” in the sense of “when I get interested in something I get VERY interested” interested) and you might notice this blog wandering into areas of neurodivergence that are not exclusively autism-based from time to time.

Still so much to learn. Still so much to discover. Still so much to try and interpret and explain.

And the medication? Is methylphenidate. Yes, the stuff that’s in Ritalin!!! I’m not actually on Ritalin itself, but a slow release version called Concerta. However, the throwaway remark from last year now sounds rather different because I HAVE (almost) “ended up as one of those ‘Ritalin kids’”!!!

I’m somewhat large and I’ve had rather a lot of birthdays, admittedly, but I was diagnosed by a child psychiatrist!

Maybe I’m just a big kid after all!

Still Complicated

After my autism diagnosis I was fortunate enough to be given two follow up appointments with the assessor, mainly, I think, to discuss how I felt about being diagnosed autistic once I’d had a little time to process it, and also to discuss the report and finalise paperwork and so on.

The first of those appointments was in April 2017, and I know that by that stage I’d already learnt quite a lot more than I’d known in February. Having a formal diagnosis finally gave me the confidence I needed to start interacting with other autistic people, and I was starting to discover that some of these people were more like me and some less like me. I slowly started to try to work out where I fitted into the autistic community and what role, if any, I might play in it in the future.

There were things that were obvious from the off. I’m not a computers sort of autistic, nor a gamer, nor do I seek particular solace in nature. Neither am I a hyperempath, nor particularly introverted, nor what most people would regard as shy! I can sometimes be quite extroverted, I have to work hard to try to interpret the feelings of others so as to try not to cause offence, I like engines and machines and cars and trucks and planes (and yes, trains too), but even syncing my phone to the computer or trying to do anything new with this blog can reduce me to tears.

But there were other things too. And, as we started to unpick all the features of me that were clearly related to me being autistic, we started to notice that there were quite a few things that weren’t explained by autism. And as I read more about neurodiversity in general and started to interact with people who were neurodivergent in many different ways and not necessarily autistic, something else started to emerge as a possible contender for consideration.

It was as though somebody had laid a whole load of objects on a table, each object representing a trait (this trait might be a “skill” or it might be a “difficulty”). As I’ve steadily been diagnosed with different conditions over the decades, these objects have been removed from the table and put into a bag labelled with the name of that diagnosis. When I was diagnosed with anxiety and depression a couple of decades back a few objects were removed from the table, put into a bag, and taken off to be given an antidepressant pill and some CBT. But there were still rather a lot of things there. The bipolar disorder diagnosis nearly a decade ago removed quite a lot more objects from the table and quite a lot more of my life was explained, but again there were still an awful lot of my “eccentric” traits left behind.

Then autism arrived. And a HUGE number of objects were put into a brand new bag with “autism” written on it. I took the bag and started to work through the contents and to try to deal with them as appropriate (e.g. there was an object that told me fluorescent lights made me ill, so I wore sunglasses and I now ask people to turn off lights when I can). Learning to understand all these traits, sticking them all together in the “autism bag” was revelatory and changed my life massively.

However, there were still things on the table. And once the autism traits had all been removed, it was clear that there was another outstanding diagnosis that would explain quite a lot more of my behaviour as both a child and during adulthood. It seemed unlikely that I really was a highly spontaneous autistic who just randomly did things out of routine sometimes or that the times when I missed details and struggled with mundane repetitive tasks were down to autism – and these traits were having a significant and often detrimental effect on my life. Chatting to other autistics online it became obvious that the mixture of traits I had were the same as those who were identified or diagnosed as being autistic but ALSO having ADHD.

I mentioned this to the autism assessor at my first follow up in April. She said that she was unable to diagnose ADHD because it fell outside her remit. She was absolutely totally certain that ADHD was not an alternative to the autism diagnosis because she was so totally certain that I was autistic, but she didn’t rule out ADHD as an additional condition that would be worth exploring elsewhere.

So we made an appointment with my GP, which, owing to terribly long waiting lists and difficulty booking appointments, entailed a 6-week wait. We used the precious GP appointment to briefly outline the results of the autism assessment and to broach the idea of ADHD. My GP referred us back to the mental health services, who were the people who were the ones to do ADHD assessments. And we settled down to wait, again.

Forms arrived a month or so later. I was away at the time so we didn’t manage to complete them straight away, however, eventually, in September, we completed Formageddon Round 3 – another set of questionnaires for me, a set for my spouse, and a set for my mother. I might write the process up in more detail at some point, but not today.

And so, at the start of October, I was given an appointment at the mental health services for what we believed would be a relatively straightforward ADHD assessment.

It turned out a bit differently from what we expected. I’m not going to go into details right now, because my head is still doing a lot of processing, but suffice to say, things changed from what we were expecting (the time and personnel of the appointment were both changed just beforehand). It turned out that I was seeing my old psychiatrist from many years back, and, of course (though I already knew this) it was in the mental health centre I’d left many years ago and had been to rather a lot at a not very happy time of my life.

The triggering effect of being back in the place, with the person, coupled with the fact that I was, on this occasion, again deemed “too complicated” (warning for picture of self-injury if you click the link), was nearly disastrous. This time, however, unlike the occasion in November 2016, my spouse spotted the signs and suggested I take a break. I spent most of the appointment outside, rocking on the pavement and communing with a pot plant with a small white flower.

When I went back in for the last few minutes of the appointment my spouse had clearly explained a lot, and my autism report, which my GP had sent with the referral, had finally been read. It had also become obvious that there was something of a vacuum as far as finding anybody who understood both neurodiversity and mental health issues, and the ways in which they interacted, well enough to give me (an autistic person with bipolar disorder) an ADHD assessment. My psychiatrist, however, did think that there was someone who could be asked to help and that it was worth a try.

I’m not sure I was wildly optimistic at this stage. It seemed like the process of finding people who could actually work out what was going on in my head and help me put the objects from the table into bags and then deal with the contents of those bags, was just an uphill struggle. I pondered whether to just give up and go home and drink stronger drink, but in the end I was curious enough to wait to see what happened next.

Flippant Suggestion

Very early on in the process of discovering I was autistic, sometime in the autumn of 2016, my husband and I had a brief and frivolous discussion. We spent a short while pondering what explanations would have been proposed for my behaviour as a child if I’d grown up in a different decade?

My behaviour at primary school was clearly somewhat different from that of most kids. I spent a lot of time on report, I got into trouble a lot, and I found most of the experience of going to school as a young child incredibly difficult. I evidently had some academic ability and I was a prolific reader, and I sang and played recorders and clarinet in school concerts, but I fell a long way short when it came to actually completing written work, even maths, which I struggled at until my mid-teens (this will surprise people who know me today), and my behaviour was way off what was expected.

At the time, the school did what they could, as I described in Head’s Office, and tried to find out why I wasn’t behaving “correctly” or achieving what I should have been in my written work. However, because it was the 1970s and they were primary school teachers in an ordinary primary school, no conclusion was ever reached, and I just eventually muddled through somehow, using my learning ability to adapt as best I could and to try to work out what I should actually do.

So, we knew what had happened in my real life, in the life where I was a primary school student in the 1970s. And, as it became obvious that I was autistic and that I had shown a large number of autistic traits right from being a baby, and as we discovered that my nursery teacher had remarked on my behaviour when I was 3, and my primary teacher had done likewise when I was 4, we concluded that it was likely I would have been given an autism diagnosis as a young child had I been 40 years younger. This was eventually confirmed by the person who did my autism assessment – she was clear that there was enough information about the early part of my life that I would, in the present day, have been diagnosed at around 4 years old, as I described in Circles.

However, that left quite a large gap. 40 years is a long time. Was there any sort of intermediate stage? What would have been the analysis of my school behaviour if I’d been, say 20 years younger? A halfway point between the 1970s and the 2010s? What would have happened to me if I’d been a child in the 1990s? Obviously, things would have moved on somewhat from the 1970s. I would still have been very unlikely to be identified as autistic, but we speculated, very briefly and slightly flippantly, what MIGHT have happened if I’d shown the same behavioural traits that I did in the 1970s but viewed through the eyes of 1990s adults.

We were, of course, adults ourselves in the 1990s, though mainly students and with no dealings with small children of any description. I eventually became a schoolteacher, but that was towards the end of the decade and I was a secondary teacher – I only gained limited experience (from occasional supply work) of primary age children and how people reacted to them in the early 2000s. But we did watch the news. We did follow current affairs. And, having the sort of memory that we both have, we both clearly remember stories about the behaviour of small children and the rise of a particular diagnosis during the 1990s.

“I might have ended up as one of those ‘Ritalin kids,’” I quipped to my husband! We both laughed! “Yes, me too!” he responded. We laughed again. The throwaway remark didn’t spark any further discussion. We were only bantering, wondering, throwing ideas around, and eventually we carried on with the serious business of gathering information for an autism assessment.

I didn’t think about that conversation again for a long time. The question of what would have happened to me as a child in the 1990s was just a little game of “What If?” and since we knew what HAD happened in the 1970s and we were now certain that we had found that my being autistic was the reason for my behaviour as a child, we had no reason to pursue anything else further. We had the answer – I was autistic and we were absolutely focused on getting me the formal autism diagnosis that I so much needed, and, at the time I spent most of my life buried in autism books and blogs – like a true autistic with a new shiny interest I really didn’t care much to think about anything else in life except autism!

I was also going through that really “heady” early phase of discovery, where, after decades, I was suddenly discovering so many reasons for so many things that had always been part of my life. I was reading whole books in one sitting, taking in vast amounts of information, and learning as much as I could about autism and being autistic and the ways in which being autistic influenced my life. I was still in that initial state of shock, excitement, relief, and so on and my mind was going at a million miles an hour.

It wasn’t until I finally received my autism diagnosis at the end of February 2017 that we finally stopped gathering information about my autistic traits and I started to relax a bit and gained the confidence to engage properly with the online autistic community and to start to learn about the whole area of neurodiversity and how it impacted on my life. Getting my diagnosis freed me to start looking outwards, and forwards, rather than backwards and inwards. I also started trying to rebuild my life and to try to find solutions for some of the difficulties that I was still experiencing.

And, in the usual way, I did so by research and by reading and by learning.

There was still a lot to learn!

October

October has been a tricky month. My blogging abilities finally ran out. My spoon rations finally fell below the numbers required to maintain this blog. I was forced to take a break and to deal with life and there was no energy left for blogging.

I am still recovering from what has been a tough few months. My head is still only sporadically clear enough to achieve very much of anything. Depression is threatening. I am trying to seek help, which is proving exhausting, triggering, and difficult. I have finally reached the point where my head needs a pause to assimilate all that I have learnt about autism in the last year and a bit. Processing time. A reboot.

I feel I’m failing here and should be able to hold it together better – this is probably a hang up from decades of being told I can do anything and I’m strong and capable. The truth is that I am not, and I currently don’t have the energy to do more than crawl out of bed some days. I look at the blank days on the blog calendar but I am mostly powerless to fill them, or even to advertise old posts. It feels like negative achievement, like going backwards. My energy levels are very variable though. I need to focus on self care and getting through the days.

There is a great chaos in my mind of things that I want to discuss, things that I want to blog about, but I currently can’t. There have been successes (playing music and returning to running half marathon distance (slowly)), but these things use vast amounts of energy for me and I have not had adequate recovery time. I’ve also been in touch with family members, seen my mother, communicated with my father who is in the midst of chemotherapy, been out and about for coffee and shopping a bit more, and been trying sometimes to take pressure off my husband who is still working seven days a week. This all takes energy.

Going back to the mental health services to ask for help has proved triggering and difficult and I still don’t know where it will lead. I’m certain that in addition to being autistic I also have ADHD, but the process of obtaining a diagnosis is not going smoothly thus far. I still have no access to appropriate counselling or medication – the process of trying to get either is draining in itself.

Social media has not felt as safe and supportive as it sometimes does – I sent out a call for help on facebook and received some hurtful and gaslighting comments from people I counted as friends. One is now blocked, several I have filtered, some might remain so, some will not but will need explanation I’m not currently able to give. Over two weeks after a huge meltdown I am only just returning gently. The bruises I inflicted on myself that night are almost healed. I will sort things when I have the energy, but that is not now. I’m finding twitter almost impossible, the back and forth nature of it too much like “conversation”, which I find much harder than simply typing a paragraph. The short nature of tweets breaks up my thoughts and I can’t focus on threads and so on. I have, however, taken to Instagram – the visual nature of photographs is working better for me at the moment.

I am conscious that I still need to respond to comments here, some of them wonderful, thank you. There are many things to which I want to respond, but simply can’t yet. I will as soon as I’m able, I promise. I’m missing discussion on Chris Packham’s TV programme on autism because my brain won’t process what I want to say. I have so many thoughts, but I can’t currently form them into anything I can publish. I also had many and various thoughts about the “me too” hashtag on social media, thoughts and feelings that kept me from participating in the whole thing. And I’ve had times of serious gender dysphoria in the last couple of months that I’ve had to find ways of dealing with. There are so many complex issues swirling around in my head and I’m trying to sort them out as best I can.

I feel like I am missing the Zeitgeist somewhat. There are lots of posts going round about autistic hyperempaths, to which I can’t relate because empathy doesn’t come naturally to me and I spend a lot of my life working really hard to try to understand feelings (both my own and other people’s). I want to explore the ways in which I fit autistic stereotypes and the ways in which I don’t. But my brain won’t currently cooperate. There are so many things to write about, so many. So much to explain that I want to explain as fully as I can. And so much of it is triggering and difficult, and I fear conflict, which makes it even harder.

I need time. I need space. I need to organise my thoughts. I also need to organise my life – I have now landed us with a summons for non-payment of council tax, not even because I didn’t have the money to pay the month’s instalment, but because my executive functioning was so poor that I couldn’t make my head work to do the job. My spouse has also had to type e-mail responses for me to copy and paste and has had to complete student loan deferrals and so on because I have simply been mentally paralysed by such tasks.

There is much still to discuss. There are many things I want to blog about. I’m trying to make notes when I can. I’m trying to think of ways of explaining things to people. I’m trying to work out where things go from here.

But I’m also trying to hold some semblance of life together. Things are difficult right now and I don’t know when this difficulty will ease.

I will return when I can.

Sheet Problems

Many of our sheets are
Still missing after the move
Many are old
And wearing out…

So I bought a new one.

I washed it
As I do with all new things
Because new things
Never feel right
Or smell right
Unless they have been
Washed in the usual stuff

(My mother once washed
My bedding
In a different sort
Of powder
When I was a child
And I couldn’t sleep
Because it smelled
So wrong).

I put the new sheet
Onto our bed
Yesterday.
I knew it was wrong
The instant I got into bed…

Scratch scratch scratch.

Scratch scratch scratch.

Scratch scratch scratch.

I feel now
As though I have spent the night
Sleeping on sandpaper.
I feel as though my skin
Must be red raw
From the experience.

I know it isn’t,
Logically.
And, as always,
Any outside observer
Would simply tell me
They couldn’t see anything
And not understand
The problem.

(My spouse has had
Years of me complaining
About wrinkles
In the sheets
And things not feeling
“Right”
While he is unable
To feel what is wrong).

So I am about to get up
Much earlier than usual
Because I cannot lie
On this sandpaper bed
Any longer.

And I will be changing the sheet
Again.
More energy used.
More washing.
Another failed thing
To add to the detritus
In our flat
Another waste of money
I don’t have.
Something else
I will struggle to throw away
Because I will feel sorry for it
And guilty that I didn’t love it.

Maybe the animals will enjoy it as bedding?

But, as my spouse said to me
At least we now know
There’s a reason that I
Complain about the sheets.

So that’s something.

But I still need a new sheet.

Which means shopping
In shops
Which is hard.
And the sheets are all in packets
So I can’t feel them first.

Or buying online
Where I also have to guess
Whether the sheet
Will be a good one.

(And, of course,
The good ones are more likely
To be the expensive ones
Which I can’t afford).

You’d think
That buying a new sheet
Would be something
Quite simple to do.

Not in my world it isn’t!

Also Being Autistic

Bizarrely, the point made in the last post, that I find it hard to imagine how life could be good again when it’s bad and hard to imagine how it could be bad again when it’s good, was proven when I finally clicked publish on that post and immediately felt a weird sense of dishonesty.

I wrote the post a few nights ago, in one of the good phases, put it onto the blog site in draft, and numbered it to be posted next. But by the time publishing time came, I was struggling again, and it felt a little weird to post something so unrepresentative of my current state.

I also suddenly worried that I’d equated lack of social imagination with lack of empathy. If I did, then I didn’t mean to – I’m still trying to figure all this out and this blog is a learning and analysing experience for me as well as something for others to read if they wish to. I still need to find proper words to describe all these things better. I still need to organise and structure my thoughts better, and I’d like very much to be able to explain all these terms properly.

This constant back and forth, constant switching between feeling wonderfully neurodivergent and fabulous and relieved to have discovered who I really am, and feeling frustrated at how limited my life is and how difficult I find things, is still characterising my life quite strongly at the moment. I described some of the effects this has on me in Oscillating, and it continues to be true. I suspect it might continue to be true for some time to come.

The warm fuzzy feelings in Being Autistic are real. I AM happy to have discovered my neurology and to have solved so many mysteries from my life. I have no issues with people thinking I’m strange, or with stimming in public, or with stigma from anyone immediately around me (I realise this makes me massively privileged – when my friends see me flapping my hands or rocking back and forth they don’t tell me to stop, they just check with me that it isn’t an indication that I’m in any sort of distress). In many ways it’s all good. Lovely stuff – stick on the dark glasses and ear defenders, take my phone everywhere in case my speech fails, carry on with life. Proud autistic stuff, rainbow infinity symbols, stim toys, clothes without labels, and not a worry about what society thinks. Even before I was a nonbinary autistic I was an AFAB who hadn’t worn make-up or a bra for over 20 years and was happy existing in socks and sandals without caring what others thought. I’ve been miles away from many societal “norms” for decades, and I have enough confidence not to worry about that most of the time. If people like me and want to be friends with me on my terms, great, if they don’t, then no big deal. Now I have a reason to explain just why I fail to comprehend society’s codes I feel even more justified in being myself and not worrying about it. I am fully “out” as autistic to anyone who cares to know (and probably people who don’t too) and absolutely happy with that (to be honest, anyone who knows anything about autism can figure it out in about a minute anyway if they meet me – I do present as stereotypically autistic in many ways and even if I try really hard to mask, at the moment I’ll last only about an hour before I start to collapse or get sick). Additionally, I can take the pressure off myself to be “strong” so in many ways it’s even better than before – I can ditch the self-blame, I can relax, I can just enjoy being me.

However, there is a flip side. I am still coming to terms with the fact that I am not the Strong Woman of my mask. My day to day existence is, for the most part, relatively low quality. Most days I spend between 14 and 24 hours on my own in a grubby, overcrowded, dark flat, trying to recover from the days and times when I CAN get out and do things. I look at my former colleagues from college days, many of whom have houses, children, and jobs, and I have none of those things. Certainly my inability to sustain employment is down to me being autistic (and, maybe even more so to remaining undiagnosed for 45 years – I never asked for adaptions at work because I didn’t know I needed them and I lost every career and job I ever had), and my consequent large debts and relatively poor living conditions are a result of that. I read memes that tell me if I want something I have to work for it. I have done nothing less than work as hard as I possibly can all my life and the things I wanted didn’t come – those memes sound like cruel lies to me. I spent a pleasant evening socialising and drinking with friends a couple of weeks ago – the resulting overload caused an entire night of meltdowns and panic attacks and suicidal thoughts. Everyone else went to bed and woke up with a slight hangover. Every so often I ask “Why me?” and then I feel guilty because I am betraying the neurodivergence movement and I become frightened of those autistics who tell me that autism is not a disability, just a difference, but I am so very disabled by it so very often – no work, no money, some days I am a 46-year-old who cannot even get myself a hot drink or work out how to get enough food to sustain me or even manage to get dressed properly. And not all of this is “society’s fault”, it is just the way that life is and is often a result of simple practicalities. I am actually surrounded by non-autistic people who are doing their absolute damndest to understand me and to help me and to compensate at every turn for my disabilities – they are brilliant and loving and patient and I am very very lucky with them, but I am still struggling. And at those times I wish I was “normal” (yes, yes, yes, I know the old cliché that there “is no normal” etc etc, which, to be honest, to those of us who are so far up one end of the bell curve that we cannot even see the middle of it, sounds a bit trite), at those times I wish I could go to work for a week (even part-time) and go down the pub for a few hours on Friday night and enjoy a weekend with the family, which I can’t. I wish my gender was one that was recognised and understood by everyone (that is society’s fault), but it isn’t. That is the sort of “normal” I wish for…

I could go on. There is still much to explore. There are two sides to this, the dark side, where I just want all this to go away and to live a regular life (and, yes, I use the word “regular” advisedly, as I do the word “normal”), and the wonderful quirky side where I can finally be me and enjoy it and live a life that is right for me. Practicalities constantly intrude on me “being myself” because I have to eat and drink to stay well, I have to find enough money to survive, and unless I never go anywhere or do anything ever again I have to interact with other human beings in a way that often makes me very uncomfortable. To an extent, there is a part of me that needs some interaction too – less than most people I suspect, but not none at all.

I suspect these thoughts will continue for some time. I am still new to all this, only just over a year since I discovered I was autistic. As far as being knowingly autistic is concerned I’m only just learning to walk, at age 46, after over 4 decades of trying to be something else and failing at it. I’m also still very burnt out and still trying to find help, still waiting for referrals to services, still trying to discover if there is any medication of any description that might help (I can’t take many of the things that might help because of co-occurring conditions). Perhaps things will improve as time goes on – it’s still really really early days for all this stuff.

It’s also a big switch, a total change in life parameters, and I suspect I’m still fucking things up quite a lot. Still not explaining myself right – remember, I’m also very alexithymic, which doesn’t help. I’m still working it all out. It’s all still evolving, much like this entire post evolved out of a simple feeling that I should add a short explanation about the previous blog post.

Strange times.

NOTE: Since I wrote the words above, I feel different again. At the time I intended to post Being Autistic, I was in such poor shape that I couldn’t even turn the computer on to press publish and I had to do it the next day. I’m actually in better shape again now, happier, more relaxed. That’s how quickly things keep shifting, how fast the oscillations sometimes are. But I won’t write yet another post about that at the moment because this cycle could go on for a very long time!

Another Step

Having admitted to myself that I was autistic, and having already approached the doctor to be referred for diagnosis, I knew there was something else important that I had to do. I had to let my family know what I’d discovered, and the obvious place to start with that was to call my mother.

I recorded my feelings about doing this:

Deep deep breaths. That was a biggie. Told my mother.

And then noted some of the things that she had immediately said when I’d told her that I would need information about my early childhood and please could she start thinking whether there were any incidents that occurred in my early life that she could remember, or any ways in which I differed from my brother (who is not autistic) when we were young, and could she possibly just start thinking back to the time of my early childhood and triggering memories because the assessment people would want to know.

And without even a pause for breath, my mother remembered being summoned to my primary school (as I’ve described in Circles) when I was 4 years old. She recalled me learning to read at age 3. She recalled my nursery teacher commenting on my behaviour at nursery. She recalled something about a hearing test at 7 months that went wrong because I didn’t behave like a 7 month old should and the person administering the test telling her off about it. She told me how I didn’t respond to spoken words as a baby, only to singing, and how I hardly slept and constantly fidgeted in my pram.

And all this was instantaneous recall, the moment I asked, with no pause for thought. Memories from over 40 years ago. Little things, none of which seemed significant at the time, and none of which was ever followed up (because it was the 1970s and I seemed healthy as far as anyone could tell and when my mother asked what babies were supposed to do (I was the first child and my parents were young and inexperienced) she was told that all babies develop in their own ways so not to worry about anything), all started to indicate that my development when I was very young was, in fact, rather a long way from what would be considered “normal” by most people.

This first conversation was, it turned out, only the “tip of the iceberg” as far as my childhood was concerned. There were further pieces of information to follow, and I’m still, really, in the process of absorbing them all and trying to go through the questionnaires that we did as part of the assessment process. Maybe I’ll manage to write about it all thoroughly at some point, but that point is not yet.

My instant reaction to these revelations was to make a bunch of hashtags:

#theplotthickens
#wouldseemivebeencausingtroubleforalongtime
#thiswholethingisratherextraordinary
#ialwaysknewiwasabitunusualbutbloominheck

I subsequently went through a phase of finding these discoveries about my early life really rather odd and weird, and in many ways, traumatic. It was strange to think that there were things I’d never have discovered about myself and my early life if I hadn’t been going for an autism diagnosis. My husband and I had started to document my own memories of childhood a couple of weeks earlier, but this phone call to my mother took things to a whole new level, because I started to discover things that weren’t part of my existing life narrative.

Furthermore, since I was never able to have any children, I didn’t know whether the things my mother was telling me about my early life had any resemblance to any sort of “normal” childhood development or not, and I ended up having to do a lot of really triggering research to find out, research that brought back horrible memories of infertility clinics and pain and heartbreak and failure, so it turned out to be a triggering and difficult experience from that point of view too.

And, of course, my own memories of childhood had to be activated. And many of them weren’t that much fun either – I was bullied consistently through school and even when teachers tried to find out why things weren’t as they should have been, they weren’t able to come up with any answers, despite sometimes trying, as I described in Head’s Office.

These things are things I still haven’t yet worked through, things that still upset me, things that I know would have been picked up if I was a child today. I can’t help feeling that had I known that I really was different when I was growing up, not just naughty, that I would have felt less bad, been less self-blaming, and not become the suicidal burnt out adult I now am. I’m still not really in a place where I can consider all the things I want to consider – I have to do it a bit at a time, because it is difficult.

My mother, somewhat comfortingly, said to me a few months after that first conversation, that she wishes she had a time machine. Of course, there are so many factors at play that it’s impossible to say that changing one thing would have produced this result or that result (I KNOW all the stuff about autistic kids being “written off” and told they’d never be able to get anywhere in life – I had exactly the OPPOSITE problem and was consistently told how bright I was and given massive expectations accordingly, expectations that I could never fulfill so I was doomed to failure). However, maybe I’d not have been chastised for meltdowns, not been forced to wear wool polo necks which hurt me and so on, and not have learnt, through my early years, to behave and to internalise everything because I was frightened of the consequences and the punishments.

Furthermore, because I learnt fast and turned out to be academically able, by the time I was at secondary school exam stage nobody worried about me. I was succeeding academically, top grades of my year, therefore I must be happy. What nobody knew is that I hardly bothered revising for my O-levels because I assumed I’d be dead by the time the results came out. I didn’t tell anyone because I’d learnt by then that you just didn’t talk about that sort of thing. You worked hard, you behaved, you churned out the exam results, and everyone was happy. It was all part of the act.

Except that the act had a massive cost for me – the thing that had eventually made me as well-behaved a child as I was able to be, turned me into a mentally ill twentysomething and a burnt out thirtysomething. And nobody really knew why until I was in my mid forties.

Getting an autism diagnosis late in life is a weird thing. It opens all sorts of cans of worms that have been sealed shut for decades. I had long since closed the door on my childhood, and on everything to do with children in general, sealed away in a place in my head marked “Do not open – just move on with life!” but I was forced to reopen the door, to take the cans off the shelves, and to let the worms loose all over the place. It was part of the assessment, and it is part of coming to terms with why my life has turned out as it has. It’s something that needs to be addressed as best I can in order to move on and try to build some sort of future with whatever life I have left. I’m not sure it was something I particularly wanted to be doing at this point in my life – having just moved away from all things child-related after my own failure to have any, the last thing I needed was to go back to my own early life – but it turned out to be necessary, and perhaps going through the painful stuff now means that there will be less of it buried and I’ll eventually be less mentally ill as a result, more at peace with it all, and maybe, possibly, more at peace with my own childlessness and consequent response to children, which is something I still struggle with terribly.

And, as I have read in so many places and am experiencing for myself, getting an autism diagnosis late in life is not only about the future, and learning how to live from now on, but also about reframing past experiences, reviewing all of life that has gone before, looking back at so many times when things have gone wrong, or been inexplicable, and looking at them from an autistic perspective. It’s part of the process of making sense of life, and, of course, the later the diagnosis, the more of life there is to go through.

And in my case, it’s not just me who is reframing past events. Many of my friends have now made sense of experiences they’ve had with me over the years. My husband now understands things that have long been slight oddities in our marriage. And my family are trying to understand the whole thing.

I made the first phone call to my mother a year ago today. It had taken nearly 45 years for her to find out why her non-sleeping fidgety baby had messed up a hearing test at 7 months old. As soon as I asked the right questions and explained what I’d recently discovered, it became obvious.

I didn’t even know I’d had a hearing test at 7 months until I started gathering information for an autism assessment!

Typing The Words

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.

On The Sofa

Legs rocking,
Foot hitting the sofa back
Over and over again.
As usual.

Moving my wine
From hand to hand
So I can flap each hand
Even numbers of times.
Ah. Flapping. Happy.

Flicking my fingers
And waggling them
Fast.
Flick flick flick.

Occasional noises.
Just sounds.
Tonight a
“Nya”
Sound.
For no reason.

Wrinkling my nose
Which is my newest stim
Only a week old.
I don’t know where it came from
But it is.
So I go with it.
Wrinkle. Wrinkle.
Feels good.

Twisting my hair.
Allowed.
Picking my scalp
No no no!
Trying to let it heal enough
To dye my hair.

I rub my face instead.
Distraction.

Rock, hit, flap
Flick, waggle, sound
Wrinkle, twist, rub.

Just a normal evening.

Stimming.