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!

The Preparation

Right from the start things were very different with the second referral. I think the triage service had given some explanation as to what had happened at the first place and had instructed the second place to see me as soon as possible, and we were also much better prepared and aware of what I might need in order to get through an autism assessment without having a giant meltdown part way through.

There was still, certainly, a lot of tension involved. The second place to which I had been referred was in the midst of a reorganisation period – it had, officially, closed and was being reopened under a different name and we had no real idea of timescale as far as when I’d be seen once the reopening had occurred. We also still had the first referral open, and had they been able to find someone to assess me at the first place there was a chance I’d have to go back there anyway. And, of course, there was the whole build-up to go through again, the nagging doubts that I wouldn’t be diagnosed autistic, that I would come home feeling broken and suicidal once more, and that there still wouldn’t be any formal answers as to why my life had been going so badly wrong for so many years.

I went through Formageddon all over again, once more trying to answer everything as best I could and to explain why I’d answered the more ambiguous questions as I had. We were also sent another (different) list of questions to ask my mother, so there were a couple more sessions of phone interviewing and learning even more things about my early life and how I was when I was very small. Everything was, as before, written down, duly answered, copied, printed, scanned, and so on, and sent to the assessment people.

We started to feel a bit happier when good e-mail contact was established between the assessment people and my husband. They acknowledged receipt of the forms and a few other bits of information we’d sent to them, and the appointment for my assessment was made. The third attempt to get a formal autism diagnosis was, it seemed, going ahead.

My husband then received an absolutely superb e-mail that felt very reassuring. It described the building where the assessment would be held, the lighting, the furnishing, and outlined that once we arrived we could organise the layout of the room to be as comfortable as possible. It was made explicitly clear that I was welcome to take cushions, blankets, fidget toys and so on with me, and that we’d agree on a schedule of breaks throughout the assessment time, which was given as around three and a half hours. An outline of the format of the assessment was also sent, and parking at the venue was also mentioned. It felt very encouraging and we started to believe that these might be people who actually knew how to communicate with us, who understood that we needed clear information and practical help.

They also made it clear that we were welcome to send information in advance and that that would be helpful to them and would also mean that if there were things I was unable to explain in spoken words on the day they would already have the information so that wouldn’t be a problem. We’d sent around 60 pages of notes and information to the first centre although there was very little evidence that they’d really looked at it and I felt a bit jaded about the possibility of sending things that I was working hard to produce that might likely never be looked at. However, we determinedly made ourselves take a “clean slate” approach and I set about providing as much information as I possibly could, including sending the original files of some of the early posts on this blog.

Then came an even more reassuring document – a more detailed outline of what we were going to discuss on the day, along with explicit statement that there were no “right” or “wrong” answers. It was made very clear that the assessment was not going to be about “passing” or “failing” some sort of test and that the criteria on which I would be assessed were not some sort of “cut-off” on a quiz, but on a whole lot of different things regarding the way I communicated, interacted, behaved, and so on. This was not a “box-ticking-getting-a-score” thing, but an exercise in observing me and finding out how I thought and felt and communicated.

I set about going through the outline, answering everything as best I could, and saving it to yet another document in the growing “Autism” folder on my computer – another document full of evidence and thoughts, another 10 pages to add. By the time I arrived at the assessment itself, I had sent over 120 pages of 11-point Calibri for the assessors to read, some of which we’d printed and posted, and some of which we’d sent by e-mail, the last batch just days before the assessment itself. The feedback we’d been receiving by e-mail suggested that the assessor was actually reading it too, and I was absolutely desperate not to miss anything out, to tell the full story, to supply as much information as possible. After all, they’d said on the appointment letter that the more information I could supply, the better, so I took them at their word!

The final bit of pre-arrival preparation was an e-mail to tell me exactly who would be at the assessment (two people, one of whom would be asking the questions while the other mainly observed so I wouldn’t have to cope with talking to two people at once), and to inform us that a parking space had been booked and would be signposted and to give us a mobile phone number to contact if we got into any difficulties on the day.

I think we were about as prepared as it was possible to be!

The Preamble

I have become increasingly conscious over the last few weeks that there is a significant part of my “autistic journey” still absent from this blog. I’m also conscious that I have so far erred on the side of pointing out some of the inadequacies of services available, and that the only account of an autism assessment I have thus far published is a pretty scary and negative one.

It is true that I have encountered some difficult times during the diagnostic process and that there is much that could be improved. I still look back to the end of November 2016 with some horror and still hope to be able to feed back what happened at some point (one reason I try to type things up is so that they don’t vanish from my mind). And I also look back further to other “care” I have received, including the unhelpful GP who, two decades ago, told me to stop crying and sent me away with a packet of citalopram, and the counsellor I saw, a decade ago, who told me that it was my fault I didn’t fit in with the people at the office and I needed to try harder and learn to wear make-up and be able to discuss it and so on. These times were not good.

However, I can also look back into the history of my mental healthcare and pick out some people who were really good and really helpful. The locum GP who first referred me to a psychiatrist, realising how terribly ill I was, my current GP who has been totally supportive throughout, and a team of people who really did help with issues relating to my mental health and bipolar disorder in particular – an excellent CPN (community psychiatric nurse) and several charity workers who were brilliant. And I can look back into more recent history and see that the triage service (the stage between my GP appointment and my autism assessment) were also as helpful as they could be, and that I eventually ended up having a thorough, helpful, and successful autism assessment, carried out by people who really did know their stuff and really did help me to work out what was going on.

The only comparison I’ve thus far made between the two assessments I went through has been that in A Tale of Two Assessments, but now is the time to expand upon that post a little, and to try to write up, as best I can, five months on, what happened at that second assessment (or, indeed, third, if you count the assessment that was cancelled only hours before it was due to happen). Unlike the first assessment, which I didn’t write up for nearly a month because it was so triggering and upsetting, I’ve left the second assessment until now partly because external factors intervened (my father’s cancer diagnosis, various events to which I was committed, the need to sort out admin that had piled up prior to diagnosis, working on the report with my assessor) and partly because I have simply been exhausted and trying to process the whole thing. I knew, from reading what others had said on the topic, that getting a diagnosis would come with a whole load of conflicting emotions, and my assessors had also told me that alongside the relief would come a whole lot of other stuff, so I was prepared to go through another set of ups and downs like those described in Various Feelings.

What I had been less aware of is just how exhausted I would be, not only from relief because the fight to be recognized and validated was over and my life finally made sense and so on, but also from the energy used to gather the information over the preceding months. Looking back now, I can see that my life, from the end of August 2016 onwards, was almost totally taken up with researching autism. I read over 20 books, hundreds of blog posts, and spent hours and hours making lists, going through traits, going through my life, discussing with a few trusted friends, filling in quizzes and forms and questionnaires. The enormity of the discovery sent my mind into overdrive, and throughout September, October, and much of November I hardly slept or ate, was permanently on a sort of hypervigilant alert, and had a really intense time of discovery, of learning about my early childhood, of piecing things together, and of finally learning how to listen to my body and allowing myself to stim intensively, often for hours each day. Four decades of masking suddenly ended, the energy to pretend gone, completely burned out, and autistic me emerged somewhat powerfully.

Then came the first assessment and the crisis that followed it. My burnout finally reached the stage where I spent a lot of the time in shutdown, increasingly nonverbal, and retreating from the world, just trying to survive. However, the job of getting a diagnosis was still not done, so I kept pushing and pushing, started this blog, gathered more evidence, went through more stress, and my husband worked like crazy to get me the second referral to the team who eventually diagnosed me. Having been through the six months prior to February, it’s not really surprising that once the objective was achieved, I was utterly exhausted. And I still have to cope with being autistic, in my mid-40s and in perimenopause, working out where to go from here, and trying to maintain sufficient levels of self-care not to fall apart completely. I’ve also, tentatively, started to sort out the pieces of my life that were abandoned several months ago and have started to get back out into the world a bit more and begun the process of working out where I go from here, as I’m finally beginning to regain a bit of functionality again.

But now I am as ready as I’ll ever be to fill in the gap in the story of my diagnosis, the tale of the time between Weekend Journal and An Announcement, and of the five hours of my life that gave me the validation and permission to be myself and confirmed that what I’d learned over the preceding six months was true, confirmed by somebody who clearly knew what they were talking about and was willing to give me as much time as I needed to explain, to talk, to work things out, and who made the experience as smooth as it possibly could have been. I can’t yet predict how many blog posts telling this story will take, nor how long it will take me to write them all, nor what other posts I might feel moved to write in between times, before I complete the whole “diagnosis” story, but once I’ve documented the whole process I’ll try to find some way of linking everything up so anyone who’s interested can follow everything sequentially. I’m in the process of trying to organize the whole blog a bit better anyway.

It’s strange now to think, just over five months later, about those five hours on that day. It was a day that had been long awaited in several senses – the time after the first assessment had felt like an eternity, the months following the discovery had been intense and focused almost entirely on getting a diagnosis, and the four decades of a life that didn’t quite work had finally got to the stage where all those little things that weren’t quite “right” would be explained and validated by one sentence on one rather surreal day.

It was certainly one of the most significant days of my entire life!

Build-up (Again)

 

As the next assessment looms
I am edgy, tense, anxious.

Yet again, the maelstrom
Swirls in my head.

I am trying to concentrate
On mathematics

But it is very difficult.

(The concentration, not the mathematics)

 

As the next assessment looms
I am trying to prepare

Yet again, my mind
Is full of autism.

I am trying to work out
How to stop it going wrong

Like last time.

(I never want to go through that again)

 

As the next assessment looms
I am filled with doubts.

Yet again, huge worries
Are filling my life.

I am trying not to obsess
And to live normally

Whatever normal even is.

(Old normal gone and new not yet formed)

 

As the next assessment looms
I am hopeful and despairing.

Yet again, the uncertainty
Screwing with my mind.

I am trying to think of this
As just another step in the process

But I really want an ending,

An answer,

A diagnosis.

(Then I can move on with my life)