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!

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!