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!
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.
Finally Knowing Me: An Autistic Life 