Oddbean

Part 2: This is my childhood as an undiagnosed autistic: I wouldn't let my mother touch me, I'd scream as an infant when she came near me, I'd have meltdowns (I remember being on the floor having these spasms and fits) when, for example, my father asked me to clean up when I was very small child. My mom became estranged from me. I was literally told she didn't favor me when I was four. I would not interact AT ALL with other children in kindergarden, to the point my mother was told by the teacher that she (the teacher) had failed. She also said she completely failed to get me to interact at all with her, the teacher. EDIT: Because of this estrangement from my mother, and my brother, she wanted to leave me behind in a boarding school for children when I was 9 years old, when we lived outside the US, and my family was preparing to go back to the states. I cried... and she looked at me and said: "I thought you wanted to stay here". As if she actually thought I was so strange and unresponsive that I didn't want to be with my family! During all this time my older brother was terrorizing me on a nearly daily basis. He'd come at me, get me down on the floor, pound his fists with all his strength into my head, making me wonder why my brains didn't spill out. He was as if deranged with older sibling rage toward me. I clearly have PTSD from this, and C-PTSD, low self-esteem, I react to aggression (such as aggressive, judgemental, invalidating treatment online). My entire life was derailed from all that happened. When I was in my teens I was placed in a psychiatric facility for three weeks for "evaluation" and declared to have schizophrenic affective disorder, until a year or so later another elderly doctor of psychology said that was an error and not true, and withdrew that diagnosis. This came after my father told everyone in my world (childhood kids, teachers, my yoga teacher as a teen, everyone I knew) that I was schizophrenic and to "not give me drugs" (I'd been taking LSD in large doses in my early teens). I was stigmatized, given anti-psychotic drugs, all for an incorrect diagnosis. I was taken out of school for no reason and placed in an all-purpose "alternative" school. Now, did my father go around to all the people he told, retracting that diagnosis? Of course not. It ruined my teen years, to the point I wanted to escape into a yogic cult to get away from my family. Yeah, that happened. I did that. This story goes on and on.

Part 3: Now tell me how different my life was from those who were "early diagnosed". And how "superior" am I acting? I want to know, because I feel so beaten by the world I can't even fucking work right now. It's autistic burnout according to some. For me it's just autism... because that world out there? It's too intense for me. Just generally too much to deal with.

@94a46b7d thank you for this. Raises hand about the similar treatment and abuse and just completely unreality of the undiagnosed in the 1960s, but the ADHD was easy. Eye contact and tippy toe walking were medicalized or beat out of me. It's a complicated story. I feel this entire post. Internet hug if you want. Be kind to yourself cuz you deserve that 😎👍

@37c798f6 It's so easy to just derealize or depersonalize or dissociate from all that happened to me in the past. I really don't exactly "get" it sometimes, that all of this actually happened to me. I think we're taught by the need for sheer survival to look forward, forget the past, but there is no real forgetting the past. The autistic hyperfunctioning amygdala doesn't forget, as much as we may think we do. It's there. I get triggered (yes, yes, an overused word but it really is being triggered) by these discussions sometimes. I should know better by now. But its all surfacing these days.

@94a46b7d I just re read this and realized that you said the magic words about it is surfacing now. I saw that documentary about Nan Goldin on HBO MAX, she said something very similar and I was talking with someone else about it and I said I think being disabled has made me more human being than human DOING and I feel like my brain is just pouring it out sometimes. The documentary is called uhm "All the Beauty and the Bloodshed" it really hit me but I loved it.

@94a46b7d there's always something good coming from you telling your own story. There's always a positive discussion, someone recognizing themselves in it and thus feeling less alone. People having their own process, alongside you. It's so common( and useless) to feel bad about ones drama and pain. While opening up about it is mostly just helpful vor everyone. It makes everyone more free to reveal themselves I think.

@94a46b7d I haven't seen such comments (yet), and I'm really sorrry you ran into them. You raise such very valid points. The historical baggage around the whole concept of autism as a deficit to be "diagnosed" is real. All of us, diagnosed early or not, back in the 60s/70s had to find our way, single handedly mostly, through a rather hostile environment. Painful. Damaging. Thank you for pointing this out so clearly. I'm glad I saw your thread. Thank you for being here. Take care 💛

@94a46b7d I appreciate you not deleting. That's a heck of a lot you've had to deal with! I'm not surprised so many people saw echoes of their own experiences, though I wish I was. It's truly maddening when people assume late diagnosis implies an easy life.

@94a46b7d Know that what I am saying here comes from the heart and is sincere, even if it might be clumsy: You have my sympathy for how hard life for you were, and while you and I don't exactly interact much, I still value your input (even when you're not metaphorically bleeding all over the keyboard as in this case). I was late diagnosed but I've always known I was different--expressing thoughts such as "I don't really think I'm an alien, but it would make sense". I suspect I'm the kind of person that "can't have been that autistic" (though I hope no one's ever thought I acted superior over it), because what I lacked in other skills I made up for in willingness to ignore my own boundaries and needs, and thinking my way around problems. I was "pushing through" towards an early grave, I've come to realise.

@0464b341 Thank you, I appreciate that. I think the way autism manifests is very different for each of us, even depending on the phase of the human life cycle. In some it can seem invisible in one stage of life, but very different in another stage of life. I'm sure that in some stages of my life (in my 30s?) only a person well versed in autistic traits would have seen it in me. In my early childhood it was quite evident, and if I were a child today I'd without doubt be screened as autistic by schools. In my teens, I would have as well, I think. Now I'm older and it seems it's intensifying. This is what requires so much expertise in the psychology professions... all the different ways it can present in different stages of life, and in different people.

@94a46b7d That was one of the big take-aways of my evaluation: due to my ambitions and drive I would push myself to do things, and I had the wits and knowledge to do it ... so it wasn't until someone who had worked with autistic people for many years (both the "low hanging fruit" and more complicated so-called "female autism"--I think we both know that it's not "female"--and others) was *actively looking* for neurodivergent traits and was willing to listen to my lived experiences it was as ... obvious as I might feel it is now (my spouse is autistic, in a lot more of the "typical" ways, so while I 100% for sure knew that other people could be autistic while not being like him, somehow it was impossible that *I could be autistic, since I wasn't like him. Brains, y'know?) i think the wording that was most ... chilling to me was when he described the result of one particular test (something about remembering complicated geometrical figures and recreating them one paper). I had a lot of difficulties with it, because I was remembering it as "rectangle there, connecting with a triangle here, and a square with a circle here", etc, rather than as the whole thing (which apparently allistic people generally does?). I got an "average" result because I compensated for it with my mental capacities, which is pretty much how my entire life has gone. Just that now (I'm in my early 40s) I live with chronic pain so it takes a lot more out of me to do that, and thus ... I can't anymore.

@94a46b7d @0464b341 I was diagnosed aged 63. As I passed my mid-50s, my #autistic and #ADHD 'features' became a lot more obvious, to me, and to those who know me. I wonder why they emerged so suddenly and so obviously, when they had been much less apparent in my younger years...?