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5827a807 | 1 years ago (raw) | root | parent | reply | flag 
 @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.
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2c2c50ce | 1 years ago (raw) | root | parent | reply | flag 
 @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.
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53baa2d4 | 1 years ago (raw) | root | parent | reply | flag 
 @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...?