On the first day of “autism acceptance/awareness” month, I got a preliminary diagnosis for autism. When I described how it felt for me to do certain things, like go to the grocery store, my therapist perked up and started asking questions that perfectly described some of my daily routines. Then I took the RAADS-R test and scored 125 the first time, thought a bit more about what some of the confusing questions meant and scored 176 later, and 144 on the CAT-Q (which is real high). About a month and a half later, another therapist in the Kaiser Permanente system confirmed the diagnosis and autism went on my medical chart, where it will live forever.
It’s kind of a relief. Anyone who knows me well knows I had a really shitty childhood. It was getting exhausting trying to extract which moment(s) I needed to heal so that I could stop being so…out of sync. The torture of Sisyphus springs to mind.
What’s funny is that I’ve brought up the autism possibility a number of times over the years, but was told that I understand figurative language too well (which ignores that I have a graduate degree in understanding figurative language) and can “read” people. One, more problematic assessment, is that I have too much empathy for autism, which doesn’t line up with my experience of other people on the spectrum. Anecdotal, sure, but remarkably consistent at this point—at least enough to warrant inductive conclusions anyway.
Talking with the new therapist about the fact that I read danger or violence-escalating behaviors easily, we reached the conclusion that these are masks I’ve learned to wear in order to survive the hostile environment in which I was raised. As a weak, helpless child, you kind of need to know when the adults will beat you for whatever it is they hate about you when that’s the world in which you live. And, while I can read a poem and grasp its metaphors, I’m often surprised when people seem to “get” a half-formed thought with no clear context. Or the context and language doesn’t clearly support how the language is interpreted (or meant). Just yesterday, I got irritated with someone who apparently meant something quite different from what the language and context would imply. I was apparently expected to make the correct inference and now feel like I should probably apologize. It also drives me nuts when people say things that aren’t verifiably true, which is why I have so little patience for conspiracy theorists or antivaxxers and the like. Which is weird, because I’m cool with fiction or the “myth-making” language of poems—but god help you if you make a claim the data doesn’t support.
In any case, the diagnosis and everything I’ve learned about autism casts a very different light on pretty much everything. I can suddenly look back through my own history and see all the signs for this diagnosis were there. I read somewhere that getting this diagnosis often feels like rewatching a movie that has a surprise twist, only the second time you can see the foreshadowing. Nothing could be more accurate.