#(also i hate the terms 'high functioning' and 'more autistic' which is why they're in quotations

[emiliosandozsequence]

being just Slightly 'more' autistic than the average tumblr user is fucking hard actually

[wyn-n-tonic]

Hello.

I hope this isn’t to personal. You can ignore it if it is, but I read your post about your diagnoses and…it…just really spoke to me. For a few years now I have suspected that am on the spectrum and the more I read about experiences like yours I get more and more convinced. I just….how did you go about bringing it up to your doctors? Did you have to go for testing to get the diagnosis? I’m really nervous to bring it up to my doctors. I am worried that they are gonna look at me like I am looking for attention or something. I am in my mid 30s and I’m afraid that they are going to question why I am bringing it up now. How can it be possible that I have lived 35 years and am just now bringing it up? The sad thing is that it’s affecting how I live my life and, if I am being honest, has affected my entire life. I feel isolated and alone. I want to grow these friendships that I am keeping at arms length.

hi, babes! this isn't something that i feel is too personal. i like to consider myself an open book for two reasons: 1) these things are just facts of my life, they happened or are happening and just speaking on them has no positive or negative connotations, they're just true. 2) if there's any small possibility that something i went through and my willingness to talk about it can help somebody else then i'm okay with living with pain or reliving it because it means others don't have to feel so alone.

this is a very long post so i am going to cut it.

so... bringing it up in your thirties is super not weird. especially if you are a woman (or AFAB). so much of our understanding of autism is still developing, it's still being researched, it's still being understood. and, like ADHD, it presents differently in girls than it does in boys and, well... healthcare is sexist. there's also still a lot of really fucked up biases that people have where they think of those with autism as being high support needs (otherwise known as low functionality but i fucking hate that term) because, again, they do not understand that it is on a spectrum.

and first of all, i want to say that self diagnosis is super valid and accepted within the autistic community. even if i said in that post that i don't feel like i am enough of anything to belong anywhere, i know that that statement is still true. i think that i'm closer to the end of the spectrum than either of my sisters but i'm still there and, really, how much is that just because i've learned to mask and tamp down who i am my whole life that now i don't really know how to get out of that? it's like when you pull funny faces as a kid and your mom tells you that your face will get stuck like that, you know? my mask feels pretty stuck.

ALL OF THAT BEING SAID. bringing it up now is so important and not at all attention seeking. you're looking for answers and you deserve to have them no matter how old you are. it's your body, it's your health and it's your brain. you deserve to know the things about it. then you can consider support needs and apply that to your life. of course, you can just apply support needs to your personal life and home as it is but sometimes asking for reasonable accommodation at work requires the official diagnosis.

for me, i do not have an official diagnosis yet of autism. i got my diagnosis of ADHD (which i was diagnosed with as a kid but since i don't have access to those records, i had to redo it). it was three hours the first session, three hours the second and then one and a half hours the third and it cost me a lot of money because my insurance did not pay for as much as they said they would. please don't let that deter you, though, because my version of a lot of money in this instance came at a very financially hard point for me. my doctor was like, 'look, let's get your stable on the ADHD meds and then we can start discussing the possibility of autism and sending you for testing.' this man looked at me two months later at a check in appointment and was like, 'yeah, i don't even need to send you for testing right now, i am very comfortable with just telling you that you are autistic.' i have worked with multiple psychiatrists and mental health professionals, as well, who have randomly mentioned it to me in conversation before this which is what really got me interested in figuring this shit out. like on psychiatrist just looked at me while we were at lunch and went, 'you know you're autistic, right?' and then i've had another conversation where i was talking about how i interpret some thing in a social aspect and this therapist was like, 'oh, because of the autism right?'

i will, at some point, start picking apart the healthcare system so that i can be officially tested and have that official diagnosis. because, at the end of the day, having that official diagnosis is having protection for yourself. especially in the work place. i just don't have the money for it right now and have a surgery i need to be focusing on alongside paying down debt.

i started with a psychiatrist because i work in mental health and can kind of navigate my way around in my state regarding rules and where to go and it's still SO FUCKING HARD to understand. i'm unsure what state you're in (or if you're even in the US, i'm so sorry, i shouldn't assume) so it would be my advice to bring it up with your doctor first and foremost because they likely will have resources and referrals that they can make. in some states, it actually has to be your doctor who diagnoses you (never mind that psychiatrists legitimately went to medical school too or whatever, we have established that the government doesn't know shit about medicine). hopefully they will have those referrals and can be a better guide for you. if they don't, however, i would say make an appointment with a psychiatrist and let them know that you just want to look into all the possibilities to help you feel and be the best version of yourself that you can feel and be. and that's not always medicine (there is no medicine for autism), sometimes it's just having the fucking knowledge.

because my psychiatrist, when he started the evaluation, we were talking and i had to take all these questionnaires for all the different mental illnesses and he was shocked. he was like, 'you are lighting up all of these questionnaires. you are leaning positive for bipolar and for borderline, your anxiety is one of the worst scores i have ever seen and your depression is.... have you ever been hospitalized?' like... sir, do not even suggest a grippy sock vacation, i cannot afford it. and i told him that i don't mean to sound like a drug seeker, i'm just very self aware and i work in this industry and i've done a lot of thinking about this. but i've been in therapy for years now and it is very helpful but it isn't enough and i've been treating my depression for years as well and i'm on one of the highest dosages of my anti depressant and it barely scratches the surface of my suicidal ideation because, underneath everything, i still feel different and unwanted and like i'm not getting it. i can be smart all day, i know i'm not stupid, but i really don't know how to navigate a lot of life and it goes so far beyond social anxiety. which only told me that my anxiety and my depression were not my illnesses, they were my symptoms and treating just the symptoms does nothing to treat the root cause of it all. And for the first time in my life, a professional agreed with me not to get me to shut up and get out of his office but because he believed me.

he said, 'that makes sense to me. because i'm talking to you now and i don't think you truly have manic episodes that would suggest bipolar disorder. i think that you've been depressed for so long that nobody knows who the real O is, not even you. so when you feel good and 'manic' the way you're describing... that's actually how you're supposed to feel all the time.' he started me on Adderall and we actually increased my dosage at my last check in but i'm going to request going back down. because that first month on the adderall was perfect. my brain was quiet, there were no intrusive thoughts, i wasn't fidgeting to get through the day, i understood and listened to my hunger cues, i was losing weight healthily (for a girl who's had an eating disorder since she was five, that is a huge deal for me), i didn't bite my nails, i wrote 50k words in the month of August. and then we started discussing the autism. and the more we talked and the more reading he had me do and the more reading i did for myself not to mention the personal interactions i have with those on the spectrum that tells me so much about myself like.... it all just made sense of everything for me. like it hurts! it's wild how much it does hurt. i feel like nobody talks about the grief of later diagnosis as much. and grief is weird and you're allowed to cry and crying is okay. because this isn't a bad thing, it just sucks that you had to learn so late in life that you feel as though it's too late for you. i promise it's not because i have to have that hope for myself. it's just gonna take a bit but it's actually really freeing.

i hope any of that made sense or was helpful, friend. i will try to answer questions or if you wanna just talk, we always can. i'm not a licensed professional by any means and these diagnoses look so different for every body but i'm here to commiserate!

[cat-sapphics]

i'm also both autistic and i have adhd and i think the definitive difference ultimately comes down to the amount of time they span over and "how badly" (because everything has to be an unfortunate negative, don't you know) it affects the person's everyday life, but like... that's not strong enough criteria imo to gatekeep as strongly as some terminally-online autistics do.

trust me, i hate allistic ADHDers (as someone who doesn't personally "hate" their oppressors as a whole, but supports others who do) and i used to think i was one, and earlier this year well before i ever even considered the possibility that i could be autistic (i'm diagnosed with both now), i made some mistakes out of entitlement that are still archived on my "problematic" twitter account that i began to deeply regret months before i picked up on neurodivergent research for myself again, such as fighting people with baseless arguments that allistic ADHDers have a right to reclaim the 'r' slur when... how? why? i have some parallels present-day when it comes to my stance on the 'd' slur, except that actually holds tons of weight and i know i won't be sorry in the future because i'm right. as i said, i have learned and grown as a person. allistic ADHDers certainly have it hard, but they do not face oppression (compared to disapproval and stereotypes and professional dismissal in minority groups) the way autistics are abused, mistreated, told they're TW: r*t*rded (ADHDers are in general certainly not targeted), attempted to be "cured", genetically eradicated, etc.

but anyway, i rambled (product of being doubly neurodivergent 🙃), so back to the point. i agree with you on not feeling as strongly about the differences not mattering as much as i am about other discourse and debate topics. however, i see both sides and i think the gatekeeping side of it, while reasonably defensive, fails to take into account the grey areas that we may not be able to divide into one or the other, such as autistic ADHDers who don't know what to call their special interest or hyperfixation? is it both? can it be both? it's all so confusing and i would think other autistics who have been given a hard time over it and found a safe community online would understand that more than anyone else, but i guess maybe not when the pressures of performative activism and woke progressivism get in the way and cloud their judgement.

but again, i understand the intent before it develops into a superiority complex over "lesser" neurodivergencies. there's no denying that allistics of all types - but Especially ADHDers who think our overlaps make them just like us in every way as well as entitled to our terms and spaces - tend to be the worst when it comes to tearing down the walls we were forced to build by neurotypicals originally. i don't know what the solution for that is except to confidently say that it isn't black-and-white, which gets us nowhere - hence the discourse and dissent.

and i sure can't wait until we go from "functioning and divisive labels are bad because we're all equally autistic and valid and deserve access to resources" to "you're high-functioning, so you have privilege over autistics neurotypicals hate so stfu you don't get a say in autistic issues", because i'm calling it right now, twitter and probably tumblr too are absolutely not unlikely to take steps back in the name of activism. that'll be... so fun to deal with. the invalidation. oh boy. :,) /s

just some thoughts and repetitive insight that i wanted to give. hope this was okay to add!!

I'm curious, in what contexts other than autism can special interest be used? I've been thinking about it after seeing your post and came up blank, but maybe I'm going at it from a different definition than you?

The main debate is that ADHDers HAVE to use hyperfixation and Autistic people HAVE to use special interest. I have both autism and ADHD and I'm telling you right now they're exactly the same experience and not only that but if you ask people what the difference in those terms is they'd not be able to tell you one single answer because everyone uses them either interchangeably but ones for autism and the others for ADHD or they all have slightly different definitions for each person.

I use hyperfixation differently than special interest but that's also because there's a huge overlap between how i experience hyperfixations and my OCD so the experience is more unique to me than many ADHDers.

But there are probably other neurodivergencies that could cause someone to fixate on or have an extreme attachment to certain things in the same or a similar way to autistic people and ADHDers.

I get a lot of gatekeeping like this comes from how many allistic people use our vocabulary and terms to make a mockery of us or to describe things that are not neurodivergent at all (like using special interest just to describe liking things regularly and mocking anyone who's "obsessed" over something) but there comes a point where it's used to gatekeep not to protect our community