#in a household filled with bipolar disorder and attention disorders and autistic people and depressed bastards . so she Has To Be Normal | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

july-19th-club · 2 years

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the first time my mother and i ever talked about it was after i tried and more or less failed to attend the calling hours for the mother of a school classmate who’d passed away. it was in ninth grade. and we got into the funeral home and i’d been lucky and never really been in one that i could remember anymore so i had no social script and it didn’t occur to me until we’d left but the thing that was fucking me up the most was the idea that i would have to see and interact with someone i saw every day in normal contexts (gym class, CCD, the bus) in a Grief Context and i didnt know how to be normal with him ever again because there were like, no established ground rules for that that i knew of and at this funeral home i just got. SLAMMED with the most massive and impenetrable wave of nonverbal that i’ve still ever experienced in my life, and i’m in there sweating and shaking and incapable of communicating why i’m being weird when it’s not my relative’s funeral and i basically only knew the woman from church. and mom puts our names in the guest book and gets us back out to the car pretty quickly and once i’ve come down a bit from the Edge Of Meltdown she’s like so i’d been meaning to talk to you about this at some point but it seems relevant now i have suspected for many years that you might be autistic. and at the time it was such a relief to have somebody else say it that i was like oh wow thank god i’m not insane for also thinking that. but in retrospect i’ve always been like, fuck, and you just didn’t mention it? nice nice nice that’s cool that hasn’t affected me you’re good you’re good what the fuck

anyway after that we sought out NO psychologists and did NO accommodations and it was only ever talked about between us as A Thing You And I Both Know but it never factored into all the things i still needed and just about every work-around i have is still something i had to develop myself

#in more recent years ive come to also observe that my mother hits many many hallmarks for adhd but she'll never question this herself #because she has a different concept of what that means so she'll never be able to apply such a word to herself without feeling #like real bad about it bro #there's not a neurotypical brain in my whole family which isnt surprising looking at our genetic history but she's not allowed to see it #because she's always been The Normal One #in a household filled with bipolar disorder and attention disorders and autistic people and depressed bastards . so she Has To Be Normal #i have no idea what i would be like if i hadnt spent my entire life just instinctively trying to be more Visibly Like Everyone Else #like i dont even think of it as masking it's just what was the obvious thing to do. you cant be visibly weird so you have to work at this #but also i am ABLE to do that. so i feel like i shouldnt bitch about how hard it was like what if i had never even been able to mask #wouldve been harder. no?#idk even to this day im like but my experience is not as difficult as some people's and i dont have a real diagnosis #so i shouldnt feel i can speak to these things #idk

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