#should clarify that the neurological testing ikm talking about

[ot3]

Hello, I've notice you mentioning in a couple posts that you are autistic, and I'm wondering how old you where when you found out? I've thought for a while that I may have autism but my age and my unavailability to resources have left me with many doubts, any thoughts?

this is gonna get a little bit long so i'll stick it under the cut.

the answer is i still am not entirely sure but it's really just the only thing that makes any sense. i got a bunch of expensive neurological testing done and the woman testing me came to the conclusion that i was too socially well adjusted to be autistic despite the fact that 1. most of my friends are autistic or otherwise compatibly messy in the brain and 2. my social skills were the result of very very very careful and hard-won work by my parents. she basically asked me 'do you have friends' and i said 'yes' and she said 'can you make eye contact in conversation' and i said 'yes i can if i force myself but i hate it and its exhausting' and apparently that was enough to counteract all of my sensory issues and processing issues as far as she was concerned. which i'm still really bitter about

but the thing about any atypical neurobiology, and especially autism given it's presence as a Media Boogeyman, is that once again they can pretty much only diagnose you based on a failure to adapt to mainstream society, so if you Can force yourself to function in mainstream society, no matter how difficult or harmful it is for you to do this to yourself, you pretty much bar yourself from an official diagnosis and any of the resources that come along with that. it's a pretty horrible catch 22.

but i know myself a lot better than the woman who spent a total of two hours running me through standardized tests and everything about the way i navigate life gained a lot of clarity when i started viewing it through the lens of autism. parts of myself that seemed to be inexplicably fucked up or i thought were genuinely just some psychosomatic oddity that i was inflicting upon myself for No Reason suddenly had a pattern and logic behind them. and the thing about autism is that being able to have that sort of rational scaffolding to my own behavior feels Really Good. it makes sense now.

if you look at people within your age group (or older) and see autistic individuals describing their autism in a way that resonates with you, i think it's really worth considering. ignore the labeling aspect of it for the time being. dont think of yourself as either having it or not. instead, look at the symptoms and behaviors that you exhibit that you think might align with autism, and see if they match up with factors that autistic individuals attribute to their brain chemistry. try strategies for dealing with life intended for autistic people and see if they work for you. if these strategies and this way of understanding you helps, whether or not you actually label it as autism is completely secondary. what matters is having the tools to get through life, and if the tools autistic people have come up with prove to be helpful to you, no one would fault you for using them regardless of whether or not you are an autistic person.

so really, i never 'found out' i was autistic and never truly will and there will always be a bit of doubt that eats away at me, but whatever sort of guilt comes from that doubt is completely secondary to the relief of having a framework to apply to my life that makes it more manageable.

i recommend looking through the #actuallyautistic tag on twitter and whatnot to find autistic creators detailing their experience, as personal experience is going to be a nice and easily accessible way to sort of get a feel for the experience.

on top of that, autism in adulthood is a peer-reviewed journal focusing on the study of autistic adults, and if you're like me and enjoy reading papers theres a bunch of good stuff here. even without reading the whole papers you can learn a lot from just browsing and skimming abstracts to get a feel for things.

in general there are a lot of really good academic types on twitter who are either autistic themselves or just incredibly solid researchers who do great stuff with autism and are really looking to break a lot of the stigma and boundaries that prevent people from being properly diagnosed and given tools to navigate life, and browsing around related twitter accounts should help you.

hope this was helpful!