Member-only story
I Was Finally Diagnosed With Autism at 46
And why I’m grateful.
Why is it so hard for me to function in the world? I watch you move through your day with an ease I can’t fathom. Weaving through crowds, paying bills, hatching plans, laying your heart to bear while I need to take an Ativan to survive a conference call. While I sleep above the sheets rather than beneath them — one foot off the bed, ready to run.
I see your heartbreak, trauma, a fall that seems bottomless and how you slowly recover and I admire your strength, your impenetrability. Meanwhile, I feel like I’m trudging through my days. You go at things so hard, hold onto things so hard, a friend told me once, and I couldn’t get the make of her. I kept replaying her words, re-arranging them because I couldn’t understand how one wouldn’t hold onto something so hard. How one wouldn’t…hard.
From an early age, I learned to study and mimic. Catalog a person’s range of emotions, reactions, responses, facial expressions — how they endure the world — and I copied it. For years, I party-hopped, socialized, hosted large events and parties, managed teams of 10, 30, 100, and now the idea of walking into a room filled with people unbearable.
I’m ashamed that I’ve learned to fake my way through the world without understanding why it’s so hard to live in it for real.
A few years ago, I read books, articles, scientific papers and studies, essays. I watched hundreds of hours of videos because this is how I get. When I want to know something, I want to know all of something. I’ll go into a deep that seems unreasonable. Reading about adult autism, the words I kept repeating to myself were: this is me.
Of course, I wasn’t silly enough to self-diagnose. I knew how futile, facile, and reductive that is because I see people throw the word “depression” around when what they’re describing is a tough time. They don’t seek out the advice of a medical professional or do the hard work to determine what is illness versus what is human experience, and I get angry because I want to scream into a screen: you don’t know how hard this is.
For a time I say, maybe I’m not autistic. Maybe I’m just an asshole who hasn’t learned how to function as a normal person. Or perhaps a bit of both.
