The Struggle

 

To Start With…

 

Actually Autistic

 I’m autistic. All sorts of aspects of me-ness turn out to be part of a widely shared autistic experience. I’m now learning more about autism than I ever did, either as an undergrad or postgrad psychology student. I studied psychology for five years at university in the 1990s, and when I dropped out of grad school I had learned way less about autism than I have recently, with my student days long gone.

My autistic traits showed up from the beginning. I was a bed-wetter, with gastrointestinal problems, who zoned out, was monotropic, became super-focused as soon as my interest was captured, resented interruption, surprises, and demands, and had weird food fads. I was late, first to learn to ride a bike, then to drive a car. I’m clumsy and accident prone. My brain literally doesn’t fit into my skull, with part of my hindbrain protruding into my nape. I retain ridiculous amounts of information in it.

I don’t see or hear the nuances of human expression or communication, with everything being positive, negative, or neutral. I struggle to take part in conversations with more than one person, and I experience really, really bad feelings when talking on the phone. If a service provider customer care representative calls me about anything it can take me hours to recover. I suspect my expression and tone are often either inappropriate or flat, because it’s such hard work to apply the correct reaction filters to my face and voice.

My pain tolerance is through the roof, while my sound tolerance is at floor level. I can’t stand nuts and hard seeds in bread or cake, crunchy things in pasta, or combination of lemon and sugar. The smell of metal oxides, unwashed humans, and cooking meat (apart from bacon) are deeply distracting in a bad way. The smell of wood, soil, and some animals make me feel safe. I love the feeling of animal hair or wool. I hate it when particles stick to my feet. 

There is so much more, but I won’t put it all in here. Needless to say, living in a world geared towards people who aren’t thinking or feeling similarly is exhausting, painful, and stressful, because, aside from the bed-wetting, every “me” trait I’ve found to be linked to autism has persisted, and makes operating in a professional context, to the timetables of others, pretty nightmarish. Don’t get me started on relationships.

I’m 52, and I can’t always cope with adult life, and even when I’m coping, commonly known as being “high functioning”, I’m in pain, worn out, and using huge amounts of energy masking. I’m so highly adept at it that people question whether I am actually autistic, but it makes me less alien and scary. In order to reduce my fatigue and discomfort I am going to try and shed a lot of my masking, which will be more disturbing to others than to myself. Honestly, I’ve spent my entire life, and expended huge amounts of energy on trying to fit in and operate outside my spec’, and I’m over it.

Nobody in my life, even me, had ever considered if I might be on the spectrum, until I was in my late 40s, and in the end it was me who worked it out, just as I did with my endometriosis. 

From this point, until I reach a state of balance and energy in my life that I feel is sustainable for me to live out my remaining years in comfort, I will be sharing my journey here. If you are interested feel free to bookmark or subscribe. If not, then thank you for caring or being interested enough to read this far.

Ngā mihi.