I definitely felt comfortable identifying as “neurodiverse” but had that very common thing where I thought I wasn’t “autistic enough” to bother getting a diagnosis and wasting anyone’s time. I’m tickled by how many people apparently knew long before I did. https://twitter.com/jrhyley/status/1300205226373320704

Like: “I’m doing fine, I can mostly navigate the world okay, I can do meaningful work, I just need to be better at reading the room and developing a better sense of privacy, autistic people With Real Issues don’t need me on their train.”

It really came down to starting to process a lot of my childhood, which was an absolute horrorshow for me in so many ways, despite having great parents. And seeing how many things I didn’t “grow out of” so much as “got really good at masking”, which is exhausting and draining.

The childhood processing came after Steve was trying to talk to me when I was reading & he started to get irritated and was like “sometimes you just check out” and I explained that I PHYSICALLY cannot hear sounds if I am focused on something else, and then the floodgates opened.

As a kid, grades were the most important thing, my entire goal, quantifiable and fridge-worthy, and then in Grade 3 my teacher gave me BAD GRADES and recommended my parents get my hearing checked. My hearing was fine. I still feel sweaty when I think about that report card.

But now I’m trying to see it not as an absolute meltdown because she wouldn’t believe I couldn’t hear her calling my name, but an example of an adult who sensed that SOMETHING was off and did her best to probe it a little with a recommendation.