If you’re wondering if you might be #autistic but ruling it out because not all of the criteria apply read on. Like many late diagnosed #ActuallyAutistic people #autism wasn’t seen as a possibility because I seemed to communicate well, was married and had a successful career.
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Stereotypes and caricatures reduce autistic people to a narrow ‘type’ even though we’re just as fabulously diverse as the neurotypical population. I’ve seen some people (men!) say they met all of the criteria and were diagnosed within a nanosecond, but that’s not the norm.
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When I took autism screening tests they suggested a significant probability of me being autistic. But then I wondered about how I’d interpreted the questions. Maybe I’d skewed the results. Then I looked at checklists for autistic women and agreed with 80% of the statements.
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I still hesitated. I was encouraged to think I might be autistic when a female former colleague emailed me. She and I were alike. She had just been diagnosed. But maybe I just wanted to explain away the difficulties I was having, and this was a convenient bandwagon to jump on.
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I read more accounts written by autistic people. Some resonated, others did not. None was completely consistent with my experience, with hindsight I wonder why I thought they would be. For everything that supported the idea I was autistic I thought of something that did not.
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Speaking to a psychologist who specialised in assessing autistic women on the phone I poured out a lot of thoughts about my life, stream of consciousness style. She couldn’t offer me an assessment because I was out of area, but she encouraged me to look for someone who could.
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I was on the trail of an autism diagnosis, looking for pointers to encourage me to take the next steps. I risked being put off by things that appeared to contraindicate autism. Many of us do detailed research before we seek diagnosis. We may conclude we’re not autistic enough.
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This is why it’s important to understand how lived experience and socialisation may have affected us. Negative reactions to our autistic selves may have led us to suppress traits that would support autism diagnosis. They may only emerge when we’re stressed or when we’re alone.
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Accepting people who believe they may be autistic but who don’t have a diagnosis into the autism community is vitally important. One of the most compelling moments in my journey to diagnosis was communicating with autistic people online. They were encouraging and supportive.
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To be perfectly honest being accepted by other autistic people, and feeling that I belonged, was more important than a clinical diagnosis. I could have stopped there. I decided to carry on and get assessed to try to safeguard myself from inappropriate care even later in life.
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I’ve struggled when I have had to stay in institutional settings in the past - college, hospital, residential centres. I wanted autism on record so that accommodations could be made in future. I also thought it might help my adult children to know conclusively I’m autistic.
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It’s coming up to two years since I got my formal autism diagnosis. Looking back there are some things that might have accelerated the process. The detailed written explanation of why I thought I was autistic I gave my GP wasn’t read. Counsellors I saw didn’t consider autism.
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There’s a long way to go in increasing autism awareness among health and social care professionals. The GPs I saw either bent over backwards to tell me nothing that went wrong had anything to do with me, or seemed to find me a bit annoying and closed down the conversation.
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Many of us recognise we’re autistic long before professionals do. We then face the enormous challenge of persuading them to agree with us. I was in such dire straits by the time I sought an autism assessment I lacked the energy to do this. Luckily I was able to bypass my GP.
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Every day I feel gratitude for finally discovering who I really am. Every day I become a little more ‘me’. After 60 years of effortful existence I’m finally experiencing what it’s like to be relaxed and free. It’s joyful.
#autism
#autistic
#ActuallyAutistic
#AllAutistics
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