Accepting My Own Autism

One of the realities of my diagnosis is that it has taken me A LONG TIME to understand myself. I know that this is partly aging and not just autism, but it is also internalized ableism that has caused me to hate so many aspects of my autism and therefore to refuse to acknowledge those parts of myself that are “bad.” It began with my absolute rejection of my own autism because I didn’t lack empathy. If anything, I was overly empathetic. It took years for me to see that actually, my empathy often appears in ways that other people don’t recognize it as empathy and that this is a real problem. If the point of empathy is to show other people that you care, feeling empathy that other people can’t recognize isn’t the same. It isn’t the kind of social empathy that bonds people to each other and makes them trust each other. This was the step that finally allowed me to go in and ask about a diagnosis that eventually came in 2017.

I thought after reading through the long list of autistic traits that my diagnostician carefully wrote up that I was finished in some way. Yup, I have these sixteen traits of autism. I don’t have these other traits. The end.

But that hasn’t been the way it has been at all. It’s been 8 years since my diagnosis and I’m still poking around inside my psyche and discovering parts of autism that I hadn’t known I had before because I hated those parts so much and spent so much time masking that I masked the parts even from myself.

For instance, I was convinced for most of my life that I had absurdly good executive function. I was good at remembering times and appointments. I got homework done on time always. I managed a household of small children and got everyone to their school or play dates or music lessons. I kept a list of groceries that needed to be purchased and remembered all the clothing and shoe sizes and birthdays and so on for everyone. Great executive function, right?

It has only been recently that I’ve begun to question this reality. Maybe the reason I think I have such great executive function is that I was obsessed with looking normal. More normal than all the other normals. So no one ever suspected that I wasn’t “good enough” at normaling. I had so many routines and checklists that were running in my head constantly because I was terrified of the consequences of being seen as “other.” And also, I was lying to myself. My kids will tell you that I was, in fact, always late. And that was because I often lost track of time when I was hyper focused. But when you hate that part of yourself, you just hide the truth of it.

I knew that PDA (pathological demand avoidance or persistent demand for autonomy) was also often associated with autism, but I wasn’t like that at all. I had always been an overly obedient and submissive child, the teacher’s pet in every class. Right? Except no, that wasn’t true. Even in elementary school, there were teachers I disliked and simply refused to respond to their commands. I would stand stock still and pretend I didn’t hear them and not do what they asked. It didn’t feel like a choice, either. I just had something blocking obedience inside of me. This continued and in many ways got worse as a teen in high school and in college. I got good grades because I am intelligent and hard working. But I often had to work around my dislike of certain teachers and their dumb rules. I had to make up my own rules that made sense to me that would seem like I was obeying the teacher’s rules, even though I wasn’t.

And then there is RSD (rejection sensitive dysphoria), which I definitely DID NOT have. Because I am a writer and one thing a writer deals with on a regular basis is rejection. You get rejected hundreds of times before you are accepted, if you are lucky enough to be rejected, and you are rejected hundreds of more times after that. The rejection never ends. I spent many years dealing with the dysphoria that came after receiving an editorial letter for a book that I’d already had accepted for publication. I had to read it and wait a week before I could do anything about it because the pain was so acute. But oh, no, no problem with rejection here.

This is all to say that I am trying to allow myself to see my own autism more clearly because it helps me to actually deal with who I am if I can see myself first. It helps me deal with a whole slew of problems that were affecting my life but which I could never solve because they were too awful to acknowledge. Maybe writing this down will help someone else out there. Your autistic parts aren’t bad. They are just part of you.