On Realizing I was Probably Autistic

I wrote the entry that follows in December 2020.

My son's school was going through the process of evaluating him for an IEP and Special Education services, and one of the forms they sent home was an ASRS (Autism Spectrum Rating Scale.) I was immediately pissed off at seeing it, because I'd just gotten done telling my ex husband that not even I thought the kid was Autistic anymore, even though I'd strongly suspected it since his first developmental checkup with his pediatrician. How could he be Autistic? Every complaint the school had about him was something that reminded me of me, either when I was a kid or now. By that logic, if he was Autistic, then I must be, too. Feeling rather indignant and impatient, and knowing that if I had to sit around waiting for two weeks for the school to get back from Christmas break in order to share the results with us, my anxiety would eat me alive, I followed a similar pattern to the one that ended with me being diagnosed with depression in 2004: I got online, found an evaluation, clicked all the appropriately corresponding radio buttons, and felt my jaw hit the floor when the end result informed me that I needed to talk to my psychologist about Asperger's Syndrome.

(The evaluation I took was the Autism Spectrum Quotient.) Please forgive the language. The passage is most definitely not rated G.

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December 2020:

Today, I’m writing something I never in a million years thought I’d ever be writing about myself. My dad? Yes. My son? Yes. At this point, I’m beginning to think I may even be able to see traits in my mother and her mother, based on how they interacted with the world and how others perceived them. No, this time I’m not talking about MTHFR, which turned out to feel relatively pointless to treat (at least for the time being,) and only served to make the Autistic markers I'd been trained to mask all my life all the more prominent.

You see, today I think I’m angrier than I’ve ever been, and believe me, I’ve been through some shit in my life that has damn near caused blood to spill out of my ears from anger. I’m more hurt than I’ve ever been, because in the past couple of weeks, not only did I have to fill out an evaluation for my son, I also filled one out for myself when I realized how many things on that evaluation described me. I filled out my own informal evaluation multiple times, just to make sure I fully understood each question. I even had my fiancé stand behind me one of those times, to make sure I was being as accurate and as honest as possible. And every time, I got the same answer: I’m Autistic. Specifically, (if it was still prescribed as such) I have Asperger’s Syndrome.

I’ve known for a very long time that there was something different about me. From my absolute obsession with love and my fast and strong emotional attachments to people starting when I was 4 or 5 years old, to how I read at a 6th grade level in Kindergarten because I already preferred books to people and fiction to reality. I even remember the time my father’s second wife locked me in my bedroom for expressing misplaced affection around adult company, and the time she poured pepper on my tongue because I wouldn’t stop clearing my throat all the time. I remember the time I tried to fill my gloves with water, and then sat sucking on each individual finger in order to dry them afterward, so my dad wouldn’t find out. I remember the time I attached all my dad’s zip ties together as a surprise for him, only for him to completely lose his shit because he was a volunteer cop, and those were his allowed alternative to handcuffs.

I very quickly got used to no one taking me seriously because when I spoke, the things I said were so different and ‘odd’ or ‘overdramatic’ compared to how their own minds worked, so I just stayed silent and watched TV, played video games, read books, or made it so that my Barbies and other toy people lived better and happier lives than I did. I spent most of my life sitting in corners watching people, wishing I could live their lives instead. At one point, I failed so badly at trying to join other peoples’ conversations that another student wrote a rap about it and performed it whenever he saw me. No matter how much I watched them, no matter how hard I tried to emulate them, I always felt as though I came off as awkward to most other people. I’ve spent a large portion of my adolescent and adult life feeling as though people much prefer it when I sit in the same place and content myself with whatever they’ve given me to do, and stay silent and invisible while I’m doing it. It’s no wonder, when I was raised by and around people who were so incredibly skilled at spewing bullshit and pretending that nothing was wrong when it was, and gaslighting me into believing it was all in my head.

I remember my mom and grandma laughing at me when I was around 4 or 5 years old because I thought the teeth in the cup in the bathroom of the trailer we lived in with my uncle were grandma’s real teeth, despite no one ever having told me about false teeth before that night. That wasn’t the only time in my life people expected me to understand something that had never been previously explained or taught to me.

I remember getting the shit kicked out of me in Kindergarten because my father’s second wife told me that I should say something to my school bullies involving the N-word, and I didn’t understand that she wasn’t being literal. That incident followed me to third grade, where someone remembered me from Kindergarten and beat me up again. It wasn’t the last time I got myself or someone else into deep shit because I couldn’t tell that someone wasn’t being literal.

I remember thinking that Eric in my second grade class was the same Eric from the trailer park just because they had the same name and similar features, so we could just pick our friendship up right where we’d left off, as if him being dead had never been true. I got bullied worse that year than any other time in my life. I spent the rest of my life trying to binge people in order to be better prepared to interact with them ‘normally’ the next time I had the chance. It rarely worked out with 100% success.

I remember always thinking at every funeral I’ve ever been to that the people were just sleeping, and that if I watched them hard enough, I could see them sneaking breaths like the people on TV do. I find it very hard sometimes to believe to this day that when someone dies, they’re not just being moved to somewhere else in the world to be a part of someone else’s life. As if reality really is The Truman Show and we’re all just actors playing parts.

All my life, I’ve had issues with certain food and substance textures. I can’t handle slimy ANYTHING. I don’t like foods that mix smooth and crunchy or smooth and chunky (chunky peanut butter and Snickers bars are gross, and don't get me started on Oreos.) I’ve always loved experimenting with mixing foods in the kitchen though, which is probably why I’ve always loved baking; things that start crunchy or hard become soft, and things that start slimy become chewy. It’s magic, and I’ve always loved magic.

All my life, I haven’t liked wearing sweaters or sweatshirts without a cotton shirt under them because the yarn or fabric is scratchy and tight in the wrong places on my skin, or makes me sweat too quickly and I get claustrophobic. I can’t even wear blazers or jackets for long, and hoodies have to be baggy. I’ve always ripped the tags out of most of my clothes because they’re annoying. I haven’t liked wearing long sleeve shirts that are tight on my arms. They always have to be loose in the arms. I prefer cotton over any other type of fabric. I LOVE tight bear hugs and squeezes. I LOVE having my hair played with.

The hardest part of coming face to face with this at 32 years old is that my parents were told when I was 6 DAYS old that there was a very distinct possibility that as I grew, something would be different about my brain development. While I did end up getting evaluated for ADD and Depression, my parents made no other attempts to test my cognition outside the standard school tests, which I insisted in high school they should make harder.

Instead, my entire life was set up to be one long series of training courses in ‘normal:’ My mother taught me how to read early so I’d be smart. My father taught me household chores, so I’d know how to be 'a better housewife than my mother had been.' My grandparents taught me how to be quiet, polite, and invisible unless called on. My mother also taught me that different was dangerous, and once specifically told me that even if I did think that something was wrong with me, I had to keep it to myself because if I was open about it, it could cost me my job, my children, everything. The only specialist I ever saw was when I was 14 and even my mother couldn’t deny that I had depression, even though my father even then refused to let up on me or take the time to try to understand why. Of all the years I spent wishing I could be a Disney princess, I never once thought I would turn out to be Elsa, or even Rapunzel.

I asked over and over again. SO many times. All my life. “Is. Something. Wrong with me?” I even thought I was someone else’s child more than once. It feels as though everyone has always known something about me that I didn’t, and that none of them knew what to do with that knowledge except treat me like I was different. Like I was a bomb that was going to go off at any second and destroy their realities. I didn’t have anyone throw me baby showers. I haven’t had a surprise birthday party since second grade. I haven’t had a friend show up at my house or invite me out to socialize one on one or in a group since Summer 2017.

To so many people, I was always a second thought - or even a last thought - because I behaved so much like my parents. That’s how I got to this point: How could something be wrong with my son, if he’s acting the same way I did as a child, and even sometimes the way I act today? That would mean that something would have to be wrong with me too.

All I want to do right now is scream in so many peoples’ faces HOW THE HELL DARE YOU?!? How the hell dare all of you force me to live a life CONSTANTLY skirting around the edge of neurotypical society trying to find my way in, and CONSTANTLY running into brick walls and getting doors slammed in my face? How the hell dare all of you sit there and hear me all my life talking about how I didn’t have any friends, how I didn’t fit in, how I was bullied, without speaking up and saying something other than ‘It’s all in your head?’ (Granted, I owe a MASSIVE debt of thanks to my cousin Lisa for FINALLY stepping in where fashion and image were concerned, otherwise I might still be wearing uncoordinated out-of-date clothes I either inherited or took from my grandma and mom.)

All the school dances I went to alone when I would’ve loved more than anything for a boy to dance with me and look at me like I was as pretty and worthy as all the other girls. All the times when girls my age were having sleepovers with their best friends or hanging out at the mall in groups, when I finally ended up getting pulled in with outcasts who wanted to take advantage of my lack of street smarts by getting me into things I didn’t fully understand. All I needed was to be around other people LIKE ME! It’s no surprise then that the first boy to ever pursue me was also Autistic.

All the times I said things to adults and got looked at like I’d said something scandalous because I didn’t realize just exactly how fucked up my life really was. I don’t blame my teachers, mentors, or peers for never saying anything about any specific condition they thought I might have; autism in women is INCREDIBLY difficult to diagnose, and in my case it was made all the harder by the fact that I was raised to specifically conceal anything and everything that made me different, because it might degrade my entire family’s image. If I thought though that I hated my parents before now, that was NOTHING compared with how much I LOATHE both of them right now. I would give anything to be able to completely erase my past and rewrite it. All my life I wanted to be a parent simply to prove just how god awful they both were at it. At least I know I’ve succeeded at that.