I’ve been internet-diagnosed with autism plenty of times, but the one time I went to get evaluated, they said I didn’t have “it.”
But if it’s a spectrum with different combinations of different traits at different levels of intensity, maybe a diagnosis is irrelevant and what matters is what your constellation of traits actually is, regardless of an official diagnosis (which, let’s face it, is probably highly subjective outside of some constellations–that is to say, with a long enough list of psychologits, I could probably get a dx).
Personally, for me, what this means is I can look to autistic literature to see what resonates with me without worrying about the fact that I don’t share many of the hard markers for autism. For instance, my investment in the truth often conflicts with social niceties even though I can read people’s emotions. I can see myself as an unofficially atypical person in a lot of ways.
I’ll leave my resonsances in the comments below. Feel free to share yours.
Austistic traits run in one side of my family very obviously, but if any of us got tested it would be borderline at best. At the same time, it’s hard to talk about it because when most people think of autism, they think of the extreme high support needs kind of autism. Which, I found out, is pathologically different from the genetic kind of autism - that one arises from genetic mutations vs passed down genetic traits*. I think merging the autism and aspergers diagnoses did a lot of disservice to the social understanding and acceptance of higher functioning autistic people even if it made it easier for them to get disability services (i.e., insurance reasons as always). Because so many different pathologies and presentations get unduly conflated and merged, I really agree that it’s much more helpful at the individual level to do what you’re doing and just find strategies for coping with the specific aspects that resonate with you.
*correct me if I’m wrong on any of this, I’m not super well informed.
Ironically, I thought this way about myself for a long time. When I got evaluated as an adult, I got high scores for most things. Turns out, what I thought was borderline, was not borderline at all, I am just good at masking, for my own detriment. I am not saying it is the same for anyone else, who knows, but sometimes people perceive themselves very differently, than mental health professionals do - in all directions.
The real issue is that we live in a society that doesn’t respect us individuals, so we need to qualify into a diagnostic category to have any kind of rights. That diagnostic category needs to have a enough people in it that it has political power (what was likely behind the merger of Aspergers and Autism into autism spectrum disorder), but not so many people that it loses legitimacy.
It’s largely a political project.