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.
Thanks for the example: psychology is not science, it’s feels. That’s why I don’t really value a diagnosis per se because if I get it or not might just depend on who I see.
So you have all these traits but no diagnosis. What have you learned about autism that’s helped you understand yourself? Or at least does it help you feel “normal”, that is to say that you are the way you are because you were born that way and not from trauma?
The biggest thing that I learned was that I had to redefine what my path to trauma recovery would look like. There are a lot of things that I do that I attributed to coping with trauma, but now I need to ask myself what I am trying to do and whether I should seek to stop doing those things.
For example, since that explanation is a bit convoluted: as a kid, I learned how to walk very quietly by walking on the balls of my feet, because it was useful for getting a snack from the pantry when I was refused dinner. But I also just like walking on my toes sometimes, and learning that this is common among people on the spectrum helped me accept that.
It also helped me look at my childhood and see how much of my trauma was a response to me struggling with that divergence. Having trouble managing emotions to the point of panic attacks at age 8 I can now recognize as autistic meltdown. There were many cases where I was labelled maliciously compliant to orders, and I now understand that it was because I was interpreting the command very literally, which is still something I struggle with as an adult.
My most recent meltdown at work was when someone from a different department asked me to violate a policy and nobody in my department–including my direct supervisor–gave a shit.
Like you as an 8-year-old, I was more upset that nobody cared it was a violation of policy than that I was being asked (quite rudely, may I add).
I also had a GF refer to me as “Mr. Literal” because I was always correcting her speech if she was being imprecise… I also sometimes get in trouble at work for wanting to correct sloppy verbiage. “People know what it means,” is not a good solution.