Published on 12, July, 2020
Hello everyone.
Recently joined this community through the advice of a support worker and I received my diagnosis of HF Autism earlier this year.
I have found the whole process a bit of a roller-coaster in that it has been isolating at times, emotional, reassuring and overwhelming at various stages - not to mention exhausting. I'd reached a point where I was struggling to accept certain aspects of who I am and felt I couldn't explain what I was going through or relate to anyone around me. My support worker recommended I turn to this community to see that I was not alone and that other people were experiencing and learning to cope with the challenges I was facing, as well as overcoming them or at least managing them better.
I am happy to say that you all seem a lovely lot who I can relate to well, so for that I say thank you for making me feel less like an alien in a human world!
Thanks for the comments and sorry I am not fast to respond. I suffer with extreme fatigue at the weekends from slogging through a stressful full-time job.
My partner is understanding and we both realise we are very different in how we perceive the world, communicate and run our day to day lives. As a result we lean on each other for support as well as drive each other nuts with frustration, but I think all relationships are like that to a degree.
We are still going through the early days of getting our heads round it all really. My partner has said all along I am not normal and not like other women, but at the same time that is what he likes about me. Unfortunately I also come with my quirks that he tries to tip-toe around delicately, such as routines and the way I go about things, stress over things to the most minute detail, obsessively research everything etc. As mentioned previously I work full-time in a stressful job (I have worked very hard to be where I am today and love my job), which I struggle with day to day, but the bills have to be paid and I like a clean house and good food on the table, so on the face of it, nothing looks odd or out of place. It's the fact I struggle a lot more than most in office environments and unpredictability in the work place, sensitivity issues, feeling constantly overwhelmed and anxious amongst other things that one one really sees, other than my partner.
The challenge now is understanding who I really am and whether I can show that or not. I have lived so long pretending to be normal and only being myself in my own company, that the thought of letting my guard down in front of others is terrifying and quite baffling to be honest.
I have been working on this with my partner, but it is a steep learning curve and we are having to learn fast due to the fact I spend most of my evenings and weekend in shutdown mode, so we both realise that something needs to give or improve if I am to achieve anything at all.