Published on 12, July, 2020
Just reflecting on my journey to date, the false starts and blind alleys. I've had longstanding issues with anxiety and these have dominated a lot of my reading, and my life actually.
I've kept searching and searching, with absolutely zero awareness that any of this could be related to autism until my son's informal diagnosis a couple of years ago, and have spent much of my life dogged by the constant feeling that I can just learn the answers, maybe not in the book i'm currently holding, but probably in the very next book I read.
It's been perhaps obvious to others that I've spent far too much time on this. I'm 55 now and got my first self help books out from the library whilst my mum observed, Oh, you don't need those, love". Claire Weekes' "Self help for your nerves" & Dale Carnegie's "How to win friends and influence people", I think. Recently a former colleague found me in the self help section and, expressing mock surprise said, "Fancy bumping into you here!" as if this was where I lived. And my husband, observing all of my books from the "Overcoming" series on my shelf, quipped, "I know which book is missing! It's called Overcoming the need for Overcoming books!". I think they have a point.
If only the subject of autism had been mentioned sooner. Perhaps i could have bought the right books or enlisted different support. My family is full of individuals like me. It's a large family and yet nobody else has mentioned it. I could simply draw a genogram and join the dots! Can anyone relate?
Oh yes, I know what you're talking about. My keen interest in psychology, sociology and neurology all stemmed from that need to understand why I didn't understand! If only there had been forums like this one in 1980!
I get what you mean about family too. While none of mine are formally diagnosed, there are a few close relatives who have remarkably similar traits to mine, and a few more distant ones who have or had a reputation for eccentricity. In a way, I think that made my childhood easier; my Mum had no idea about autism, but she understood my fatigue after school, my need for "quiet time", my late-onset insomnia, how intensely I engaged in my hobbies. Both she and I just accepted these things as "normal". We were just a certain kind of person, maybe a quite rare kind; but she had just stoically battled her way through life with her traits, assuming that's just how you do it, and passed that on to me.
I'm comfortable with that now that I've had a few years to let my diagnosis sink in a bit. No-one else would have known we might be autistic, because the Asperger's form was unknown. But it has taken a long time for me to quiet the ruminating about "what might have been", and I somehow doubt that I'll ever be able to stop it completely.