Published on 12, July, 2020
This is not me having a whinge. But does anyone on the forum had or have to deal with the expectation that as they are good at what they do they feel that there is a continued and increasing need to do and provide more and more to suit others.
I sometimes feel that I have just become a high functioning machine rather than human and that the challenging aspects of autism (where I am low functioning) are negated or ignored.
Still not exactly sure what high functioning is supposed to mean. It seems to imply that being on the spectrum is inherently a disability & that even those labelled as high functioning are by definition still impaired in some way, rather than just being fundamentally different to those not on the Spectrum.
High Functioning is a label that NTs like to use to describe people who are good at blending in. I was only diagnosed last year in my fifties & had previously thought that most people viewed the world in a similar manner to me, it's only recently that I realised I have been essentially emulating their behavioural patterns for most of my life.
I used to try to convince myself that I was just like everyone else, but now I know that I am not, even though I can appear to be when I want to. I just havent quite figured out what that means yet.
When I was in therapy, I used to say that I no longer felt human in the same sense as everyone else, I had just become very good at faking it. Things that oher people take for granted, in my head feel like digital algorithms & I often catch myself breaking down social interactions into components & analysing from a detached third person perspective.
I'm probably just crazy though