So nearly two months after diagnosis I still find myself searching for *something*.
It's not exactly "certainty" as I know that's impossible. But two or three things have conspired to take the edge off the sense of objective endorsement of my own experience that I felt following my diagnosis:
1. The feeling of the circular argument "I'm me, and I'm just a normal person, therefore I'm normal" came back a bit
2. I've read some of the debate around the apparent changes in the way the diagnostic criteria are interpreted(*) which some say includes a broader range of people in the diagnostic envelope
3. I find myself going over old ground, trying to justify to myself that I am autistic, despite now having a positive diagnosis.
But part of me can see that this is almost humorous, because I *know* that I am different. I know for instance that despite my academic qualifications I never approached my academic work in a "typical" way, and that my understanding of the technical things that I studied was very narrow and achieved in an unconventional way that I can't quite describe, and if I try to apply my analysis skills to new subjects I often feel like someone who doesn't know what they're doing. In other words I'm not the person I thought I was. My analysis skills and cognitive abilities are very "spiky", and I've had a successful career by finding ways to show off the spikes whilst avoiding the valleys between them.
I've spent a few days reading research work about the heterogeneity of autistic symptoms, and thought I had found a clear answer with one paper that presents results indicating that there the main variation in autism is the varying levels of impact (in other words supports the model in DSM-V) but then I read articles arguing that DSM-IV was right and we should go back!
One of my natural instincts is to try to form a synthesised model of this and have it as something that I can believe in, perhaps blogging it to help others, but having stumbled onto Twitter and seen the antagonism between different camps of people with different opinions about autism, I am reluctant to put myself out there and also find myself struggling to find something stable that I can hold on to. Ironically, my abject fear of someone making negative comments on, or even politely disagreeing with, things I write on social media is, I believe, part of my autism! And I need to keep reminding myself of how very much lower my stress levels are now that I'm not on social media!
The other way round this, of course, is to stop trying to understand everything, accept that I was diagnosed objectively by the NHS using DSM-V and my ADOS score was in no way "marginal" and cut myself some slack, and realise that it's not my responsibility to understand everything about autism and explain it to the world and settle all of the arguments! Having written that down, I can't believe that there's something in me telling my that I should, and could - because that's plainly ridiculous and so far beyond my capabilities that again it's laughable.
(*) and I must mention in passing that this statement, in one of the references supporting yesterday's Guardian article, gets me quite angry because it trivialises the struggles that we have: "Fifty years ago, one sign of autism was a lack of apparent interest in others. Nowadays, it's simply having fewer friends than others." Having been through the diagnostic process and had an awful lot of scrutiny applied to my symptoms, I can say with certainty that "having fewer friends than others" is in no way sufficient to satisfy even *one* sub paragraph of the diagnostic criteria!
