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Got my assessment next week...why on earth am I doing this

Deleted User

.....I've deliberated for a number of years and finally, for various reasons,  took the decision to book it.

It's next week. I'm going through cycles of.....I definitely am autistic / I'm definitely not / I'm looking forward to the assessment / why on earth am I putting myself through this / it'll give me answers / who the hell do I think I am? / it'll help explain my life / I don't know which outcome is more scary/ I don't want a label, I want to cancel the assessment because of this.

The last one is really bothering me right now.  So I've got this far in life and haven't held myself back and I'm just worried if I get a label it'll give me an excuse not to do things where in the past, I've previously pushed myself. (Altho at a cost to my mental health).

Parents

  • I recently was diagnosed with ASD - after decades of trying to figure out why life was so damned difficult. I found it helpful as it the shared experiences and struggles of other people really opened things up. I also found some ASD strategies in managing mood and  general day to day things really useful.

    TBH I found that accepting that although there is shared experiences amongst ASD, I'm still figuring what that means in my own experience. I keep my reading to life stories, testimonies and strategies - somehow I found the more psychology-orientated literature off putting. I've learned to define myself by other things than my diagnosis. I have pushed myself in the past, also stretching my mental health, unfortunately I came to a situation - a different job role - where I just couldn't push through it because I needed things a certain way that just weren't there (I spoke to other NT's who'd had similar experiences, and they were able to manage it which gave me a clue something was amiss). I decided then if there was something going on then it was better to know - I could decide afterwards who to tell, whether to accept/reject the diagnosis (that's been a fun one!) and whether to ask my employer for adjustments to make things easier. Before the assessment I had loads of doubts - I got ok with it when I decided to trust the process.  

    I found the assessment was worth it. Up to now I've been on this endless treadmill of bouts of CBT, 6 session counselling and varying levels of anti-depressants. Now I've got something which actually makes sense (ah! That's why I find people exhausting, conversations in social groups a complete trauma, why certain lighting makes me want to vomit, why I prefer routine over novelty etc.. etc...). On an average day the diagnosis is useful information to make sense of my personal history. On days when I put the effort in and practice strategies to manage general living - like disengaging from activities before I get overtired, checking in on what mood I'm feeling (using a chart for this, because my emotional literacy is virtually non-existent), "buffering" in-between different tasks, life is much, much more pleasant to live.

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