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For those diagnosed, what level are you?

Shardovan

...if you're comfortable saying. 

It occurred to me after just reading another post that maybe my Level One makes some off the things I say on here seem a bit OTT (it doesn't feel that way though!) if the majority are L2 or whatever and have more 'right' (stupid thinking I know) than me to be saying anything. What percentages/ratios predominate on here in terms of all this?

Paranoid thinking maybe, it gets the better of me sometimes. I just got a weird feeling of embarrassment that I may have presumed I belong somewhere I don't. I think it will pass, and thanks for undertanding my posting this even though I can sense it's (I think?) a bit skewed, having come up as a sudden fear that seems to be demanding early closure/external invalidation. My usual issue!

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  • in reply to Charlotte

    I brought it up with my therapist and she said 'why does it matter?' That's the overall consensus here too, and I appreciate people taking the time to post.

  • in reply to Charlotte

    I suppose my intermittent fixation on the levels thing has been more likely from the start in my case. My mother taught profoundly autistic (and often otherwise-disabled children as well) for years, and I grew up next door to a lady with two non-verbal and very immediately discernibly autistic sons who outwardly are very much in their own world with no capitulation to NT convention whatsoever. I suppose when I've experienced such a dramatic contrast with my own much more masked and subtle experience, there's a tendency to feel I oughtn't to be claiming any kind of hardship in life, in relative terms. Except that I increasingly see that it's silly to think that way. My being able to work, function (with discomfort) in many day-to-day situations, etc. is just a different kind of autistic experience. I'm way more invisibly autistic than the people I've just mentioned, but the trade-off is more exhaustion and uninterrupted anxiety, and unavoidable sensory overload, and spiralling rumination and so on. I'm siphoning a constant energy drain into the mask, whereas a non-verbal or profoundly autistic person who will never work or secure independent living has other people making the effort to break into their bubble, adopt their language, adjust most environments and routines to suit them, etc. 

    I take the point that Levels as a concept can over-simplify and segregate into irrational hierarchy that which is uniformly present in all 'levels', with the key difference being how much of the environment each unique autist can tolerate in one go, what reactions it triggers in them, and so on.