ADOS tomorrow

Hello, I hope it goes well for you. It is perfectly valid to feel anxious, the process of autistic identification and formal diagnosis is life changing.

You say you are worried about masking but a competent clinician should make you feel as comfortable as possible and therefore hopefully you won’t mask. Also even if you do mask, the clinician should know enough about autistic experience to pick up on that and recognise that you are maybe an internaliser.

 I hope this response is helpful.

Thanks, that's really helpful. There are going to be two of them, and they're videoing it.

You are very welcome. I haven’t actually had my assessment yet, so I don’t know what to expect.

Just another thought that I should have included earlier, many autistic people are likely to be anxious on the day of the assessment, so clinicians are probably used to it.

Purple said:

There are going to be two of them, and they're videoing it.

Does the videoing make you feel more anxious?

I’ve started a collection of American numbers plates, I have about 20, I’m trying to get one from each state so I have a little way to go yet. I’ve got them displayed on my workshop wall. Particularly like my Texas one, it has seven stars in the corner of it, one for each astronaut that died onboard the space shuttle Columbia.

That’s cool, I have car number plates on my bedroom wall. Your collection seems really cool.

That's cool. Have you thought of expanding that memorising capability to other things? Using numbers as reference? 

I was working on one my Special Interest projects I would call Memory Indexing before burnout hit me 2 years ago, and I'm thinking of continuining that, now that I recovered at last, the only problem is time, working full time, and heat summer time, ADHD wins with autism summer time, can't really focus on anything

One of the AQ50 questions is about recognising patterns in things like car number plates. I’ve actually got a large collection of number plates and can name the car make and model the plate came from and normally it’s colour. Some go back to the 1950’s. My late father often bought and sold cars, as soon as I see it’s number plate, I can remember the car in detail.

One of the AQ50 questions is about recognising patterns in things like car number plates. I’ve actually got a large collection of number plates and can name the car make and model the plate came from and normally it’s colour. Some go back to the 1950’s. My late father often bought and sold cars, as soon as I see it’s number plate, I can remember the car in detail.

I’ve started a collection of American numbers plates, I have about 20, I’m trying to get one from each state so I have a little way to go yet. I’ve got them displayed on my workshop wall. Particularly like my Texas one, it has seven stars in the corner of it, one for each astronaut that died onboard the space shuttle Columbia.

That’s cool, I have car number plates on my bedroom wall. Your collection seems really cool.

That's cool. Have you thought of expanding that memorising capability to other things? Using numbers as reference? 

I was working on one my Special Interest projects I would call Memory Indexing before burnout hit me 2 years ago, and I'm thinking of continuining that, now that I recovered at last, the only problem is time, working full time, and heat summer time, ADHD wins with autism summer time, can't really focus on anything