Published on 12, July, 2020
Hi ,
Sorry if this is a long ramble but I have been thinking about it for a while .
My son has autism and learning difficulties , when I have told people a couple have commented 'I think you have it ' and my wifes said the same .
In truth it's not something I either knew or thought about until my sons diagnosis ,and has thrown up a lot of contradictions in my own head as I have always been a bit 'different ' but I just put it down to us all being unique in our own way .
I enjoy spending time by myself and need that , as I have always found people exhausting after an amount of time but I have always just thought i was more introverted than extroverted , although I have lots of friends it takes me a while to take to someone ; but once I do they are my friend forever I guess .
I really have set routine and a massive fear of change , the main fear is the fear that something will change .even if when it gets to the 'thing ' that I am worried about does not actually change -it really stresses me out and I wish i could change and cope better with this again I thought this was just part of my personality .
I get fixated on things and tend to only be able to focus on that one thing at once and it sort of takes over , I cannot think about more than one thing at once and tend to just function and think about that thing - it's my teeth at this point as I decided to try and improve them so I have been talking about them a lot at home , it's normally some sort of sporting statistics as I love sports .
I struggle to understand empathy to , emotions and other peoples are very difficult for my I have not cried since I was 10 and I am now 35 .
That's a brief overview , It's something that that keeps popping in to my head and was wondering if anyone else is similiar /been in the same situation and if i should go down the route of a potential diagnosis .
My stock advice is, take some online autism tests. AQ10 and AQ50 (sometimes called just 'AQ') are the most commonly used by clinicians in this country, but the RAADS-R is the most definitive. They can be found here: embrace-autism.com/.../If you score in the autism range it will give you more certainty about following up on a diagnosis.
I wish someone would explain some questions to me because some of them aren't specific enough or I wish that they have much more answer options. In lots of questions my answer would be "it depends". I have such inconsistency in my skills and abilities to tolerate that it's never the same answer for whenever the things they ask about happen, it depends on the day, situation, my energy, my mood, the person I'm dealing with and so on. It's very hard to simplify answers to just one. Each time I take a test I score high ( 120 in RAADS-R) but I can't even trust my answers because of the generalisations in the options available to answer from.
One more aspect is that I've been masking all my life and I've been raised by parents who couldn't care less about my needs so I grew up very unaware of my needs myself until I self-diagnoused. My sensitivity to noises for instance, I ignored it for years and when I put the noise cancelling earbuds It was a huge relief to finally be in calmness, so I can't rely on myself to tell exactly what my needs are since I'm figuring them out recently, and never had anyone to care about them or teach me to care about them.
Third thing that makes me doubt my self-report is the high probability that I also have Alexithymia. It's so hard to tell how I feel in situations. I only figured out how anxiety feels like about two weeks ago in a therapy session. When I'm asked somethings like "do you feel anxious in such and such situations?" How the hell was I able to tell?..
The tests are just indicators, it is quite usual for a person's score to vary somewhat between instances of taking the same test. Try not to get hung up about individual questions, some are badly worded, or entirely situational - 'museum or theatre?', my answer would depend on what the museum was about and what was playing at the theatre. As long as your score remains somewhere within the autistic range, then it is likely that you are, and remain, autistic.
Most questions in a clinical assessment for autism do not have right or wrong answers, how you reply is often more important than what you reply. You are allowed to be nervous, confused, hesitant and even not be able to reply at all.