Published on 12, July, 2020
I'm 33 and going through the Diagnosis process currently. It's very hard going. Going through every inch of my personality and life. I'm struggling with trying to separate what is me and what is autism. Some things I do, like or find uncomfortable will just be my personality everyone is different. Which bits are and are not Autism. My family and friends argue with me on certain points that everyone does a little of everything. I work with Autistic children so I'm fully aware of what Autism looks like as a spectrum. However i feel adults are a different thing all together. Ive had my whole life to learn. hide and adapt to the world around me. I'm now set in my ways and routines and have found safe ways of doing things for myself. I don't know what I'm hiding or masking anymore. To conclude who I am?
Help ? I don't know any adults with autism to reach out to
I can only speak for myself, but personally I AM my autism because it is my autism that is shaping ALL of my personality. I absolutely couldn't disentangle the two. The bigger question is in what way might you have been copying NTs and masking in order to cope.
As for the "every one does a little of everything"... hmmm...sounds close to the "everyone is a bit autistic" line. Yes, every one has a sense of smell, but ours can be to an extreme of hyper or hypo active. With other things, NTs might avoid eye contact too but for very different reasons; they are feeling embarrassed or guilty in the moment, don't want to talk to someone; because it's cultural not eye ball superiors (parts of the Far East and Caribbean), or it's modesty (Middle East) and so on.
Hi Dawn. You've been missed.
Dawn said: it is my autism that is shaping ALL of my personality. I absolutely couldn't disentangle the two. The bigger question is in what way might you have been copying NTs and masking in order to cope.
I agree ....but before I had become self-aware of my "whole" (aka autism) I had already worked out most of the coping and masking I was doing......I just didn't understand why I was doing them all / any of them.....they made no coherent sense as a suite of behaviours.
*Then, all of a sudden, they did. B O O M.
Self enlightenment (or grand psychotic self delusion) is the only remaining question, some of the time, for some of us maybe.
We miss your socks. x
Hi, maybe I should keep changing the sock pix. My feet must be my most photographed part of my body.
I do get this question though. I'm sure at first I asked myself similar questions and then as I dug deeper and deeper and found myself over and over going 'But I do that, thought it was just my little quirk' to just about everything about myself from the vaguely irritating to what I like to think are better qualities.
There really is no Dawn without autism. I suspect that's true of us all.
"inclusive of all warts and bumps,"