Published on 12, July, 2020
........and probably will hardly manage to again, as I may have forgotten my password ready. After a zillion things going wrong.....including the fact that all my brilliant ideas for a handle were already taken. Great minds.
I have not been diagnosed and won't be, I don't live in the UK and no doubt more ties to my lovely home country will be cut still further in the next year.
It was just seen as craziness when I was a kid, in the 1960's. It could be a spectrum thing but it could be something else. The red flags for the A word for me are that I regressed at 18 months and no longer spoke using grammatically correct sentences. Tantrums and obsessions during childhood, being scapegoated at high school and repeatedly being criticised from student years onwards for not engaging in enough eye contact.
But it is on the other side of the boot too as I teach at a high school for children who wish to specialise in the arts, and many are now getting diagnoses of dyspraxia, dyslexia as well as the odd autism I do feel the need to know how to work with these kids.
I would love to hear from older people who are only now recognising the hidden thing after all these years. Or from other teachers also confronting similar things.
The most important thing is my art incidentally.
The most important thing to me, for peace of mind and the ability to lose myself in it, is reading. The only things that come close are art (although just for fun, not to your degree) and, weirdly, filing and cataloguing things. I can lose all sense and track of time during these activities.
I was diagnosed (Asperger's / High-Functioning Autism) in January, aged 44, and although I'm aware that I'm still at the early stages of learning about autism, it certainly has answered a LOT of questions and made a LOT of things suddenly make sense.
There have been a few bumps since diagnosis. Being informed that it's considered a disability for one. Learning that once you walk out of that assessment room, you're essentially on your own for another. The difficulty in finding good quality information and research papers too. Another was hearing my prolific reading described as 'reading behaviour'!!! Overall though I consider my diagnosis to be a positive thing as at least I do now have answers, and know what it is I'm dealing with moving forward.
I hope you'll find this forum as useful as I have, it's a very mixed bunch but I find myself recognising many of my traits in most people I've met on here. It's a nice feeling, and a change from any other social situation I've found myself in.
When this thing came up a few years ago a counsellor told me it would never have hurt so much if there hadn't been any truth to it and yes, he said he thought he could see autistic traits in me.
But as diagnosis goes, I am not sure how that would benefit. The awareness of autism is massive now and maybe there is less stigma. But from the art poiint of view: I would want my work judged by the craftsmanship, not forany special disability. I would feel so patronized if that was the case.
We don't nudge Gates by his autism but for his acumen in business. Van Gogh was crazy but it is his genius we are interested in. We are interested in Jung's contribution to psychiatry, not the fact some experts say he suffered from childhood schizophrenia as a child. And so on.
All the same I would not wish any child to have come up against a host of misconceptions as I did, nor to have been bullied and scapegoated so much.