Published on 12, July, 2020
After a 2 year wait I was recently diagnosed, and it is taking some time to adjust to it, such a mixturte of different feelngs, relief, regret, avoidance, disbelief, but mainly just relief. It wasn't just that I was weird all my life, there was a recogniseable, distinct, pervasive difficulty and there always has been. It wasn't that I didn't try hard enough, it wasn't that I was lazy, or just didn't want to mix with people or do a 'normal' job, but there are other more positive things too...the synaesthesia type experiences I have had, sensitivities to energies, my being drawn to workshops and groups where I could learn to make eye contact, to hug and enjoy physical contact, and many many more things I can now begin to place as to why I did this or why I was interested in that, or why I would have my own version of a meltdown. Thank you to the community for existing and hi to everyone. I look forward to learning and understanding more/
Hi, Timetraveller! Welcome to the group :) I'm 25 and I've been on the assessment waiting list for nearly a year now - I'm hoping they get in touch soon, as I'm finding the wait very difficult.
You mentioned that you're sensitive to energies and I can see a lot of people here saying similar things. It's interesting, because I've always been told I'm very perceptive, and I've often had 'gut feelings' that turned out to be absolutely right. My friend jokes that I'm a little bit psychic.
What is interesting about being 'sensitive' is that it connects with the autism thing of empathy - I was told that autistic ppl are empathic in a feeling sense, but not necessarily in a cognitive sense, that they find the aspect of creating a perception of another's world more difficult. I think that for me, these sensitivities are something I have worked on, both in the psychic sense and the feeling sense with the trainings I have done, and believe now that it's something ppl with autism have an extra sensitivity to...
I also think that empathy works both ways. It's interesting that neurotypical people say that autistic people struggle with empathy, but are very rarely able to empathise with how we feel, or imagine how it feels to be in our world. I do think you're right in that we're extra sensitive in many ways.
Thanks for sharing this - very interesting article.
DuckBread said:I also think that empathy works both ways.
Indeed, this is certainly true, and has been written about and studied as the "double empathy problem" - here's a link to an article about it here on the NAS site (Googling that term will reveal many other good articles about it).