Published on 12, July, 2020
My daughter recently moved back in with us aged 31 and I’m 61. She had been working with autistic people and she said that she thought I was. I’ve always known I was different, but never realised why. I mentioned it to a couple of people and they said, yes, I know! How come I never even crossed my mind that I was autistic?
Autism only became more widely known in the mid eighties and even then most of the attention was on diagnosing children not adults. I was only diagnosed in 2015 age 50. I was meant to be seeing a counsellor for some counselling but after the counsellor’s initial assessment she said she thought I might be autistic and therefore wasn’t able to help me. I must admit when I pursued a diagnosis it was as much to prove the counsellor wrong as to get a diagnosis - a classic fork in the road. In the process though of getting the diagnosis I came to accept that I probably was autistic - when I plucked up my courage and told my sister her reaction was that I probably was autistic and our late dad had definitely been (undiagnosed) autistic. At least you don’t have to pluck up your courage to tell your daughter.
I’m in my early 50’s and have only recently accepted that I am autistic. When I was school age I was just perceived as weird and largely avoided by everyone else. That has pretty much carried on ever since.
When I was young people had barely heard of autism. So there was no question of me ever being referred for anything. As you are almost 10 years older than me, it is hardly surprising no one ever mentioned it. If you can ‘mask’ then it would never have occurred to anyone you may have an illness. You were probably just seen as odd.