Hello everyone. The title may seem harsh, but it has proven plainly obvious over the years as I will explain by painfully info-dumping my life story to you.
I noticed very early that I was different. At or before 10 years old I saw how I reacted differently to people around me. I felt differently, I thought differently, I acted differently, and liked different things. I decided I was wrong. So at about 10 years old I decided to reprogram myself. Not content with just fitting in, I decided I needed to train my responses to BECOME normal. I didn't like parties. I was wrong. I would make myself like them. I didn't like loud music, wrong again. I didn't just train my speech patterns and how to emote, I trained my emotions to feel like others did. I trained my thinking to ape others. I constructed a psychological profile of a "normal" version of me and silently focused on erasing my identity and replacing it with this profile. I threw myself into every social situation, every party, I watched sports, and didn't allow myself to act, think or feel "wrong". I willed myself to feel the right emotions and the right times, negated incorrect responses, admonished myself when I was wrong and tried ever harder.
My mum also was convinced I was "wrong" but couldn't figure out in what way so tested me for everything. I remember proving to professionals that I wasn't dyslexic, I remember proving to other professionals that I wasn't deaf, I remember proving many things, but it never satisfied her. This irked me, but FOR SOME REASON, I never connected it to my own thoughts about my wrongness.
By 19, I didn't just like to party, I was the life of one and enjoyed the attention, I had several large friend groups, I watched and enjoyed sports, I was the mother of all wing-men, I listened to loud music, hung out with people to relax and was diagnosed with clinical depression a year later.
Whilst depressed both my mum and someone at University independently shared their thoughts with me that I might have Asperger's. I furiously went off to prove them wrong and was diagnosed with Asperger's.
I still didn't connect any dots.
Eventually I read a topic in a depression support forum on ego state disorders and mistook my mask, now a fully fledged personality, as a separate ego state and experimentally tried to switch to another one. I turned off my mask for the first time in almost a decade and I knew peace. I was emotionally numb for a week and then my depression was just gone.
I STILL didn't connect any dots. I thought I had a light version of multiple personality disorder, just with no memory interrupt.
It took another 3 years to figure out the 5 personalities I had identified were just my masked and unmasked self, 2 trauma induced defence mechanisms, and "something" I to this day haven't figured out yet but sends me into fits of uncontrollable and hysterical laughter and tears when I try to access it. (Last time took 30 minutes to get myself under control. I have left it alone since.)
Only this last month, at 35, have I made a realisation: I am Autistic. I have Autistic needs. I should be exercising self care, and I shouldn't respond to a sensory overload by trying to distract myself from the feeling with MORE sensory input!
The problem is that after 21 years of ignoring my own feelings and needs and treating my mind like a cityscape to be demolished and gentrified into a "Normie" haven, and 4 years of stumbling about trying to pick up the pieces of what's left after all I had done I have no idea how to read my own emotional state or needs. Last week it took me 2 days just to figure out that I was suffering sensory overload.
I have known for 15 years that I am on the Autistic spectrum and I STILL have to remind myself of the fact.
Ergo, I am an idiot.
Hello.