I swear every Twitter and Tumblr ASD page keeps posting and posting about these lot. Cool if this is your parents. But what if it's not?
In fact I feel highly annoyed by so many mentions, how awesome and patient they are supposed to be etc. Well guess what, that's not my parents; I still have to convince my own Parents I have autism at all even after diagnosis!
If I haven't made friends with ASD, who knows how long I would've gone undiagnosed, because it would never cross my family's minds that this childish 20-year-old me might simply have Asperger's, and is not a selfish, despotic, stubborn, arrogant, lazy, narcissist many make me out to be :-( (Yes, all of these words I have been called by relatives!).
Another popular one is claiming that I'm just making yet another excuse, as in the past I always felt I was weird and tried to assign many various conditions to myself, such as Schizophrenia, Psychosis, etc. I was only trying to find out the truth about myself for all these years. Yet they believed all I always did is attempt to get out of doing things. It's really not.
Or of course I heard the classic most of you probably heard, “You're just depressed”. And “everyone has some traits of autism don't they?”. Ughhh sigh.
Even my Mum hasn't been helpful either and once asked me, “Why'd you always try to make yourself look weird when you really aren't?”. How am I not??
Luckily what She told during the phone interview for my diagnosis must have been sufficient, despite Her saying She doesn't remember much and that nothing struck her as unusual and that I was a “cheerful, happy child”. Yet from what I heard from the Diagnosis Team when they confirmed I have Asperger's that there was sufficient evidence of ASD traits in childhood, so perhaps what my Mum somehow saw as nothing odd, it was in reality, strongly suggesting She is simply in denial about Her child.
I mean I remember I could do some basic reading aged 4. I remember the first thing I ever wrote, which was (transliterated from Polish) “No dogz aloud” - the naive fool I was really thought that would defer the dog from coming in! (It didn't, by the way). By 5 my skill was polished up to perfection. I would engage in conversations with every bloody stranger, and when I cited that to Mum as evidence of abnormality, She dismissed it as "cute". O_o I also recall everyone remarked how smart I was, and when I was 6 She actually took me to this place which assessed if the child is fit to go to school early (this was still in Poland) and I actually 'passed' - but didn't want to go myself! And before being tested there were these 2 women, chatting about some nonsense I was totally uninterested in - and this rude child me straight up told them" 'Could you stop talking? I have a headache'. Oh man, if you only saw how horrified my Mum was!! Yet today, She doesn't even remember it, how!! Not mentioning I definitely must've copied that headache phrase from somewhere lol.
As for my Father, just check out the “But you don't have autism” anecdote from my previous posts >,<
So… Yeah… I guess I'm just my classic dismayed and bitter that my Parents are not people I could count on, and the Autism Parent memes just seem like lot of dull, pretentious propaganda setting goals and expectations I know my folks will never reach :-(
