@thecookiejoe

3 months ago

I think you pretty much nailed it. I just recently understood how many comorbidities there actually are and how prevalent they are. Especially the later someone gets diagnosed or diagnoses themselves. The younger you get diagnosed and the more accommodation you get the less traumatic your life will be. The more accommodation you get the more you can live your autistic self and thrive. A lot of people that do not get diagnosed in their 20s or 30s have to mask (heavily). And masking comes at a really high cost. The younger you are the easier for you to pay that cost, the more accommodation you get the lower the price. But masking all so often causes trauma, one loses their identity or feeling of self, you gaslight yourself every day into thoughts like "this is fine" "everyone else is doing it, and so can I". But you can't. And then you burn down and you look nothing like this other autistic 4 year old kid that plays with their trainset all day in their room. But the way your thoughts work is just the same as this kid thinks. Your life is just tremendously different. And a lot of people forget that all too often that the medical diagnoses checks for the bare minimum of disabilities you have. It does not care about your strengths, it does not care about your family your friends, your pets your accommodations. All it does is check if you got the tism or not. If you get diagnosed with a broken leg, nobody in the medical system cares that you have a dog that you can pet when you spent the next couple weeks at home. Autism is more than a diagnosis and the older you get the more history is added to that lived experience part of it. And I think a lot of late and very late diagnosed people are probably more prone to imposter syndrome. The longer you have been masking somewhat successfully, the more you think: "maybe I am fooling myself, maybe I am not impaired, maybe I can do it and I am just being ... about it." And then you try, and you crash and I guess you had to learn that lesson again. And recently I really got mad at a lot of German youtubers about autism. Because almost all of them are like "these are 5 things only autistic people do" "do you have these 3 autistic traits?". And I think, people are not checklists. and also putting your books in color coded order may be autistic and it also may not be. And also it is not a huge part of the autistic experience. Like if your biggest problem in life is that you take words too literal and that when someone says "its raining cats and dogs" and you think literally - god I want to have your life mate. The autistic experience (I think) is more you hear that, you stop for a second and smile to yourself because it is a funny picture but you know that it is just coming down - as in water and no animals are involved, and then you go back to struggling with your motivation (because of adhd), your depression, the memories that keep coming back to you and that you just can't shake or process, you try and get rid of all the stress in your body without anyone noticing that you are just about to lose it for today. But yeah, of course you could not have autism. Because you don't like trains, you barely match 3 out of the 5 points that youtuber mentioned in their video. The thing is that medical professionals wake up more and more to these lived experiences and take them into account when diagnosing people. You can diagnose a white male kid that loves trains and dinosaurs just a little too much and looks nobody in the eye. But when you have people that have so many comorbidities it gets a little harder to diagnose. They still have the thing, its just hard to detect. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrQdGpq-BRs This video, although it focuses heavy on the medical side and the detecting the disabilities and not the strengths, explains a lot of different kinds of autism. And it really shows a lot of the spectrum and it should put anyones mind a little at easy why they do not relate to the stereotype.

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