Be Warned

A personal blog about Persistent Depressive Disorder

I am as i always was

After being on a waitinglist for more than 8 months, after more than a month of appointments and cancelled appointents I finally got an answer.

The question was: Am I autistic?
The answer to this questions is: Yes.

I’ve suspected this for years but never really saw the use of being tested. About two years ago I noticed more and more things in my life that just didn’t really go as I wanted. Barely being able to work 3 days a week was not what I had in mind when I was 20. After one of such days of work I’m not really able to hold a conversation anymore. All of my ‘peopling’ was already used up on customers, coworkers and such. I can give you a dozen more examples of really big things in my life that are affected, but that’s for later posts. For now I really want to talk about getting the diagnosis and what it does for me.

I’m happy. Since I suspected this for quite a while and I did see a lot of similarities with my autistic friends (of which I noticed I had A LOT) the diagnosis was no surprise. I did try to research a little bit on how people take the diagnosis and how they cope. It turns out that a lot of people are completely taken aback and really didn’t see it coming. So those experiences I skipped. Then there is the group that got tested, really didn’t want to believe it to be true and then got a diagnosis they basically mentally rejected. Those experiences also did not apply to me. After looking closely, most people that suspected it strongly and wanted the diagnosis to be able to get more specific help don’t seem to write about it.

So I’ll write about it. I feel relieved, because I need help. I believe that in order to really help someone, you need to know what the problem is. So my problem is not that I’m autistic, but some of the problems I have are definitely a direct result of me being autistic. I need some help in coping, I need some help with structure, I need some help with protecting my boundaries, I need some help with asking for help. Let’s just say I need some help with quite some topics. Because I got diagnosed, I’ll hopefully be able to get the help I’m after. My life hasn’t been an easy one, my parents say I always made a choice to be true to myself and not follow the herd. I don’t believe this has been a choice, I think this is just what happened since I didn’t really understand what the rest was doing. Oh and I’m stubborn like hell, that might have something to do with it as well 😉

I thought one of the questions I was going to have was: Where does the autism end and my personality begin. It turns out, I don’t wonder that at all. It doesn’t matter to me, because I’ll have to find a way to live the best life I can being me. If some annoying little habit or an inability to have conversations when I’m tired is all me, all autism or (most likely) a little of both is absolutely not interesting. I’m looking forward to all the things I’ll learn that are true about me, autism and all.

The saying “When you’ve met a person with autism, you’ve met one person with autism” applies here.

I am as I always was, me.

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1 Comment

  1. Christa March 24, 2020

    mooi beschreven

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