"You can't be autistic, you can speak/write/have a job"

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ZombieBride: You're not a "dropout" until you never go back to high school again. If you don't go back by the time you're, say, 22, and don't get your Equivalency, then maybe you would be considered a "dropout."

I haven't gone to Grad School for a while; yet I don't consider myself a "Grad School dropout."

You might just be taking a vacation from school for a while, until you feel ready to come back. Maybe you'll go for the Equivalency when you're ready. Should you pass, there's no chance that you'll be a "dropout."

As the OP, I am having a very, very hard time feeling like people like me are getting dumped on as fakers, not autistic enough, doesn't belong, go away, drop dead, you're not good enough for our club. God this really, really hurts and I don't know why I need to justify myself to anybody.

Because I have a job? I get in trouble every few weeks, passed over for promotions, get all the crud jobs nobody wants. And this is the first job I was able to hold for more than 5 months, over a job history of 30 years.

Because I have a marriage? that's no bed of roses either--fights, misunderstandings, and lots of other things I prefer not to discuss.

Because i am out and about in the world? Because it was an alternative to being at home with parents who abused me in every way possible. I overcame my terror of people because I needed to survive. I endure physical pain, anxiety, and near crippling depression every day because I have to support myself and my physically disabled spouse.

If you knew the absolute hell i had to go through as a child, with nobody to support me or protect me, no special classes, no therapy, nobody fixing me special meals because of my sensory issues, no sensory time out room, nobody making allowances for my differences, bullied at school and hurt at home, if you saw how incredibly angry and awkward I was, if you heard my TEACHER call me ret*d, my parents calling me psychopath, trouble, burden, too dramatic--you might not think I had some happy, easy time. I never said autism is not a disability for me. I never said that it's all fine, or tried to diminish it's impact. It's a burden I carry around every day, but I'm too damned stubborn to give up. There have been times I thought about suicide every single day for months because I couldn't face getting on the subway and going to work one more time, being yelled at by my boss for screwing up again, being yelled at by my wife for not understanding some mysterious unspoken message I'm supposed to know.

Every thing I have learned, every lesson in independence and how to fake normal has been at the cost of a painful experience. Every time I got fired, I learned a little how to work at the next job. Every way I learned to talk like an NT was learned from some humiliating experience. I've lost friends, alienated family members, lost jobs, been evicted from my home, been a victim of violent crime.

It's hard enough trying to find support from medical people with all the ignorance and misinformation about, but it really hurts that I need to justify myself to other autistics that don't even know me.

I think it is pointless to talk about not autistic enough or you don't seem autistic.
EzraS doesn't seem autistic in posts, but they say they are, so they probably are.
If I didn't know, I wouldn't consider ZombieBride as someone who seemed autistic in posts, but that doesn't mean they aren't.
Sometimes, someone does seem quite autistic to me just from their posts, and I think it is because they are probably similar to me in autistic traits or personality traits that gives me that impression in my mind.
Sometimes, someone seems very NT online, but they are diagnosed, and they may not seem so in person.
It would be hard for them to be diagnosed and seem very NT in person, unless they were diagnosed early in childhood and developed in a more NT direction later, or perhaps they were misdiagnosed in childhood, sometimes people post to question their childhood diagnoses.

kraftiekortie,

I seemed to come in somewhere in the middle of all this, between when autism had a strict definition and the recognition of autism spectrum disorder. At 23 months (in 1986), I showed "decreased language development" and was brought to a military speech pathology clinic at the Tripler Army Medical Center in Hawaii, where we lived (and I was born). I had a tendency to jabber a lot, they said. An audiology test showed normal hearing, and I played appropriately and showed "prespeech" behaviors. No diagnosis was given then, and my mother was given homework, which involved speech stimulation activities. I would not put 2 words together until I was about 3 or 4.

In Kindergarten, I was removed from my normal school and put in a "psychoed" classroom. I was found to have ADHD, a severe language disorder, and a moderate articulation disorder. I was noted to have "autistic features," but no autism diagnosis was given. I was also found to have macrocephaly (head circumference greater than the 98th percentile). By 1st grade, however, a doctor noted a "pervasive developmental delay" and by the end of 1990, a diagnosis of PDD-NOS was given at the Dwight D. Eisenhower Army Medical Center, in a note addressed to the Walter Reed Army Medical Center as we were moving to Northern Virginia, based on the following symptomatology: "impaired social interactions (oppositional, little notice of other's feelings, poor play but can occ. play parallely w/out difficulty), perseveration + obsessive thoughts, poor tolerance of change, hyperactivity, and difficulty separating fantasy from reality." They noted that at this point my "language was very good" (this was halfway through 1st grade).

Considering the above, it seemed that at around this time I switched to a more Asperger's-type presentation, sorta like how you switched. Later on, in 1993 I would be found eligible for autism resource services at school, which at the time seemed to be a "new" disability that could be accommodated on an IEP. At age 9, a child neurologist at Walter Reed found that my head circumference was now above the 75th percentile (so I did not have macrocephaly anymore). At 13, I would be diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome. In 2013, my diagnosis was updated to autism spectrum disorder.

If someone doesn't care you'll hear it in their voice. Don't care tone starts fairly high then just drops lower. The I 'care' tone starts low and ends high. Tho the NT type are very in tune with this s**t so they can just fake the emotion. But most just say how they feel cause its natural to them.

Quote from zkydz
"Wanna know one of the things that occurred to me?

I was always afraid of being called upon because I would be found out to be a fraud. Now I realize that it was a deep recognition of the fact that I was faking every interaction I ever had. So, if that was a fake, I was a fake. I crumbled a lot.

I'm tired of killing gooses that lay golden eggs."


My response
Very revealing and informative observation.
Had to post this way because CAPTCHA is not letting me post at all if I use the quote feature

I like how my points were completely ignored this whole entire time.

Everyone ignores any points about how the misidentified identification of intelligence is consistently used.

To OP, you are not alone. I struggle to find services. I have other issues which I have gotten treatment for, but for autism-related problems I just struggle on my own IRL and come here. It is scary and frustrating. Many times in my life I have wanted to give up. I haven't because, like you, I felt like I had to escape an unbearable home situation.

Other people, including most mental health professionals I've encountered, completely fail to acknowledge my autism and those who are aware of it have nothing to offer in the way of support because they are ignorant of how autism effects me on a day to day basis. They just see me as smart but eccentric or they think I'm stupid or an as*hole. Some probably see me as a hypochondriac.

On the issue of not autistic enough: I don't care what others on WP think about whether or not I am autistic. I know I have the disorder. That's enough for me. I've encountered several people here at WP who can relate to my problems so I keep posting and reading others' posts. I can't relate to everyone's experience but that's okay. We all have certain things in common because we're aspies. I try to focus on that and avoid the controversies that often occur here.

Hi Beneficii,

Thank you for this illustration. I bet this is more common than we think it is.

Have you ever heard of the book Elijah's Cup? It's about a boy who seemed quite classically autistic when very young, but became quite Aspergian later. I met the mother about ten years ago; I met the boy, who is in his late 20's, about a year ago. He seemed somewhat apathetic and depressed when I met him. About 7-8 years ago, he did a comedy routine, and called himself Mr. Inevitable. You could Google Mr. Inevitable.

When I was 5 1/2 years old, in 1966, our whole family went to a special so-called research camp. It was called Harrelson. It was in upstate New York. They did research on maybe about 20 kids, including my NT older brother and myself. This was probably where I said my first words. I wish I could find mention of it online. I did go to a nursery school sponsored by the New York Association for Brain-Injured children NYABIC. You could Google it. The organization still exists, but under another name.

kraftiekortie,
I have ordered the book Elija's Cup by Amazon because you have mentioned it before and it arrived a few days before Christmas, but the pages smell funny, some sweetish funny smell they have, so I have a hard time reading it because I have to put it one arm-lenghts away from me and I don't enjoy reading it that way, and still I can smell it, thought to a lesser extent.
Usually I like the smell of bookpages, but not of that one.
Maybe the funny smell will wear off some day.