The double-edged sword of a late diagnosis

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It's not a myth that gypsies steal babies, at least not in some parts of Europe. In Ireland they put security tags on every baby in the hospital for this reason, and an alarm sounds if anyone tries to take them out of the ward. These would be the Irish/English type of gypsy, not the Eastern European ones - I don't know their habits.

Yeah, I remember our parents teaching us about Gypsies. That was a big issue back then. I don't know if it still is. I thought about mentioning it in that post but did not. I did not want to start getting all kinds of grief from people saying that I am prejudiced against Gypsies.

Did you have to delete most of your post? Or have you found a nifty trick that gets past the bloody thing?

Back on topic, I'll never know what my life would have been like if I'd been diagnosed when I was young. I did notice the double-edged nature of my late DX though. It gave me some kind of protection against the cruel yoke of my employer, and the insights into who I am have been very useful. But the adjustments were too little, too late, and I don't think I'm going to wake up one day to find that society has taken on board the autistic perspective.

Sometimes if I write a long post, I copy it so that I can paste it back in if I need to. But that one incident with captcha was new to me. It would not let me do anything, no matter what I did it would just keep going back to the same screen and asking for more confirmation. I think it was stuck in a loop. I just had to abandon my efforts and move on to another thread. I never successfully posted that post.

Truth is we can only guess how our lives could have been different. And anyone can do that, Autistic or not. But I think some of the guesses might be pretty accurate.

I've been thinking more about this since my earlier posts, and I got onto accommodations...

I say that I'm glad I didn't have accommodations and I was forced to try and fit into an NT world.

Yet, here I am going through the diagnosis process, and the reason it's helping is because it's giving me a reason to get those accommodations - allowances from others, and from myself, to not have to force myself to try any more. Diagnosis is my permission to rest after a fight almost three decades long.

So maybe, if I do still need those accommodations and the past three decades have been a fight, it doesn't much matter that I struggled through and achieved certain things that I otherwise might not have done. Maybe the end result is all the same anyway. Maybe there really have just been close to 30 years of unnecessary fighting. And possibly, that's why I'm so adamant that I wouldn't want that for my daughter.

I can 100% relate to that except for having a child part but I can certainly see how you would want to protect her from having to deal with some of the fight you went through. She will still have her own fight but having help and support for it is a good thing.

Really?

Why do they steal babies?

Do they "fence" them for money, or something? Lol!

The fair red haired "Irish Travelers" are indeed a curious subculture. Outwardly similiar, but apparently unrelated in origins to, the Rom ( the actual dark skinned Gypsies who migrated into Europe from the East via the Byzantine Empire a 1000 years ago). Though both groups wander around the British Isles apparently.

The Rom of Balkan Europe were actually the victims of child theft, and as children and as adults were often owned as slaves by non Gypsy East Europeans until as recently as around the same time that slavery was abolished in America in the mid 19th Century.

All I know about the Irish Travelers ( in both North America and in the UK) is from one Sixty Minutes expose ten years ago.

But I once deejayed a weeding for a strange group of folks whom I deduced must have been American Rom/Gypsies. By far the strangest subculture of folks I have ever deejayed for.

Both kinds of "gypsies" are... interesting... to say the least.

It's not a gypsy thing to steal babies. Normally women who do it is because they are desperate for a baby. Normally they will fake their own pregnancy, fake their appointments, get a fake ultrasound picture, they will even have a baby shower and then when their "due date" comes, they will either seek out a pregnant women and cut the baby from her stomach or go steal a newborn and pass it off as her own. These women are very clever and know how to somehow get fake records of their appointments and get a fake ultrasound. So IMO when you are very pregnant, you are at a higher risk for abduction so I would suggest to never go alone to someone's house or when you meet a stranger somewhere from Craigslist when you are trying to get free baby things. Also meet in a public spot. Never out in a parking lot. Meet where there will be people around.

They also put tags on babies here too and an alarm around their foot so they can't be stolen and only certain nurses with certain bracelets are only allowed to hold the baby and carry it and even the mother and father wear the same bracelet as the nurses. Pretty hard to steal a baby that way unless one of the nurses do it and they cut off the alarm patch and the bracelets and just walk out on their job with the baby.

It's not just a Gypsy thing but back in the 70s in Europe we were taught to be careful of Gypsies. But people steal babies to sell them. Human trafficking basically. Black market adoption agencies are the most common places babies are sold. Little kids are also kidnapped for the camel racing industry. That is a big one.

Because they like big families, I guess. A lot of them also game the Irish welfare system by claiming each others' children as their own when the social workers come around.



I've seen American Traveler families on tv, and I have to say they don't seem to have a clue about their ancestors' culture and traditions. They think it's all about wearing sequins.

I know what you mean about feeling off from everyone else and having a lot of misunderstandings or conflicts where you can't really figure out what exactly you did wrong or whatever. That actually contributed a lot to some pretty bad depression and anxiety I developed, by the age of 15 it was so bad I tried offing myself but luckily didn't succeed.

Thing is I don't really feel like I ever adapted to well..I never had a many friends, I usually felt like the school outcast. I did date a guy in highschool for a bit and a couple years has some friends but over all I experienced plenty of ostracism and bullying I have more memories of that than memories of friends or any good times.

I cannot say it would have been better to be diagnosed early on...the impression I get is I would have constantly been disregarded and treated like someone much dumber more often than I already was because of seeming 'weird' in some undefinable way. I mean I'd read all the time and other kids still liked to call me ret*d, I don't imagine having an earlier diagnoses would have helped that problem.

Another challenge was during highschool a girl I knew was shot by a random gunman that came in the school...I actually developed PTSD, which I didn't get much understanding for either. But yeah I still pushed along to graduate and move on with my life whilst trying with all my will not to be effected by that event. I had a horrible first year of college full of loneliness and spending my days after class on chat-rooms drinking vodka since that was my only social life. I than transferred colleges and ended up thinking I had 'friends' but they turned out to just be untrustworthy people I ended up doing drugs with and wasting money on. So I ended up dropping out, continuing to be rather reckless in life until I finally started trying to get some help with my issues.

After all that I finally has aspergers mentioned to me...and looked more into it which led to a diagnoses and me having a better understanding of myself and experiences. I was able to apply for disability for that, the PTSD and the reoccurring anxiety/depression and well things have gradually improved since than...though for a time I was convinced it was hopeless. But yeah I've moved out of my moms house and am paying rent with room-mates and I have an amazing boyfriend so it's turned out ok. Currently I am looking into transitioning into working at least some, so I can eventually maybe totally get off the SSI income.

In Ireland it is. It's a real issue that hospitals have to consider. I'm speaking from the personal experience of having given birth there.

I can relate to this so much. It's still hard for me to imagine that people enjoy being social, when it's such hard work for me even to this day. I can be highly social when it comes to relationships built on common interests. But everything else feels like fakery.

My mother was always giving me social instructions and nagging at me. I assumed every other kid's parents were doing the same thing, and that they were just better fakers than me. I felt surrounded by sickening deceit.

It's still hard for me to imagine that people enjoy being social, when it's such hard work for me even to this day. I can be highly social when it comes to relationships built on common interests. But everything else feels like fakery.

Ditto. Now, when I have to be social without common interests, I take the anthropological view: it can be fascinating to study the neurotypical animal, now that I know they're not faking, but actually enjoying themselves.

Is there a big Gypsy population in Ireland? I have never been and don't much about Ireland.