Diagnosis and identity

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How has being diagnosed or learning about Asperger's affected your identity?

Learning about being autistic left me feeling like I had no idea who I was, what my identity was. Like everything I had believed about myself was based on things that weren't true. Not like deliberate lies, just profound misunderstandings.

So I had to reclaim my sense of self. Which I have. It's definitely different from what it used to be. I am less depressive, less anxious, and generally more content with who I am.

I still have anxiety and depression, and I still have other issues. Like, no one is ever perfect, but I think it was overall a good thing for me.

It was a very strange month when I couldn't figure out who I was, though. Fortunately, that's only ever happened to me once.

I think my diagnosis is my only true identity. I only feel like something can be my identity if it's part of me all the time. For example, I'm a student but that's not my identity because I don't study all the time, nor am I in class all the time.

Me too. I found out about my diagnosis when I was eight years old. I was pretty surprised and confused. I did know some low functioning autistic kids, but I never suspected that I was one of them. I didn't really have any negative or positive thoughts about it back then. I started to get more and more negative feelings about my diagnosis as I got older.

About a month ago I started questioning whether my diagnosis was valid to begin with. This has been quite freeing, but I also have to live with the ambiguity. I have lost quite a big part of my identity. I'm trying to rebuild my identity because I think I've been believing some untrue things about myself because of my diagnosis.

Being diagnosed in my 50's gave me a very positive identity. It is a pervasive neurological condition so how could it not be an essential part of who I am? The positivity came from having so many things in my life that I had no or partial explanation for explained, learning that so many things that I thought were wrong and defective were really a matter of not being understood, that there were other people like me. At the time I felt almost like I had discovered a family I did not know about. The group part of my identity part has soured, it is pretty much is almost gone. It is a silly to identify with a group where most members don't want it to exist because they believe there is a stigma associated with it and they don't like the name.

The group part is interesting. Interacting with other autistic people is pretty important to me.

Interesting question. Liberating, is all I can say, quite liberating. Although, as strange as it may sound, it made food consumption considerably more difficult.

Best wishes,

Volterra.

I'm a lot more self-conscious after being diagnosed, trying not to do anything that could be perceived as typical AS behaviour. It's made me even more desperate to fit in as more and more people are becoming aware of the condition, but unaware that no two people with it are the same. I remember being outed when I started high school, after another kid in my year who had it always brought it up, and my friend read between the lines so I was basically forced to say "yes, I have the same disability as Tom." It was a very painful experience.

I suspected I had AS around 3 years ago, wasn't diagnosed till more recently like in the past year. But yeah it seems to explain quite a bit, like what made me 'weird' to other people. It hasn't really changed my identity or whatever its just part of the person I am I suppose. I just feel the diagnoses does give an explanation for a lot of things.

Before diagnosis, I was more prone to either getting in trouble with the police, sleeping rough or just completely withdrawing from society. I couldn't really function as an upstanding member of society. I had no qualifications, I couldn't hold down a job and to be quite honest I had no confidence. I would drink, take drugs and do anything to escape from the hell that I felt the world was.

Since my diagnosis (nearly 10 years ago), I am a completely different person. It has been slow progress, but progress non the less. It's a strange thing when you see a report about yourself written out by a psychiatrist, listing traits. I took all of those traits and as if by magic I began to turn round all the things that had held me back before, into positives.

I am now extremely independent and 'normally' functioning. I have qualifications, am able to hold down a job, I pay all my own bills and my daughter came back to live with me when she was 16.

I can walk down the street with my head held high, and I truly feel worthy as a productive human being.

I am not saying that my life is perfect and I do still struggle from time to time, but from what it was 15 years ago it is far better. I am better.

I'm not sure if I have answered the question, so I will stop there.

Thanks for reading.

My life has been a long struggle to reach some kind of acceptability and I have been critisized very much throughout my life. I never knew what was "wrong".
I couldn´t describe it better than Verdandi does.

The diagnosis, august ´13 (and a very good therapist) gave me a positive explanation and made me see, that I am an OK person with OK qualities and abilities, - only different and therefore misunderstood, - like so many in here.
(I did have my own secret suspicions about having AS or some kind of autism).
Now it is a positive part of my personality and identity, - and I am getting ready to use my abilities freely instead of trying to squeeze them into some conventional form.
My life is so much better now.

Last edited by Jensen on 21 Jan 2014, 1:17 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I learned about Aspergers when I was about to turn 40. In the years since it has actually helped me in a number of ways.

I finally realized that there is a reason for certain things about me, and that no, it was not just because I was lazy, bad, or didn't "try hard enough". But for most of my young life, that's what some people told me and I actually believed it. Couldn't do sports? Why, it was because I was a stupid klutz. Wasn't liked by my classmates? Why, it was because I was not likeable. Couldn't get a girlfriend? Now, that one was much harder to understand, because I went out of my way to be extra kind and nice to girls, but it NEVER worked. Thought about that for a long time and simply could not understand why so many a*&holes succeeded even when they treated their GFs badly, but I, the soft spoken kind guy, didn't exist. Learning about AS dramatically helped me with that, because I understood it wasn't something I had or hadn't done, but my neurology, that was causing this.

So on the whole I believe that the more knowledge we have, the better it is for us to adjust our self-perception accordingly. Hopefully we use that knowledge to empower ourselves and help others to understand.

Not exactly what you're asking for, but as an UNdiagnosed person, hearing from my therapist he suspected autism (which had long been suspected by me) gave me some hope that maybe this can actually be diagnosed. (And since there was never any delay or loss of language, "Asperger's" would likely be the sub-catagory I'd be in.)

If the evaluation does produce a finding of "Yes, you're on the spectrum", I'll feel even more relief. A name to call "this, whatever it is that makes me different" by. It won't ruin my sense of identity, it'll fill in a blank space that's currently there. I'll still be who I already am. There will be a new word to use, tho', to apply to something there that currently has no name..

I am not diagnosed, but looking at my life from the perspective that I may have autism has been a huge revelation. A lot of things in my life make sense now. I've learned so much about myself and feel much better about and more comfortable with my differences.

Diagnosis led me to learn a lot about autism and use this knowledge to live my life in smarter ways, go after my goals, make greater use of my strengths, gradually improve my weak areas, interact more with people, learn more about how other people think, go out of my comfort zone more, mostly positive developments, etc. Identity-wise, I am the same as before, just my personality, likes and dislikes, way of being, etc.

It means that even if I don't quite accept it, I have to question if it's me. Every time something is wrong. Before, I thought it was out there, the world that was strange and disturbing. I thought I was a bad person, but I thought it was others who were behaving strangely.

Now I am always much more worried what I have done wrong or how I might be seen as strange and weird and disturbing.