I don't want to have autism

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arw89
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Joined: 9 May 2014
Gender: Female
Posts: 2

02 May 2018, 4:47 pm

Hey everyone, I am new here. I guess I registered a year ago (edit: or 4 years ago :lol: ) or so on wrong planet, and even for the last 15 years I have suspected that something was 'different' or 'wrong' with me. I am 28 now, originally from the UK and now living in Germany.

I want to start this post with an introduction on me and why I think I have (mild) autism.

For nearly as long as I can remember, I have felt different or alien, and like I wasn't the same as other people. There would be many things I did as a little girl that were signs of autism - e.g. being disruptive/naughty/getting into trouble, having obsessions (mine were dinosaurs and birds), drawing on the wall at my school, having OCD (hand washing) for a while, picking at the skin on my fingers (still do this a lot today). At the end of primary and all through secondary school, I was bullied for my poor communication skills and geekiness. By the time I was 15 or 16, I felt so lost and confused all the time. I also didn't understand why my primary friends began to mysteriously ditch me and make new friends/do new things. I got depressed and withdrawn and lost a lot of confidence and self-esteem. To try and get my self-esteem up again, I'd constantly copy people who I thought were doing well socially. I simply couldn't stand the rejection I'd experienced when I had been my true self. I wanted so desperately to be normal.

I continued to be bullied when I left my teens, even by one older lady at a job I worked at. Two different girls I used to hang around with (one a flatmate and one someone at school) who were loud and intimidated me a lot accused me of having autism which upset me a lot. I was really, really fed up by that point and in my early 20's, I decided to travel and work in different countries - basically pushing myself out of my comfort zone. In the last 8 years, I've lived and worked in 5 countries, while getting a masters degree in child psychology. In the last 2 years, I left that career and decided to pursue web design which is something I'd always been interested in (I like science and art equally). At the moment I am living in Berlin working at a design agency. I am at a point where my social skills and ability to cope with life are at their highest point ever. However, I just had a very upsetting breakup with a man I was sure I'd spend my future with. He is struggling massively with depression and we couldn't continue our relationship, especially since he lives in a different part of Germany. I've handled the breakup really badly, falling into depression. I don't think it helps that at 28, I feel like a failure. I am a junior again in my career, I have no flat (I still live with other people to keep costs down), I have no car, no partner, not as many friends as I want, barely any savings, and (I know this one is really dumb to be worried about), no family or children.

Anyway. I've really felt the signs and known for years that I have autism, but I always pushed the idea back. I didn't want to know about it. I've always wanted to be 'normal' so badly. If autism was a Hogwarts house, then I'd be absolutely *begging* the sorting hat to *not* sort me into that house. I really can't see how I can have the fulfilling life I've always wanted if I really do have the condition. The last 15 years have been a huge uphill struggle for me with slow gains, and I feel like I'll never attain the level of social, or emotional, functioning that I wish I had.

Sorry for the depressing rant. I have spoken with a few family members about this over the past few days for support (oh, and my mum almost certainly has autism too, as well as a few of my aunts and cousins on my mum's side). I am finally giving it the attention it deserves, I suppose. I know I'll have to accept that this is me if I want to be happy. I just don't know how to do that.

ASPartOfMe
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Joined: 25 Aug 2013
Age: 67
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Posts: 36,441
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02 May 2018, 6:47 pm

Welcome to wrong planet.

You are working and you did earn a masters degree which proves that despite the social difficulties you do have very redeeming qualities.

Would having professional confirmation of your suspicions help?

Whether you have autism or not the first step towered success is defining success on your own terms, not on everybody else's. I suspect that since you have been trying so hard to be normal for so long you are unsure of who you really are. There is an arw89 underneath that normal shell screaming to get out.

The other key is you have to work with what you have, use your strengths and cope as best as you can with your weaknesses. At this point, you probably do not think you have any strengths. That is how bullying messes up a person. Now that you are beginning to accept that you very well might be autistic you need to learn about the condition. This will help you understand your strengths and find coping mechanisms for your weaknesses. Wrong planet is a good place to start.

It took you almost 30 years to get to this point, so it is going to take some time to figure it out. As they say, it is a process

_________________
Professionally Identified and joined WP August 26, 2013
DSM 5: Autism Spectrum Disorder, DSM IV: Aspergers Moderate Severity

“My autism is not a superpower. It also isn’t some kind of god-forsaken, endless fountain of suffering inflicted on my family. It’s just part of who I am as a person”. - Sara Luterman

arw89
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Joined: 9 May 2014
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Posts: 2

04 May 2018, 12:07 pm

Hi, thanks for your reply. My name is Amber by the way

I think having a professional confirm my suspicions would help although I've heard it can take a really long time. I even heard that in Germany, having the diagnosis makes it harder to get private health insurance because they imagine a lot of counselling sessions and medicine would be needed. In the UK, I've heard some horror stories where women who were quite sure they were on the spectrum were ignored by many doctors and that it took them years to get their diagnosis.

You might be right that I really have no idea who I am. It's really hard not to copy others though. Whenever I meet a person I admire (who does well socially and seems happy), I'll most likely want to act like them.

Thanks for all of your tips. I'm going to spend time reading posts on Wrong Planet and try my best to understand myself better and move forward.

ASPartOfMe
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04 May 2018, 6:25 pm

The costs of camouflaging autism Many girls hide their autism, sometimes evading diagnosis well into adulthood. These efforts can help women on the spectrum socially and professionally, but they can also do serious harm.

Quote:

Execpt for her family and closest friends, no one in Jennifer’s various circles knows that she is on the spectrum. Jennifer was not diagnosed with autism until she was 45 — and then only because she wanted confirmation of what she had figured out for herself over the previous decade. Most of her life, she says, she evaded a diagnosis by forcing herself to stop doing things her parents and others found strange or unacceptable.

Jennifer confides in me some of the tricks she uses to mask her autism — for example, staring at the spot between someone’s eyes instead of into their eyes, which makes her uncomfortable. But when we speak for the first time over video chat one Friday afternoon in January, I cannot pick up on any of these ploys.

She confesses to being anxious. “I didn’t put on my interview face,” she says. But her nervousness, too, is hidden — at least until she tells me that she is tapping her foot off camera and biting down on the chewing gum in her mouth. The only possible ‘tell’ I notice is that she gathers up hanks of her shoulder-length brown hair, pulls them back from her face and then lets them drop — over and over again.

In the course of more than an hour, Jennifer, a 48-year-old writer, describes the intense social and communication difficulties she experiences almost daily. She can express herself easily in writing, she says, but becomes disoriented during face-to-face communication. “The immediacy of the interaction messes with my processing,” she says.

“Am I making any sense at all?” she suddenly bursts out. She is, but often fears she is not.

To compensate, Jennifer says she practices how to act. Before attending a birthday party with her son, for example, she prepares herself to be “on,” correcting her posture and habitual fidgeting. She demonstrates for me how she sits up straight and becomes still. Her face takes on a pleasant and engaged expression, one she might adopt during conversation with another parent. To keep a dialogue going, she might drop in a few well-rehearsed catchphrases, such as “good grief” or “go big or go home.” “I feel if I do the nods, they won’t feel I’m uninterested,” she says.

Nearly everyone makes small adjustments to fit in better or conform to social norms, but camouflaging calls for constant and elaborate effort. It can help women with autism maintain their relationships and careers, but those gains often come at a heavy cost, including physical exhaustion and extreme anxiety.

“Camouflaging is often about a desperate and sometimes subconscious survival battle,” says Kajsa Igelström, assistant professor of neuroscience at Linköping University in Sweden. “And this is an important point, I think — that camouflaging often develops as a natural adaptation strategy to navigate reality,” she says. “For many women, it’s not until they get properly diagnosed, recognized and accepted that they can fully map out who they are.”

In a few small studies starting in 2016, the researchers confirmed that, at least among women with high intelligence quotients (IQ), camouflaging is common. They also noted possible gender differences that help girls escape clinicians’ notice: Whereas boys with autism might be overactive or appear to misbehave, girls more often seem anxious or depressed.

Delaine Swearman, 38, says she wanted badly to fit in when she was about 10 or 11, but felt she was too different from the other girls in her school. She studied the girls she liked and concluded, “If I pretended to like everything they liked and to go along with everything, that maybe they would accept me,” she says. Her schoolmates were avid fans of the band New Kids on the Block. So Swearman, who says she had zero interest in the band, feigned a passion she did not feel. She made a few more friends, but felt she was never being herself. Swearman, like Jennifer, was not diagnosed until adulthood, when she was 30.

The adults in the survey described an imaginative store of tools they call upon in different situations to avoid pain and gain acceptance. If, for example, someone has trouble starting a conversation, she might practice smiling first, Lai says, or prepare jokes as an ice-breaker. Many women develop a repertoire of personas for different audiences. Jennifer says she studies other people’s behavior and learns gestures or phrases that, to her, seem to project confidence; she often practices in front of a mirror.

All these strategies call for considerable effort. Exhaustion was a near-universal response in the 2017 British survey: The adults interviewed described feeling utterly drained — mentally, physically and emotionally. One woman, Mandy says, explained that after camouflaging for any length of time, she needs to curl up in the fetal position to recover. Others said they feel their friendships are not real because they are based on a lie, increasing their sense of loneliness. And many said they have played so many roles to disguise themselves through the years that they have lost sight of their true identity.

It’s only after a diagnosis that a woman may ask, “Which parts of myself are an act and which parts of me have been hidden? What do I have that’s valuable inside myself that can’t be expressed because I’m constantly and automatically camouflaging my autistic traits?” Igelström says. “None of those questions can be processed without first getting diagnosed, or at least self-identify, and then replaying the past with this new insight. And for many women, this happens late in life after years of camouflaging in a very uncontrolled, destructive and subconscious way, with many mental-health problems as a consequence.”

A diagnosis leads some women to abandon camouflaging. “Realizing that I am not broken, that I simply have a different neurology from the majority of the population and that there is nothing wrong with me the way I am means that I will not hide who I am just to fit in or make neurotypical people more comfortable,” Lawrence says.

Others learn to make camouflaging work for them, mitigating its negative effects. They may use masking techniques when they first make a new connection, but over time become more authentically themselves.

ChefDave
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Joined: 15 May 2018
Age: 64
Posts: 106
Location: Nevada

17 May 2018, 1:03 pm

Being autistic sometimes feels like being Pinocchio, the wooden puppet who wanted more than anything to be a real little boy. In point of fact, one of my very favorite songs is Muss I Denn which was popularized in the United States by Elvis Presley under the name, Wooden Heart.

It's possible to have a normal (like) life if you're on the high performing end of the spectrum. I know you don't want to be autistic but let's face it, this is our reality. There's no cure. The best way forward (at least for me) was to accept who I was.

I don't know about you but having autism sometimes feels like having a super power.

I have incredible focus on work related projects. I am detail oriented. Although I don't enjoy working with others, I've developed this skill after years of experience.

When I'm fixated on a project, I become oblivious to things like hunger, sleep, heat, or cold. It's kind of weird to finish a project and to suddenly be hit with conflicting needs ... an overfilled bladder ... hunger ... thirst ... and WHY AM I SHIVERING? Oh ... it's because I've been sitting under the A/C vent and have had cold air blowing on my for the past 6 hours ...

Since I've been able to align an interest in all things culinary with a profession, Chef Instructor of a Culinary Arts program, I've had a really successful career. I've even published 6 cookbooks and I've had articles published in magazines and blogs.

I agree with ASPartOfMe. You really should get a clinical diagnosis if for no other reason than to finally know beyond any doubt.

I'm sorry you've had problems with bullying. I have yet to meet anyone on the spectrum who HASN'T been bullied. It's unfortunate that kids (and even adults) can be really mean.

Kudos on your Master's degree in Psychology. I have a Master's in Education.

Has having a graduate degree in psychology given you any additional insights regarding your condition? I'm just curious. My graduate major is in Curriculum and Instruction but my minor is in Educational Psychology.

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