So, I'm 43 now

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Since I'm now 43, I'm now officially at least 40 years late in terms of diagnosis. I'm also massively burned out, and I doubt that I'll be able to get reevaluated while everything is so clear. Sigh.

I've definitely learned a lot lately about what's going on with me and why it's been so hard to get proper recognition. I'm hoping that when the schiZotypy Autism Questionnaire drops that folks will finally accept that if I'm on that spectrum at all, it's just barely.

There's a few things that I know now that would have been very helpful earlier. First off, you're not supposed to be honest with health care providers, you're supposed to know if you're supposed to know the correct amount understate or overstate certain things. Being honest or getting it wrong means that you may get a very wrong diagnosis and treatment. And if you collect too many of those other diagnoses you're pretty much stuck for the rest of the ride as it can take a proper formal diagnosis to get medical personnel to accept that the other diagnoses were wrong.

Requiring obvious external RBB for any related diagnosis is BS and may not apply if your parents were undiagnosed and came down hard on those sorts of things. The stims may still be downloaded as unlockables, but you may need to run out of stamina before hitting the right button combination for them to start to unlock. I wish there were a better way, but for the most masked that's how that works. (It's totally worth it though to finally get how to do them, just don't do it that way if you have any other choice)

It's worth considering savant syndrome, dyslexia and the like, even if you haven't been diagnosed as savant syndrome is a pretty broad spectrum category and the enhanced memory and central nervous system abnormalities frequently mask ASD. Also somewhere between 10 and 37% of autistic people have savant syndrome to some extent with the syndrome previously known as AS being very close to the entry level savant splinter skills.

I don't recommend it, but with enough stress and overwork, whatever the truth is will come out. I've been working 6 days a week and struggling to leave work less than an hour or two late and at his point, I wish I could run into a diagnosing clinician and just get it done because it's undeniable right now. By the end of the day, I cannot maintain eye contact to save my life and it looks a lot like me looking somebody in the eye slowing turning my ear to their mouth before remembering that I'm supposed to be doing eye contact and moving my eyes back. Or, just staring at people blankly because I can't fathom the figurative language that they're using,e ven though I'd normally have no issues.

My visual processing is running so far behind at this point, that I'm seeing things that really are there as things other than what they are. I saw a large fluffy dog the other day as being just a large white bag and was rather confused by the fact that it disappeared and a dog showed up.

But, mostly, I think that at some point, some of us are essentially unicorns or some other mythical creatures. There isn't a place where we quite fit, but for me, I fit enough with the various autistic people that I clearly am one, I wouldn't even bother trying for a formal diagnosis at this point if I hadn't received just about all the common misdiagnoses.

Side note, I'm mostly just exhausted, but this sort of thing is a large part of why people keep wanting to put me on the schizophrenia spectrum when that's not a great explanation. Hopefully some of this will be in some fashion enlightening to others following behind me and that I don't just desperately need rest.

I'm also a unicorn. Not only am I autistic but am sufficiently transgender that if I try to pass as my birth sex, I fall into the uncanny valley between male and female! Luckily times have changed. Cross dressers like Klinger on M.A.S.H, are no longer mocked by normal people, just power hungry politicians.

I was exactly where you are three months ago. Completely burned out, really struggling, and feeling lost. I decided to pursue an official diagnosis, which just came this week. In addition, I found a therapist who is also autistic! I think the biggest thing I've learned is that diagnosis or not, I should act as though I had the diagnosis and figure out what I needed to regulate my system and recover from the burnout. This meant taking some time off work (essential! please do this!) and hugely restricting my social visits.

My therapist talks about what it would look like if I lived a "curated" life with autism. What would my daily life be like? And from there, I've worked with my spouse to communicate better about what I need and the result is that I'm coming back to myself.

You've got this, you can do it.

Welcome to WP.

I admire your work ethic. I'm also very transgender as well. I strongly identify as male and I have a somewhat GI way of looking at the world. I hope you had a good birthday. I don't wish people a happy birthday unless they're excited about their birthday. My birthday was 18 days ago, but I didn't make a huge deal about it here.

I think things will in general improve, it's a particularly annoying time to be dealing with this as just getting appointments with any sort of doctor lately takes ages. Just a neurology appointment to hopefully help sort out my sensory processing issues isn't going to be until sometime in January, and that's not anywhere near as comprehensive as what it would take to get a proper evaluation.

Yesterday, there was some random alarm going off, and I was so grateful that I no longer go around without ear plugs on me.

I'm sure I'll be fine, but this latest patch of burnout kind of explains why it is that everybody wants to group me with the bipolar folks and the folks on the schizophrenia spectrum. I didn't realize that when I used to be "psychotic" it was that I'd hit my limit and it was more or less my brain rebooting. This time, I just gave myself a couple days and I'm mostly fine now.

But, it would have been really nice to have had real treatment when I was younger to know why I was hitting that kind of burnout in the first place and had a less traumatizing way of coping.

It's more than a little infuriating to find out that effectively "too many" diagnoses were being handed out so the folks that didn't have the ability to participate got kicked out of the club and left without any sort of assistance at all, and not even allowed self-provided help without there being pressure to feel bad about it.

Savant syndrome is very rare.

Huh???

That's absolutely true, and I think it applies for all "invisible illnesses" like chronic pain and fatigue, neurological conditions as well as mental conditions. You want to know enough about your diagnosis and its recognized symptoms that you don't accidentally say something that will ring an alarm bell. For instance if you say, "The other day I thought I heard someone calling me but it was just windy," they will immediately think: schizophrenic. Or if you answer innocently, when asked if you ever wish anyone ill, that you do wish your boss would fall and hit his head sometimes. You don't actually want it to happen, it's a fantasy. Who hasn't had either of those experiences and thoughts? They mean nothing.

Or if you want your doctor to believe your pain, you have to, ironically, understate it. Otherwise you will seem dramatic and they won't believe you. But if you understate it you will seem stoic and be taken more seriously. That partially holds true for emotional pain as well. If you seem subdued you will be taken more seriously as being depressed than if you have an emotional outburst.

And so on.

It was believed to be rare in the past, but it's not that much less common than autism itself. Prodigious Savants are rare, but other forms of savantism aren't particularly rare. The savant population is somewhere between 20 and 80% of the autistic population, depending upon how precisely you want to draw the line. (Autistic savants are about half the total savant population and somewhere between 10 and 37% of autistic people are also savants, so 20-80% is probably right, but may well be an undercount due to savant skills being useful for masking)

It would be nice to have some sort of test or more specific standards to know if it's savant syndrome, but all savant syndrome requires is that there be some sort of extraordinary memory, some condition that affects the central nervous system that causes standout abilities that aren't explainable by conventional intelligence. In other words, it's more or less the ND specific version of genius. It seems rarer than it is because people are looking for obvious folks like Kim Peak and Stephen Wiltshire when there's folks with splinter skills that are also savants, but just know all the baseball player stats for the whole league going back decades or have a rather impressive ability to play musical instruments or identify pitches.


It's how I wound up with basically every ASD adjacent diagnosis, except for BPD and PTSD. It's normal for patients to withhold information for one reason or another and clinicians assume that the information isn't full and completed even to the ability that the patient is capable of expressing it. As a result, if you go in there and tell them the whole truth, to the extent that it won't get you locked up, there's an assumption that you're still holding back.

Definitely, and I really wish I was wrong about this. But, for the time being that's how things work and you're better off making a guess in terms of an appropriate level of impact when speaking of such things. That meme of somebody trying to sneak past laser beams to work with a therapist without being involuntarily committed exists for a reason.