So, I’m kicking off a few autism related posts this April (which is autism awareness month) with a few basic facts about autism that you may (or may not) know.
I paid privately for formal testing and was therefore diagnosed at the age of 42 . The wheels came off for me when I stopped my highly structured teaching career and opted to start a business. Despite being an ASD specialist teacher it was like starting over, learning all about my own Autism. Suddenly the rest of my life started to make sense.
A few facts to get us started.
- No, everyone is not a ‘little bit autistic’. You either are or you aren’t and the diagnostic testing to find out is incredibly in depth and comprehensive.
- Hypersensitivity is very common. It’s different in different people. Mine is sound. Imagine this. I have no internal filter to block out background noises in busy cafes, for example. So I can hear every conversation, every noise in the background at the same volume at the same time. Yes, it becomes very overwhelming very quickly.
- Masking: something girls do a lot more than boys (covering up their ASD to appear normal). This is why girls and women are often missed. Or diagnosed a lot later in life.
- Autism is not a mental health condition. Our brains are wired differently to neurotypical people. We can’t just ‘stop being as autistic today’ or some other thing. This is how we are, this is how we experience the world. Get used to it, or move along out of here!
- We think in black and white, we experience emotions in black and white. We seriously struggle to understand any or the grey areas at all. So this means we very frequently misinterpret meaning in conversations because we just can’t decipher ambiguous meaning or ‘read between the lines’ like you can. There are a lot of words that describe the more subtle emotions that quite simply are line an alien language to me. I only recently figured out what ‘anxiety’ actually means. But I can’t use the word in context – I substitute it with my version, so things make sense.
- We usually H.A.T.E phones. Abstract words and conversations are just too hard to negotiate and make sense of. We have to work so hard at looking at expressions, listening to words, cross referencing that with what we know then translate it back to words that make up a response that social interactions are absolutely exhausting.
- For that reason silence and alone time is our way of recharging.
- Autism is not curable.
