A highly edited form of this ran online on Insider.com today. Here it is with a lot more context that they edited out…
When my friend Jenn came out to me, the morning after she came out to her husband (now ex-husband), the reaction in my head was “are you sure?”
I didn’t say that out loud, thank God, because a woman like Jenn, raised in strict conservative Christianity, doesn’t tell her husband that she’s queer and upend their suburban life with four kids unless she. is. sure.
I’ve been thinking about Jenn a lot lately. Because I’m expecting some forms of “are you sure?” from people who have only seen one side of me.
I’m autistic.
And, yes, I am sure, as are my therapist and psychiatrist and others who are in roles in which weighing in diagnostically is appropriate. (Random people on the internet are not among them. I will not debate my autism diagnosis with strangers, because my identity does not require the validation of the online people among us.)
Autistic people are more vulnerable to being abused but we’re also less likely to show traditionally understood signs of child abuse because those signs are based on neurotypical kids. For me, PTSD and autism go hand in hand, and masking tools for each contributed to hiding the other.
I’m a firm believer of autism as a difference in how the brain works, with some attributes being functionally disabling in our world. We all need different supports in different situations at different times. I would be described by some as “high functioning” with “low support needs,” but that minimizes the realities by making it sound like I have Diet Autism, made to taste like the real thing but not quite.
Being autistic without a diagnosis, having ADHD undiagnosed, and living with PTSD unaware? All my life, I’ve felt fundamentally flawed, failing at being a person. I was diagnosed with lifelong complex PTSD in 2016, true from early childhood but not given a name until I was 34. Then came my ADHD diagnosis less than a year ago. And now, in a process that began with my oldest child’s autism diagnosis, I was diagnosed with autism myself in 2022.
(If you’re keeping track, yes, all the white Dingles are autistic. We also all have ADHD, PTSD, and anxiety, and the DSM is basically one of our family albums. As for me and my gene pool, we will be neurodivergent.)
I have a teaching license in autism education birth through grade twelve and an M.A.Ed. in Special Ed, with autism as one of my areas of specialty. I finished that master’s when Robbie was nine months old; later, I diagnosed Robbie with autism when he was two. We didn’t bother having him formally diagnosed until age seven.
Yes, learning that I’m autistic on the cusp of turning 40 was a lot. Still is. More so, though, it makes sense of a lot.
I’ve always seen myself as fundamentally flawed and wrong at being a person. PTSD explained pieces of that but not all of it. ADHD helped give more pieces to the puzzle of who I am. Now, using the lens of autism to reflect on my life experiences is maybe the first time I’ve ever felt like I can actually give myself a break. I’m not flawed and wrong at being a person after all. I merely fail at being a neurotypical person because I’m not neurotypical and was never meant to be. That shift in thinking allows me to make sense of my life as a full person, not broken, not deficient, not lacking.
I’ve been trying to be apples and oranges when I’ve been a blueberry all along.
All my life, I’ve watched people and mirrored them. My big sister was my first. My best friend Hannah and her family were next. Then I can name the kids in elementary school who I used as my models: Kendra, Jocelyn, Devin.
I didn’t like other kids, though. Wait, that’s not right. I liked other kids. I didn’t know how to speak their language of social interactions. I preferred littler kids or adults. Or more often than not, I preferred books more than any sort of people.
You can study all the people in books by staring right at them, whereas I had to try not to be creepy like that when I studied other kids. Book characters don’t care if you copy them. School peers do.
On a darker note, I used news articles about child abuse and textbooks about trauma to figure out the scripts to follow for surviving the hell that was my childhood. I didn’t have people to mirror. I did have Sara Crewe, and I read A Little Princess over and over and over to revisit her, study her, imagine I might have a rescuer who never came.
I met Lee when I was 18, and while he wasn’t a rescuer, he did become the filter I needed for support. He moderated between me and the world. When I couldn’t speak the same social language as others, I translated the world using him.
When he died, I didn’t only lose my husband. I lost the support mechanism for making sense of everything outside of myself.
Then, five months after he died, COVID entered stage left. Talk about mental whiplash. I didn’t have anyone to mirror while our family locked down to stay alive. (When people say “it’s only really dangerous for people with preexisting conditions,” we are the people whose lives are being dismissed.)
In interaction after interaction — particularly in moments of conflict — I was dealing with apples and oranges who didn’t speak blueberry. When Wake County schools abdicated their responsibility to educate disabled kids during the pandemic and gaslit the parents who fought for their kids, I didn’t have Lee to moderate. When I had to work with our home insurance and misogynistic contractors after our HVAC unit got clogged and the failsafe failed and our house flooded, Lee couldn’t translate that world for me. When I didn’t realize until a month and a half into our rental situation that the man renting to us was coming into the house without permission and what seemed like kindness to me at first was sexual advances? I didn’t know, and then I had to move us out with haste to extricate us from that nightmare.
(Please don’t try to offer advice on any of that. It will be more traumatizing than helpful, and events are resolved now.)
Now I finally know that we are speaking different languages. I finally realize that I need someone to help me with translation sometimes. I finally have a name and explanation for why I’ve never been successful at being neurotypical.
I’ll be figuring this out, often out loud. I might decide that my blueberry, apple, orange analogy is a poor one and rewrite it. We’ll see.
I’m here, and I’m autistic. I’m not flawed, broken, or less than others, and I’m sure about that
