to no one's surprise: i am autistic. wow! i know right? what a revelatory fact about me. we knew this. i have acted for a long time in my life as if i am autistic. which i am.
ok, this week i recieved an Actual Diagnosis. i still feel, somehow, that i have conned several professionals into giving me various diagnoses by being the most best manipulator that there ever was, that even i do not know i am manipulating everyone. i'm sure this is a normal feeling.
i didn't feel much at first, i guess, because i expected it. i would be more surprised and confused if they said, no, you are not autistic. then there would have to be another reason why i am so........ yeah.
something i thought was interesting was they sent me an additional questionnaire after the video call assessment. i am interested in psychiatry, so i looked it up to see that it's a test intended to gauge a level of masking in an individual.
i didn't ever think that i mask a lot, or am particularly good at it, but i guess i do. i tallied up my own score for the questionnaire and found i scored really high (lol), which i guess just goes to show my stealth skills amongst the general populace are super mega elite.
that said. i guess it makes sense. i feel profoundly disconnected from my actual wants, desires, and being. the mask has run so deep that i don't know where it ends and where i begin. i want to unmask, as it were, and choose things that i want and enjoy, and i don't know how to tell that i want those things, and not the proxy of someone else's/societies desires in my brain.
there's an underlying feeling of resentment or grief, which a lot of people say happens. i thought i might be immune to it, since i was expecting it, but i guess even expecting the diagnosis does not make me safe from emotions.
i know that it was brought up to my mum as a child that i might be autistic, and suggested as an avenue for her to explore. and i don't blame her for this, but i still feel something about it nonetheless; she obviously never went ahead with it, and did once tell me her reasoning: she did not want for me to have a 'label' to go through life with.
bearing in mind that this was the 90s, and my mum was of the 60s. there just wasn't the same ideas around autism back then, that there are now. she didn't wish me to be classed as a 'special' kid, for lack of a better word, even though i obviously was different. i will never know, i guess, how it would have played out.
knowing mum, things might have played out the same, anyway. i don't/didn't present typically autistic. i just think, i wonder how different i might have turned out, as a person, if i had the reason for my sensitivity, for why i struggled with interaction.
maybe i would not have clung to the first form of validation that appeared and thus avoided an abusive relationship which broke me (the real me - because i think after this point was when the mask began) and set me up for decades of repeating the same cycle upon myself.
i wonder what she would have been like, unhidden by years of wrapping my vulnerability in whatever i could to be liked, and loved, because that is how i could be safe.
i don't know who she is. and in all seriousness... how do i begin to find her?
15-02-2026