@actuallyautistic

Much of the difficulty in realising and accepting that we are autistic much later in life comes, in part, from the fact that we have been exposed to so many ableist stereotypes of it through our lifetime. The rest from the reality that much of the information we may have, is either outdated, or such that we struggle to see ourselves in it. It means that we have to spend a considerable amount of effort both in digging out and dealing with our internalised ableism, a somewhat ongoing process for many of us, and also educating ourselves on the reality of what autism is.

Such education quickly reveals that what it mostly is, is a spectrum of difference. It really is true that no two of us are alike. It may only be in the difference in which something affects us, its intensity, or the degree to which it affects our ability to function or cope. Or it may be in the aspects that we experience that others don't and vice versa. We also have to realise that whilst autism is often described by the way that it manifests, in terms of the various traits associated with it. That doesn't mean that you have to manifest all those traits to be autistic. Nor does it mean that there is one and only one way that those traits can look. Each of us, in this, really are different.

To further muddy these waters. The older we are when we begin this process, the longer we've obviously lived. In other words, the longer we have lived with what being autistic meant for us. Not by name obviously, but in terms of the ways we've learnt, as often as not the hard way, what we can and can't do, how we struggle, when we don't, our strengths and our weaknesses. And we haven't just ignored this, as much as possible we've built our lives around it. Obviously not ideally, we didn't always have the knowledge to be able to set the right boundaries, or the paths we should, or shouldn't walk down, regardless of what others wanted from us or even how we thought we should be. But still, as much as we could, we walked a path that was a reaction to what we were. That meant that over time we could learn to hide and compensate, to try and take advantage of our strengths and fear our weaknesses, adjust and compensate. In fact to continually layer the products of false awareness and understandings, of guess work and trial and error, over our behaviours, like papering over a crack, until the original could hardly be seen any more and we could at least get by.

This is why it can be so difficult to realise that you are autistic and everything about it now. So much of what is described is the cause of our behaviour today, but not the behaviour itself. And seeing past that to the root of the behaviour and the way we are and that it can still be different from how others are, is the reason why it takes so long and why so much of it, is still an ongoing process.

#Autism
#ActuallyAutistic