Diagnosed today

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I visited Professor Digby Tantam at his clinic in Sheffield (UK). I had brought quite a long list of notes and 'observations' for him, but he didn't even need to go into them in too much detail. He spoke to me for around two hours, and said that he thinks I have Asperger's. It's mild, but he was in no doubt. He's going to send a letter to my own doctor to inform him.

I'm shocked, because despite everything I've read and related to, I still thought he'd either say I didn't have it and should just go into therapy, or at the most had 'some autistic traits' or some such.

I just don't know how I feel at the moment, relieved or slightly depressed. Relieved that I was right, that I'm not simply insane, and things in the past weren't my fault. Depressed that now I can't even pretend to myself that I'm 'normal'.

You are the same person you were before your diagnosis, just that you can know better what to expect without puzzling over why you do each little thing ... If you thought you were on the weird side of normal before, you're still on the weird side of normal now.

Congratulations!! Knowing why you are you is a liberating experience. Trying to change some of the things about you that limit who you are is the next step.

Congrats!! !

It's been nearly a year for me now and I'm still going through those types of feelings, unsure whether to breathe a sigh of relief or weep in hopelessness and despair. Sometimes I do both nearly at once.

One of the funny things (peculiar funny, but also a little ha-ha ironic) about coming to terms with the idea that my oddness is actually an atypical brain function, is that I realize more and more all the time just how glaringly obvious it has been to those around me for years that I was not just intelligent and unique, but exceedingly odd and eccentric. In other words, they knew all the time there was something definitely 'wrong' with me, while I saw myself as just a bit eclectic and somewhat aloof. Embarrassingly enough, I think the notion that I have a 'mental disorder' is far more of a shock to me than to friends, family and coworkers.

And still, I can't shed the feeling that I'm the rational one, and it's they who have a problem...

That's exactly how it feels.

I think this is all part of the process. It was the same for me - Elation, relief, then anger and depression, then acceptance. Not to say I don't feel down about it sometimes, but then it's still early for me too. You just need time to come to absorb everything, mull it over and come to terms with it.

Congratulations on your diagnoses all the same.

But I think "normal" is all relative. There are some decidedly abnormal NT people out there.

I agree - it's questionable what should deemed to be a 'disorder'. Sometimes I think that it's only considered a disorder if the behavior is socially unacceptable.



Yes - there have been some excellent threads here recently analyzing/explaining NT behavior, for instance, and it's only after reading them that I started to realize that I haven't been just 'getting it wrong', but getting it even more wrong than I imagined! That what I had seen as simply being more of a difference in the preferences of myself and most people (even that they were stupid/petty and I was somehow of superior intelligence for having no interest) is actually me missing an entire undercurrent to the activity or interaction which is blindingly obvious to them and is the whole purpose of engaging in it.

Thankyou to everyone who posted congratulatory replies.

welcome to aspieland hehe
I've had constant changes of my feelings towards my diagnosis, I started off excited, then intruiged, then indifferent, then last year I was denying it and hating it, now I'm back to intruiged again because sinse joining this site I have found more things I do that I didn't know were related.

Congratulations!