Going through my diagnostic assessment (three and a bit years ago) was quite a big shock to me. I had the idea that because my assessment was so late in life, I must have only a very mild condition, which explained why no-one pointed anything out before. For sure, I had plenty of periods of acute depression, constant anxiety problems and lots of interventions from mental health workers, but they just led me to believe that there was a "normal" me hidden away inside that they would coax out into the open one day.
Then, at the assessment, the psychologist seemed to be making this endless list of things with weird names - dyspraxia, alexithymia, dissociation, executive function, hyperlexia, stimming, sensory modulation issues, sensory integration issues, ...etc... It quite often felt like I was getting a dozen or more diagnoses, as I had too little understanding of autism to see how they were just facets of the same overall condition. It really stunned me that I wasn't the "borderline case" that I suspected, but had all these profound differences in how my brain processed things compared to most people around me.
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When you are fighting an invisible monster, first throw a bucket of paint over it.
13 May 2018, 10:10 pm
