10 Jul 2016, 12:58 pm
I was diagnosed with PDD-NOS as a small child, which was revised to Asperger's syndrome in seventh grade, and then subsumed into autism spectrum disorder with the publication of the DSM-5. I also have ADHD, which I could not technically be diagnosed with under the DSM-IV. The DSM-5 allows a cross-diagnosis with autism, but I did not receive an evaluation until the end of eleventh grade, because my dad thought I needed to work harder and my mother was scared of stimulants. I also fit the picture of Tourette's syndrome fairly well, right down to involuntary cursing (which is a rare symptom, clinically speaking), but it is notably less impairing than the other two.
I was incredibly disorganized for most of my life, but I consistently earned moderately high grades, because I could score perfectly on tests after reading the material only once. I also understood language well enough to read many adult-length novels well before middle school, though I did not always fully understand them. Both of these are strengths sometimes associated with autism, but I won't draw any conclusions—it's better not to be disappointed. In a similar (but less supported) vein, quite a few people have attempted to link it to my high IQ, but I have found little evidence for that scientifically.
I am rarely insulted personally, but I made myself very, very depressed for a while by watching the bravado in Internet conflicts and attempting to calculate a consistent, unbiased level of empathy and aggression that would not render one a wimp or a hypocrite. This led me to beat myself up whenever I felt bad about anything, as I saw people do to their enemies. I took the "don't make excuses" concept about mental disorders to a similar extreme, leaving myself an embittered creature who mentally savaged every weakness he ever saw, in himself or others. I did not like myself in this state, but I felt that it was necessary in order to avoid being biased or sensitive. I now see that those concepts cannot easily be reconciled in an objective manner, because they were never objective to begin with. We treat our friends better than outsiders because our instincts tell us to, not because only one group has flaws. We expect kindness for ourselves, the freedom to look down on others, and the ability to do both without losing either. The solution I found was to treat many of those boundaries and conflicts like fog, because they essentially are. This is probably antisocial, but you would not like me when I try to respect them. Life is not generally fair or honest, whatever we might desire. You can acknowledge the fundamental horror of this, or you can twist it into a way to sound tough and silence those who do.
I don't want to be fully normal, since social norms are ultimately man-made, but I would happily eliminate my ADHD if that were possible, and my ideal self would not necessarily meet the criteria for autism. In that, some neurodiversity advocates may not like me. I wish I could see it as a positive variation, but I feel dishonest when I try, and I've seen the "gift" view of ADHD become a backdoor means of shaming. There is no approach I know of that does not carry drawbacks.
