Strangely I feel more resentful of being diagnosed with AS in childhood than I am of having the disorder itself. Usually more ''severe'' people get diagnosed in childhood, and I'm nowhere near severe, social-wise. I've always been a good communicator and lacked common autism stereotypical behaviours or special interests.
I just felt my life has been too boring. I'm not invalidating other people's experiences here of not receiving a diagnosis in childhood, but what I'm saying is from personal experience only and that I was very unhappy and angry and confused about knowing I had a diagnosis as what I may have been if I hadn't known what was ''wrong'' with me.
The thing is, being diagnosed in childhood and getting statemented at school, it feels like your life is mapped out for you. You can't really do the normal teenage rebellion because you're more watched closely throughout school by your mentor, so if you didn't turn up to any classes your mentor will take a note and pass it to your form-tutor and your parents, and it's just harder to get away with such things. Also having a mentor in class with me marred my reputation to my peers, making them think I was ''ret*d'' and feeling embarrassed about being seen hanging out with me. So I became socially isolated and lonely and just relied on my mentor for friendship, further socially isolating me from my peers.
So I did feel like my diagnosis had become a hindrance and looking back I think that I probably would have engaged more in friendships with my peers had I not have got diagnosed. I might have ''went off the rails'' a bit, but in a way I sort of wanted to but had nobody to go off the rails with. My sister went off the rails by getting involved with boys and having to be grounded by our parents, causing lots of normal teenage arguments. I'm NOT saying that's good, but all I could do was watch all this drama unfold and be no part in it and just live like a 5-year-old kid; always kept safe indoors and leading a predictable innocent life where nothing happened to me and no boys liked me and no friends wanted me. I was probably the ideal teenager really, but not really, as I had a lot of outbursts of feeling sorry for myself because of my overwhelming social isolation and worthlessness, which caused a different set of problems for my parents.
It's difficult to explain. I'm probably just seeing the grass as greener but I just felt disconnected and out of touch when I was a teenager. I tried to rebel a bit in school but it didn't really work. I tried seeming cool, while blissfully unaware that having unshaved legs exposed is totally socially unacceptable when you're female, so while trying to be cool I just looked like a jackass in PE class wearing shorts with legs covered in hair, to which everyone seemed too polite to say in the first couple of years of having hairy legs but then some girls pointed and giggled at my legs just as we were coming to an end of our school lives. I wish they had pointed and giggled earlier on so that it could have been a wake-up call I needed to make more effort to fit in as a teenage girl. My mum often told me to shave my legs back then but being so she was my mum I never listened to her, and I didn't exactly look at the other girls' legs and I had no close friends to learn these things from. So I learnt the hard way instead.
But I'm not, repeat, NOT, implying that I wish anything that could cause trauma happened to me. I'm just saying that I wish I had a more active teenage sort of life, in experimenting and having fun. Instead I just felt behind, watching all of it but never being party to it.
07 Jun 2025, 6:03 am
