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Emmett
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17 Apr 2023, 2:48 pm

It has helped me to understand my own life, why I fail in certain things over and over. It matters to the people that care about you, but probably won't make a difference to anyone else. For example, I'd never disclose my diagnosis to an employer. There are too many opportunities for them to secretly use it against me.



Joe90
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17 Apr 2023, 3:08 pm

I know I would have been better off without a diagnosis, at least not until adulthood anyway. Most females my age (and even younger) somehow managed to slip through the cracks all through childhood, not just at school but at home as well. But me, my behaviour was way too obvious, but instead of diagnosing me with ADHD they were insistent on Asperger's.

I saw some of my old reports from when I was 4 years old in my first few weeks of school. It seemed like whoever wrote the report was staring at me for hours, writing down every little move I made and pinpointing it down to a "problem" instead of just normal 4-year-old behaviour. I bet if they just wrote the problem behaviour down the report would have been less than half the length.

It's like they were just so insistent on getting me diagnosed and basically threatened my parents into it. I think all this trauma has contributed to the reason why I hate being on the spectrum. It was all stress my parents could have done without. I was happy before being labelled.


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MatchboxVagabond
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19 Apr 2023, 10:51 pm

Joe90 wrote:
I know I would have been better off without a diagnosis, at least not until adulthood anyway. Most females my age (and even younger) somehow managed to slip through the cracks all through childhood, not just at school but at home as well. But me, my behaviour was way too obvious, but instead of diagnosing me with ADHD they were insistent on Asperger's.

I saw some of my old reports from when I was 4 years old in my first few weeks of school. It seemed like whoever wrote the report was staring at me for hours, writing down every little move I made and pinpointing it down to a "problem" instead of just normal 4-year-old behaviour. I bet if they just wrote the problem behaviour down the report would have been less than half the length.

It's like they were just so insistent on getting me diagnosed and basically threatened my parents into it. I think all this trauma has contributed to the reason why I hate being on the spectrum. It was all stress my parents could have done without. I was happy before being labelled.

I wonder a bit about this. I tend to agree with you that I'm glad that nobody mentioned the possibility to me until I was already out of college for the first time. But, I do wonder how much of that is inherent to being ASD in an NT world and how much of it was due to the ignorance of how the condition was being handled at that time.

Personally, most of the worst things about my childhood have nothing really to do with ASD other than being bullied and that might well have had to do with the fact that I hit puberty a bit later than the other students and for boys, that tends to lead to bullying. (For whatever reason the opposite pattern applies to girls, the ones that hit puberty first get bullied)