Not A Faulty Version Of Windows

What has changed for me since knowing I'm actually autistic?

At one point in time, I struggled to understand why I seemed to be the only one in a war with myself that I know I cannot win. I never thought of myself as an anomaly of society, until my diagnosis helped me to feel 'normal' and belonged in the autistic community.

Spectrumy, a late diagnosed autistic and ADHD mother, shred that "Autism took me from feeling like a failed person, to a person who had persevered through unrecognized and unsupported differences in my brain. I can't tell you the difference not feeling like a failure makes to my life."

Reading the lived experiences of other autistic people helps me to understand some of the difficulties I've been experiencing. For example, I was comforted to find words and terminology to address what I'm feeling at a particular moment.

And I found the best analogy for me. If everyone else was running on Windows, my brain was running on Linux. I am not a faulty version of Windows.

However as a newly diagnosed person, this can be quite overwhelming. Neurobeautiful, an autistic writer, describes this "When I first began learning about autism, I related to some traits but not others. I thought, at first, that I might be 'half autistic'."

In those moments where I feel like an autistic imposter, I will try to remind myself that autism exists on a spectrum. Besides, I also read about ADHD traits which relate to my lived experience, just that I don't wanna to be put through the anxiety and stress from undergoing yet another diagnosis assessment.

And I could not stop my autistic brain from analyzing episodes of traumatic moments in my 40+ years, where I either felt like an outcast or was struggling to keep it together until the breaking point. I used to describe myself as a volcano - where I would keep it all inside like a dormant volcano, until the pressure builds up and explodes like an active volcano. That I now know are masking and autistic meltdown.

I felt burdened when, just because I exist as a minority, I am tasked to educate people on autistic traits, or represent the neurominorities in my company, or provide another perspective that is different from the majority. Learning to self-advocate is survival skills for me, to survive in a challenging and messy world.

I was offended when people I knew for years asked me "then how autistic are you on the spectrum?" or told me what a job well done since they could not tell that I was autistic at all. This made me felt invalidated and somehow the need to heavily mask my autistic traits even more.

But I'm so tired now. Although I find myself automatically masking when meeting people for the first few times, I'm letting myself go. If they ever chance upon my blog where anything goes, they'll likely be surprised to see this side of me actually exists.