My Brain Is Officially Special!

I'm "actually autistic" and glad about it

a lone bloom I found recently, which my phone says is a yellow trout lily

It’s official: my brain is special! Today I finally finished the diagnostic process and received my set of diagnoses:

1. Autism level 1 (formerly known as Asperger’s)

2. ADHD inattentive type (formerly known as ADD)

3. Generalized Anxiety Disorder

4. (Also “giftedness” of above-average IQ—not technically a diagnosis, but it seems to strongly factor into each of the above.)

When I was growing up, these things weren’t widely known about, tested for, and accepted to the degree they are now. I look back and see so many ways that I struggled without understanding why.

So, today, I am feeling validated and freed to have official* labels for the ways in which my brain has always felt awkwardly different from other people’s. I feel validated about my past struggles and freed for my future: now I can just move forward with finding my best options for living my best life, without spending any more time or energy on trying to fit into norms that aren’t mine.

*(But I also understand the validity of self-diagnosis, for those who do their own research and reasoning about their diagnoses. Plenty of people don’t have sufficient resources to jump through all the hoops required in the medical diagnostic process.)

As for the people who still view these diagnoses with stigma and prejudice, I think they just don’t yet understand what the labels of “autism” and “ADHD” actually mean. That’s a large part of why I’m writing this post: to further promote understanding of these conditions.

On My Spectrum

To that end, here are some ways my autism and ADHD (both of which fall under the umbrella term “neurodivergence”) show up in my life—emphasis on my, because neurodivergent traits show up quite differently in different people. That’s why it’s called a “spectrum,” though it’s more like a color wheel, with different people having more or fewer characteristics of the different colors/symptoms.

This is from a Psychology Today article about autism

My wheel generally contains:

• Struggles with sensory overload: I’m sensitive to bright lights (especially fluorescents), movement, and most of all, noise. I get anxious and can’t think when there’s a lot of noise. I’ve taken to keeping earplugs and sunglasses with me at all times. Those help significantly, though not entirely.

• Social strain: I am very interested in people, but actual social interactions tend to be quite stressful for me. I usually need a substantial recovery period afterward.

• Slow processing of internal information:

  • Mentally/emotionally: When it comes to my feelings and opinions, my mind seems to work very slowly compared to other people’s. I take a long time to process my feelings about conversations, events, and ideas. But when it comes to recalling non-personal information or making connections between diverse things, my brain often seems extra fast.

  • Physically: I also, like a lot of autistic people, have some trouble noticing and responding to my bodily sensations. This is one major place where my ADHD can manifest as well: I tend to get into “hyperfocus” on an interesting project and put off eating, often without even realizing I’m hungry, until I’m weak, headachy, and melting down from needing to eat.

• Gullibility: While I’m slow to process my own thoughts, I’m quick to trust and believe what other people say. This can be problematic in various ways, such as contributing to my default tendency to put more weight on other people’s needs than my own. Also, given the highly religious environment in which I was raised, I think my gullibility played a large role in what I now feel was my spiritual abuse.

• Need for routine: I feel calm when there’s a routine to follow, and I feel stressed when the routine gets altered.

• Aversion to surprises: similarly, I really, really, really don’t like surprises. This seems related to the slow processing thing—my brain needs all its resources to process what’s already going on, and surprises throw me off and stress me out.

• Aversion to being perceived: I also really, really, really don’t like being perceived. I only feel truly relaxed when no one else can see me. I’ve even been realizing that I don’t like eye contact, for this reason.

• Preference for being quiet: being “late diagnosed” and “high masking,” I grew up feeling compelled to respond to people, immediately and amiably. Now, as I “unmask,” I find that I strongly prefer to not answer right away and sometimes not at all. I also prefer to avoid small talk and silence-filling chatter. I need to be quiet so I can hear myself think, until I’m ready to talk.

• Having “special interests”: I definitely have the “special interests” component of autism, though it’s taken me a while to realize, because they’re not as obvious as something like trains or dinosaurs. But they are all things that I would happily talk on and on about or ask a lot of questions about in a social situation where I would otherwise be feeling really stressed and anxious. You probably won’t be surprised to hear what they are:

  • 1. Writing!

  • 2. Reading/books/learning

  • 3. Personal growth

  • 4. People (who they are, who they’re related to, what their history is, and what it’s like inside their heads)

• What I call “shuffle brain”: I think it’s a manifestation of ADHD that my brain can’t just follow one track at a time; I always have multiple thoughts going on at once and multiple things I’m doing at once. When it comes to tasks and projects, my brain works like a playlist on shuffle, switching from one thing to another.

  • One way this shows up problematically is household clutter: I’ll set something down in a random place and (given that everyone else in my home is neurodivergent as well) it will just stay there for months, until awareness of it comes back to the top of my mental playlist. In the meantime, it’s like I’m blind to it. Multiply this by many objects, and, well, it’s no wonder our house is chronically messy!

  • When it comes to my special interests of writing and reading, I seem to work best when I have several different writing projects going at once and several different books I’m reading, so I can switch around according to my current levels of energy and interest.

• Basic daily task struggles:

  • Eating and fixing food for myself and my family is a chronic struggle for me (I wrote about this some in my post “Life Is Better as a Practice”), as it involves complex decisions, time pressure, messiness, and texture/food discomfort (I get squeamish about mushy foods and most meats).

  • Mornings are hard. It takes me a long time to feel actually functional in the morning, and the same is true of my (neurodivergent) kids, so we’re just always late.

  • I need a lot of solitude/quiet/downtime, which is hard with kids, obviously. This means that if I haven’t managed to get this need met very well during the day, I tend to stay up late at night to get it, depriving myself of much-needed sleep. I’m working on learning to better prioritize my needs (as I keep writing about on this blog in various ways!), but I feel like I’ve got a long way to go.

Points of connection

Thank you for reading! Do you relate to any of these things?

I’m thinking I may write a post about ways my neurodivergence manifested when I was growing up, though I didn’t understand it at the time. Would this interest you?

Whatever our brain type, may we become the best, fullest, and truest versions of ourselves.

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