It's all so glaringly obvious to me in retrospect. Not to others though. "I am autistic," I say, and they say, "no you aren't, you can't be".
Well here's the thing. I am. The 45/50 says I am. The trained qualified clinical psychologist says I am. But truth be told.
Tony Attwood and his absolutely mind-blowing explanations of how
autism, and especially Asperger's, affects women rather differently than men told me I was.
I've been diagnosed with autistic spectrum disorder, depression and anxiety in the space of six months. "I don't know who I am, who are you?" still runs through my head. But alongside it runs something else: an understanding, an ability to cut myself some slack. The person who read me the letter didn't understand why I was coming across one way when I was intending to come across in a completely different way. My boss didn't understand. No one understood, least of all me. It turns out, in the end, that the prevailing theory is that I am allergic to people, currently. If I spend any time with anyone but my other half, I pay for it. I am exhausted, often for days after. We think that this is because I am doing so much processing, trying to fit in and not stick out as being different that I've worn out my brain a bit.
....
The simple fact is, I was burning through massive amounts of processing power, just trying to look like all of you. There was nothing left to do my job. I remember someone commenting loudly in the office that I looked exhausted every evening.
Well I was. This is why. I was, as servers go, running at max. The line was at the top all the time. It was so bad by the end I couldn't drop out of fight or flight. I'd been in it for months by that point. It was normal. I burned through all my reserves, I burned through everything. Right down to the bone.
And then I snapped.
