My Autism diagnoses

I self diagnosed at the age of 30, after seeing, in the female lead of the netflix series “queens gambit”, behaviors and “peculiarities” that mirrored my own as a child. Forgotten behavior’s I’d long since learned to forsake. Not very accepting of autistic peculiarites, was the society to which I was born…

Sorry South Africa, I’m going to hate on you a little bit. You kind of deserve it. Well, small town South Africa does at any rate. I cannot speak from the perspective of someone growing up in a city…although I am of the opinion that there is a kind of nation wide abuse going on that no one really acknowledges.

Until we hit middle age/have children of our own, and the monsters will no longer remain in the closet. They come out raging and we sedate them with SSRI’s. And this is not in anyway restricted to South Africa…it is a global issue. BUT. South Africa does have its own individual brand of trauma and the way that said trauma manifests is unique to the people of our very complex and diverse country. So too do Germans, so too do Americans…Chinese…Malawians…and on and on. It’s all at once fascinating and incredibly sad…the depths to which my and previous generations of humans were traumatized. The scientist in me is fascinated with the cause and effect of it all…and the artist in me is distressed at the sheer enormity of generational/collective trauma.

I digress, back on topic.

At this point I would like to clarify that I do have an official ADD and autism diagnoses. Not that I really needed one…

I know from experience that the term “self diagnoses” will result in an immediate raising of the collective eyebrow. I really wish that this was not the case. It is a very frustrating thing, to have your theories, hypothesis, ideas and opinions totally invalidated by the knee jerk reaction of a species that has been brainwashed into believing that we are not allowed to use our own minds to make psychological or physiological deductions. I am labelled a layperson and told to stay in my lane. I say, if you have the intellect (as I am sure many or even most of us, do) to educate ourselves we will of course be able to identify whatever is amiss in our minds and bodies. In fact I’d go so far as to say that this is part of the process of becoming Self(and self) aware. Something that the powers that be are trying to avoid, perhaps?

Moving swiftly along (removes tin-foil hat….)

At first, I was in denial about the whole thing. When a google search revealed that the protagonist was written to have (what was then termed) “Aspergers”, I was like…

“pffft. I DO NOT have aspergers….”

.

.

“Wait, what is Aspergers?”

And so my search began. And it didn’t take very much digging before the initial denial became certainty.

I WAS Autistic.

And I was going to tell the world.

Part 2 coming soon….