Accepting oneself, a cognitive journey…

Underneath it all, at the core of my being, within my inner dialogue, in the very fibre of my being, I always new it. I was somehow different. Not different to everyone but different to the so called typical, different to what was considered to be desirable.

I can’t recall ever not having an internal dialogue about being different. Never in my life has there been a time where I wasn’t discussing with myself, working through internally, wondering out loud, looking up information or asking others, why it was I struggled to fit in, to make friends, to be acceptable to the world at large.

Throughout my childhood I endured significant trauma. Physical, sexual, emotional, verbal trauma were everyday experiences as I grew up. I don’t mention this as an attempt to garner sympathy or people to feel sorry for me. The very sad reality is that many people in this world experience similar and greater levels of traumatic experience than I did.

It is what it is.

Something that does seem to be true, however is that those with us who are marked out as different, in whatever form, are more likely to have experienced trauma. Who actually knows which predates which is one of those big questions of life. There is no doubt in my mind that I am different from the point of birth, but the question of whether that difference was increased and exacerbated by trauma, or more disturbingly was the trauma I endured more pronounced because of my being different.

The question itself is somewhat disturbing.

With all this in mind, I want to fast forward well into my adulthood. Living my life in a second marriage, parent of 3 children, struggling to maintain relationships, jobs, manage executive function and maintain a level of mental health that enabled me to function day to day.

By this time I had learned a lot about difference, I had embraced it to an extent. Two of my kids by now had been diagnosed autistic. Both my beautiful wonderful autistic girls present very differently to each other. Thanks to my former partner I had been able to learn much about autism as being definitively a state of difference not deficit.

Going through the diagnostic process with ones children opens the way, I think, for the parent, to engage their own cognitive journey about their own selves. To begin to genuine ask of themselves questions about the difference in themselves they have always known. Does this autism thing explain that difference in themselves. Well that was certainly the case in my situation.

It really was a cognitive journey. A journey of asking and assessing how one thinks, how one experience the world and relationships. One’s sensory experiences. So many things are suddenly up for analysis.

Personally that cognitive journey along a path of sometimes seeing autism as a good thing, sometimes as just a different thing, and sometimes as a negative thing.

It turns out that this journey began a little earlier than I thought it had. And honestly probably even earlier than I am truly aware of. My former partner was dropping hints for me pick up and investigate most likely I believe for longer than I was really aware of. I believe that at some level of sub consciousness I was thinking and considering these hints.

That’s why I think, that when I came across an old note I had made on Evernote where I directly asked myself the big question of maybe I am autistic, was far earlier than I remember really prosecuting that cognitive journey.

At some levels I was scared to take the journey in a deliberate way, and that too had levels. I recall the effort it took to verbalise the idea to my then parter that I think maybe, or do you think maybe, that I might be autistic too?

It took some effort to make that verbalisation, and then when it was out there, there was certainly a period of running from that too.

Personally my cognitive journey from first being aware of genuinely asking myself the questions to self-diagnosis and then formal diagnosis was a number of years, about 5 years of conscious journey and most likely a few more than that too.

Taking the journey is but one part. Accepting the outcome is another part completely. As I made my way through this journey and was able to answer things about myself, explain things about myself and my place in the world and the way I interacted int he world, I seemed on a trajectory of becoming more confident in the outcome. And so it was, with some level of certainty that I took myself off to a clinical psychologist for a formal diagnosis.

The outcome was as I believed it would be, though, the emotional questioning of myself and the thinking that maybe I was reading too much into thing and confirmation bias was at play and so forth were certainly present as I arrived at the psychologist to receive the results.

Generally at this point, I rightly believed I was autistic. Yet this didn’t prepare me for how I felt, and that I would struggle with accepting what this meant.

For a decade I had maintained a positive different not less attitude to autism and an attitude somewhat akin to the neurodiversity paradigm. In interacting with my kids, I wanted to understand and make their lives as good as they could be, and I wanted to do this without fixing or changing them.

But then suddenly I was diagnosed.

Suddenly I felt guilty.

I was angry at myself for what I had supposedly done to my children.

I was broken.

This was ridiculous. This was totally out of sync with what I had believed and how I had approached the reality of autism in my own kid, and in the kids I was privileged to teach in my short Primary School teaching career.

I was more depressed than normal. It made no sense to me that this was how I was, but it was how it was. I was somewhat angry at myself because of it.

It seemed I had to go on some level of a personal cognitive journey all over again. It was a journey that was punctuated by the idea that this is what you know and believe about autism, so why is it different now it applies officially to you.

I am thankful that this journey was relatively short, I think about 9 months. In this time I didn’t want to disclose my diagnosis, or when I did it was with some level of shame and embarrassment. The autistic pride I feel and try to convey was very far from present.

A chance meeting changed everything. At a conference in Brisbane, a short but instructive conversation with an eminent neuropsychologist changed everything. I was sharing with her my diagnosis, my feelings of shame and guilt. As I spoke and as she listened, suddenly the sheer ridiculousness of what I was saying seemed evident. Her response of saying to me Roe, listen to yourself, you know you’re talking shit. You’re just different, you and your kids are not less, you’re different and and wonderful. Embrace it.

In a moment, in a glimpse of time everything changed.

It was as though in that instant a paradigm shift occurred, internally my mindset shifted from guilt and shame to acceptance, celebration and pride.

The next day was the day I started my autistic focussed Facebook page and recommended blogging and writing.

Everything changed. And everything changed because of autistic pride.

Everything changed because of acceptance.

Everything changed because I could finally see and believe that autism really was:

DIFFERENT NOT LESS