So, it has come to my attention that I am a lot more autistic then I actually was aware of. Even though I got the diagnosis as a teenager, it was always something I brushed off and never accommodated. It was always taken at face value but then I was told “oh you just have borderline personality disorder” or “you’re too high functioning to have ASD” when literally, I do have it. I personally have just never talked about it, never explored how it shows up in my life until the other day. I was talking to a close friend on facetime about how I’ve been struggling more with moving ect ect and he goes “dude, are you sure you’re just not autistic and got misdiagnosed with BPD” and I laughed and said “wait, you can... tell? I actually got an autism dx a teenager” and he looks at me and goes “yeah, dude, its obvious to me that you’re autistic” and so a few days later I was having another conversation with my best friend Noah who asked me to take the RAADs test, and lol I scored a 185/220 lol. Its not a matter of... proving I’m autistic, I think its more of... taking off the mask? When I was talking to them about it they said “you’ve been masking for 23 years, but none of your autism symptoms have actually gone away, you’ve just... learned how to live with in and not show your true self”.
After that conversation I started looking at how I live my life, about how I really only watch three TV shows, about how I really only engage with topics I am deeply passionate about. I thought those things were... just normal to me. When like, I do those things because I am literally just autistic. Its really scary to... be in a situation where now the questions I’m asking are “so what if I leaned into the dx as a teen and actually accommodated my autism, like, would my life be different” and the answer is yes. My aggression, emotional regulation issues, struggling to make and keep friends... that’s literally all because I’m fucking autistic lol, I plan on bringing it back up in therapy because while I know you can have comorbid disorders and ASD, I question my diagnosis now. Been a wild 48 hours and a lot of... internal questioning has me asking like, have I been living my life wrong? How do I start like unlearning and living my most authentic self?
