the first person who noticed was actually my therapist (he brought it up when he noticed my box full of stim stuff) and i went “nahhh that can’t be right, i’m not autistic enough to be autistic… right…?” (i was afraid the autistic community would be Mad at me for butting in if i didn’t actually happen to be autistic enough to be officially Autistic)

then i actually started looking into it and i noticed that Yes, I actually was autistic, it took me a little longer to learn that the symptoms didn’t just Appear, there were a lot of ignored traits from when i was young,

apparently to the point where it was notable to my parents, notable enough for them to say something about it but not notable enough for them to put 1 and 1 together (examples, my extreme sensitivity to Loud Noises, bright lights, my very acute sense of smell, i was described as very observant, i repeated random lines from TV shows without realizing it and i had really obsessive and obscure interests such as the Mine girl from wordgirl)

my brother got diagnosed and I didn’t because my brother had meltdowns far more often than I did so he got noticed first and WOW the ableism is really layered hard on him, he’s a very sweet, bright and loving boy but he’s treated like utter crap… he has a much harder time communicating than i do, but I think it’s pretty easy to talk to him because when you treat him like an actual person, like he’s just one of your buddies, it’s really EASY to communicate with him, none of the people that complain about that seem to do that at all

it’s also important to state your boundaries when you’ve reached your limit bc communication is important to any kind of relationship, most of the people who complain about that don’t seem to realize that either

so it took me a really long time to fully accept the fact that i was autistic and release all the habits of masking I had picked up, going from “I just have a bunch of autistic traits so i probably don’t have autism” to “yes i am autistic end of story” and i am Very glad I did so because I am a lot happier as a result because i finally realized the reason i was so freaking stressed out and ready to have a Breakdown 24/7 was because of masking and overanalyzing everything i was saying in the hopes i would appear allistic

i do stim in public because i have only been noticably made fun of for stimming only once if i remember correctly (at that point i didn’t realize that what i was doing was stimming, but i LIKED to do it when i was listening to music because it enriched the experience so i didn’t stop just bc one person was being a punk)