#feel different

Who else loves reading their Solar Return Charts? 😂

I think everyone autistic people has felt this way. And it's really very present when you have been diagnosed late.

When I was a kid, I didn't really understand what was wrong. I felt that there is like a disconnection with the other children. They made it clear to me that I was weird and that they didn't want me. In elementary school, they even had fun calling me "the bacteria".

Later I was with other students, but nothing to do... They still bullied me. (It lasted 10 years, but that's not the point)

I knew full well that at my age all teenagers felt different. It is well known, everyone has an "I'm not like the others" period, right ?

But I don't know... I REALLY felt out of place. It wasn't just a teenage discomfort, it was really overwhelming.

So I started looking for excuses for this difference. I'm a little ashamed but I had "chunibyo" for a very long time... I linked my "symptoms" to supernatural things, but it changed every time. I was like "if I'm like that, it's because I'm sensitive to magic", "if I'm like that, it's because I'm a werewolf" or "if I'm like that, it's because I'm from another world", that sort of thing. It reassured me to tell myself that, and it proved my bullies wrong, so I thought about it for a very long time, until I was 15.

But after a while I was forced to admit that it was rubbish and that it didn't make sense. So I just admitted that I was just a loser, that I would never have any friends and that I was an idiot.

After a while, I realized I was trans and aroace. It gave me an "explanation" for a little while, but I knew there was another reason. So I always thought that I was just a crummy and an incompetent...

Obviously, it was more and more difficult to be attentive in class. I had always had a lot of absences, but this time I was beating some records. Because of bullying, I started to have a school phobia... A lot of things happened in my life at the same time as that, and boom !

When I was 16, I had autistic burnout followed by depression.

I had to go to several psychiatrists and that's when I was diagnosed autistic.

The most incredible thing is that my mother confessed to me later that when I was in elementary school my teachers had advised her several times to take me to a psychiatrist because they suspected that I was neuroatypical, but she had never accepted.

But other than that, no other teachers I had later suspected anything, even though I happened to do meltdowns and shutdowns at school ! For them I was just an "antisocial", a "capricious" and a "lazy"...