How I Felt Before My Autism Diagnosis

How am I different today than I was, say, maybe 30 to 40 years ago? I would say I am a lot more intelligent than I was when I was younger, though I am still making mistakes in life. But that only shows I am human like everybody else.

I am able to do things I never thought possible. I am able to live independently with a little help. I have lived in my own apartment for just about 12 years now. I can cook for myself. I do some of the cleaning of my place and do all the grocery shopping. I can go places by mass transportation, and I have a pet I adore. I am able to volunteer at two museums because I cannot work a regular 9 to 5 job because of a medical condition. I am a board member of a local autism society. I can take mass transit to places I need to be. I did not know how how to do this when I was younger.

I am a respected by my peers in our autism community. I have been to a couple of autism conferences in the last several years, plus I have been nominated by a well-respected person in the field of autism. This award I will be receiving in a couple of months is named after this person. There are so many ways I am different from when I was younger. I have found in the last couple of years that many of my former classmates from elementary through high school who found me to be “weird” and would bully me have now become my closest friends. They love and care for me, not for what I have but for who I am as a person. They have come to respect me because I have tried to teach them about autism because I do not want them to be afraid of people who are different than themselves.

Today I am proud of the work I am doing in the autism community. I forgot to mention I was made the leader of our autism support group. I am working to make this group a success. I believe many of these things I have spoken about would not have happened many years ago if it was not for the encouragement of my friend and mentor Georgia, the first volunteer leader of our group who saw something in me I never saw in myself: confidence in my abilities. I asked to find important people in the greater Harrisburg area to get our group’s voice heard. I am the group’s Chairman of the Guest Speaker Series. I am the one who goes out to find different speakers for our monthly group meetings. I have been doing this now for many years, and each time I get someone, my confidence grows and grows.

Now, how did I feel before I got the correct diagnosis? I think I felt “lost” because I did not really understand myself and what was going on with me. Originally I had a diagnosis of a learning disability back in the early 1990s. In my early youth and into my adulthood I was doing things not anybody else in my family did. I always felt like the black sheep of the family because of things I was doing. I look back now and see I did a lot of “strange” things. I did not get the correct diagnosis until years later, Asperger syndrome. It took me a long time to fully understand what this diagnosis meant.

I had two different main interests other family members did not have, and now I understand why that might have been. Now I am able to help other adults on the spectrum understand their diagnosis and answer questions they may have and help their families through this period of adjustment. My diagnosis has helped open doors for me I never really expected to open.

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Thinkstock image by den-belitsky