I hope this ask doesn’t upset you ... but I know a lot of ppl say they feel relieved about getting a diagnosis. But for me it’s always been the opposite. Like oh so I can’t change all these things about myself that make me weird and it really hard to make friends .... I’ll just be like this forever. I just don’t know how to stop hating myself for being autistic. Sorry if this is upsetting at all it’s just a weird feeling I feel very alone in this world
First, it’s super, super thoughtful of you to worry if this ask would upset me. But don’t worry. I started this blog as a way for autistics to talk about the hard subjects, the stuff we can’t talk about anywhere else. So this ask is welcome.
I have times when I hate my autism. For example, the third drink I spill in a day. Or the time my hands didn’t listen to me and I dropped my great-grandmother’s vase on a tile floor, and watched it shatter into a thousand pieces. Or when I get yelled at at work, for “saying it wrong” or “talking to the wrong people”, or when my friends are talking and what they’re saying is so confusing to me that I just sit quietly and feel left out, or when my partner and I are arguing, and I have to ask him to “please repeat that”, three times, while he’s yelling at me.
I hate all of that. And I have tried and tried and tried to fix those things all my life, and gotten nowhere, and it’s frustrating as hell.
Where the relief came in is this. Before I was autistic, I didn’t know why I couldn’t fix those things. I didn’t know why I could try and try and try my hardest, and STILL FAIL, constantly, forever. It made me feel like a loser. It make me feel like a failure. That it was my fault, as everyone around me always said it was. That the reason I failed was because I wasn’t “paying attention” or “being careful” or “thinking before I spoke”. The failure was on ME. It was MY fault, and I was a loser for not being able to fix it.
So when I got my diagnosis, while alllll the challenges I still faced were there, one thing changed. I learned that it was not my fault! It wasn’t my fault! My brain was literally wired differenlty. It wasn’t that I wasn’t trying! I really had been trying ! I really had been caring, I really had been paying attention, very hard, just like I said I was!
Everything I’d ever said about myself was TRUE! I did care! I was trying! It was just hard for me to do those things, AND NOW I KNEW WHY.
So the relief came from being released from the accusation. There wasn’t something wrong with ME, as a person. It wasn’t a personal flaw of mine that caused me to have these struggles. The thing that was wrong was my brain- which I didn’t build, and had no say in choosing. I wasn’t a bad person. I just had autism.
And that changed everything for me. All my struggles are still there. Sometimes I hate being autistic, for all the reasons I listed above. But now my hatred is in the right place. I hate my autism, I don’t hate me. I don’t hate me anymore. When I broke my grandmother’s vase, I didn’t hate myself. I hated my autism. I was still a good person, who wanted to be careful and not break the vase. I wasn’t careless. I was autistic. And that is a world of difference, that I didn’t have before I was diagnosed. And that is the biggest relief I’ve ever felt in my life.
