"You Don't Seem Autistic To Me"

"You don't seem autistic to me."

Maybe you don't know what autism looks like in people who can mask — suppressing autistic traits to appear 'normal' — and that's okay. I didn't either, until my diagnosis. But it's still not okay to tell an autistic person they don't "seem autistic" when they disclose to you.

There is a lot of trauma, pain and hidden suffering that comes with being late diagnosed and/or "not seeming autistic" to others.

Two years ago I was diagnosed with autism and ADHD. For the nine years before my diagnosis, I'd been trying to treat what I thought was severe anxiety and feeling like I was making little progress, despite ongoing therapy. I began to learn about autism in girls and women and how very different that was to the image that I had in my head.

I always felt like something was wrong, something was off, like there was something preventing me from healing but I could not figure out what it was.

I told myself what therapists had told me: "that it would take time to recover" but my intuition continued to nag at me.

The level of intuition that the neurodivergent women in my life have, is something that leaves me in awe. The intuition that I myself had all along, makes me want to apologise to myself for not listening and telling myself my feelings were just anxiety.

What autism looks like for me

Like many autistic people, I have incredible pattern recognition. My pattern recognition however isn't the classical math or technology that we often see autistic characters have — my pattern recognition kicks in when it comes to observing and understanding human (and animal) behaviour.

As a teenager I was fascinated with psychology. It was a special interest that I would devour books about.

So what do autism and ADHD look like in me?

For years, I would cry every day after work from being dysregulated and having to act all day. I could work yes, but then I would struggle to get out of bed on the weekend and I couldn't engage in activities that I enjoyed because I suffered from chronic fatigue, as well as physical pain.

It is not a compliment to tell someone that they don't seem neurodivergent, when not fitting in that box has denied them access to health care, support and caused them pain.

The misconceptions around what it means to be an autistic woman with ADHD hurt my heart. But everything hurts my heart. My neurodivergence does not just look like my heart on my sleeve, it can also look like my heart walking around on the outside of my body.

Sometimes I am so full of love it physically hurts me. Often my feelings are so intense that they physically hurt me.

I do not lack empathy, I have too much of it. I can feel everyone else's feelings just as strongly as I feel my own and it makes my relationships deep and meaningful but at times painful and difficult to navigate.

I have lost people I loved because I simply could not carry their emotions anymore and I hadn't learnt how to tell them that. The only way that I knew how to cope was to disappear from their lives.

I would try to give too much to others and it would either drain me until I fled or it ended up hurting me when they did not want it.

My neurodivergence has come with a lot of struggle. I experience sensory overload, wearing clothes I don't like the feel of can cause a meltdown (which for years I thought were just panic attacks that lasted a really long time), I cannot stand bright lights, I don't like going to new places alone (or many places at all alone).

I am nurturing, I see things that a lot of others don't, I connect with and empathise with animals, art, poetry and literature.

As I touched on above, when I love, I love so immensely, with so much joy.

My hope is to learn how to celebrate these traits instead of feel shame for them. I want to stop being afraid of being too much.

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