I think discovering that you are neurodivergent later in life is a bit like suddenly realising that you are not actually attracted to your partner’s gender after fifty years of marriage. I now know that there is a reason that I got distracted watching the BBC coverage of Trump’s birthday celebrations and spent an hour researching the fall of the Roman Empire and the Visigoths instead of going to brush my teeth as planned. That reason is a mad combination of both ADHD and Autism. It is not laziness, stupidity, or a character flaw as I was made to believe growing up. I have been living with myself for decades and all that time, trying to force myself to fit in, be normal, behave like everyone else, all the while feeling like an alien. Everything is too bright, loud, and smelly. I feel too much. When I was younger I used to sometimes wonder if perhaps I was born on the wrong planet since I am severely allergic to all plant life on this one. It’s bizarre to me that I didn’t see the autism and ADHD before because now that I see it, I can’t unsee it.
How was it missed for so long?
I can remember the very first time I felt that I was something other than my peers. I must have been in the first or second grade of primary school. I was absolutely obsessed with clothes and fashion at that age. I loved to spend hours exploring my grandmother’s closet and jewellery box. She had saved all of her party dresses from 1940s. The dresses had wide stiff skirts that would swirl out when I spun. She had the tiniest feet and a beautiful collection of shoes that almost fit me at that age. I would dress up in costume and perform dances and sing songs for my audience of one, my loving grandmother.
In my closet at home there was an deep barrel, painted pale pink, and with a sweet musty smell that permeated all of the slightly soiled clothes inside. One morning I woke up and wanted to be a cowgirl so dove into the barrel to assemble the best cowgirl outfit I could from the contents. I don’t know how I managed to make it all the way to school wearing a green summer romper with cowboy boots on a rainy late autumn morning, but I do remember being pushed down into a puddle by a classmate and being called weird. I cried. I also developed insomnia at the same age. I often sat awake all night in a small rocking chair in my room trying to rock myself to sleep, but nothing was done. My parent’s divorce was blamed for any abnormalities in my behaviour.
When I look back on my full experience of public education in the United States, I have come to understand that back then girls with autism and ADHD were simply ignored if they didn’t cause too much trouble in class. I got so upset every time I was chastised by the teacher in class that I learned to behave like the other children as much as I could to avoid attention. Nothing was done when I stopped understanding math in the fourth grade. I spent all of my public school education in a permanent state of parental punishment for my laziness and lack of effort. There was so much in my childhood that pointed to neurodiversity, but I was labelled Bad Apple and everyone moved on without me. The events are chronologically catalogued in my memory and the more I recall them, I am astonished that didn’t know that I wasn’t just a bad person until five years ago.
So what now?
I have language to explain what I am experiencing in life where before I would hide my suffering or even worse, run away. I don’t run anymore, but I do protect myself from environments and situations that will send me into severe burnout or give me overwhelming anxiety. I’m learning all I can about AuDHD and giving myself the freedom to explore my strengths where before I tried my best to cover them from view because I believed that if people knew who I truly was, I wouldn’t be safe.
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