My 25 years of being Autistic

It's officially April, meaning its Autism Acceptance month. I know I titled the blog my autistic rambles and everything, but I feel like I'm still figuring out my autism. I masked myself for about 20 years of my life and only recently coming to full terms with many things. All my tics and emotions I would spend so long hiding because I knew they weren't acceptable in public. I feel like I'm constantly learning new things about myself and finding who I am. So, I decided to dedicate a post about what my journey with autism has been and how I'm still coming to terms with it all.

So, how exactly did I get here today. I got a proper diagnosis when I was 12 years old. Originally, I thought the appointments was to just get me an ADD diagnosis, but it ended up turning into sessions for both. I didn't really understand it at first. My mom would pick me up from school in the morning and we would drive over to a clinic and I would sit alone in a room with a woman I've never seen before and try to talk with me about school and friends (the few that I had) and run through test as well.

After my diagnosis, I didn't really know how to talk about it with anyone, especially my mom. I was already struggling so much with school, with being bullied by the other kids and my failing grades, so it felt like the least important thing to me. I think this is where my masking journey started, right there in 7th grade. I remember making myself feel so emotionally distant from everyone around me because I was so afraid of making myself a burden to others when I already felt like a burden to myself.

I masked myself all through the rest of middle school and all through high school, and yet I never realized it. I think the main indicator of this was how I never allowed myself to have any sort of interest. I could never bring myself to getting into certain shows, movies, or musicians all because I never had a safe space to talk about them. The only person I ever tried to talk about them was my mom but she hated most of my interest so I would immediately stop talking about them.

It wasn't until I got to college that I started changing my way of living. I was still masking pretty hard freshman year, especially after getting noise complaints from downstairs neighbors over my bed bouncing (it's a god damn stim, leave me alone). But then we went into lockdown due to Covid and just about everything changed for me. Because I was home for a prolonged period of time I started letting myself unmask. I noticed myself doing little hand flaps and flicking my ears more often. I also noticed when I tasted something weird or had an unpleasant thought, my head would immediately jerk to the side. I hadn't really experienced any of this before, so it was all new to me.

When I got back to campus it took me awhile to readjust to everything going on while also trying to understand my autistic identity. It wasn't until I joined my college's newspaper team that everything started changing for me. I started finding myself bonding with people who either had similar interest or could somewhat correlate them to others interest. It really helped me in being more open about my tics and my special interest. It was great to exist in an environment where I no longer had to feel ashamed or embarrassed of my autism because I've got people around me that finally get me.

Today I'm feeling a lot better about myself as an autistic person. I still struggle with certain aspects, but that's more an environment issue than personal. With the on-going rise of casual ableism happening online and in the real world it can feel a lot harder to want to express myself the best way I know how. But, I've learned the best way to combat this is to just keep being myself. Keep showing my tics and quirks to the world around me and practically force them to take me as I am, and if they don't like it, well they better get used to it because I refuse to change.