… one of those days when just taking a shower seems like a major accomplishment 
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Sometimes you just have to do what you can with the spoons you have and call it a win.
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jesus h fucking christ
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Care to elaborate?
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“Wouldn’t it be a relief if we could stop asking authors to meet a specific set of diagnostic criteria?”
It sure would!
I’m horrified by that sort of gatekeeping, or whatever it’s called in that case.
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ETA:
vamprisms
adhd will have you fighting for your life to do beloved hobbies that bring you nothing but joy
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This is an interesting, but not perfect, discussion of spectrum issues.
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wecouldntallbecowboys
Even if you don’t think/know that you have [disorder] (or even if you know you don’t!) you’re allowed to use coping strategies meant for or associated with that disorder. You can use ADHD tips for your poor memory. You can stim even if you’re not autistic (stimming has a lot of overlap between disorders honestly). You can use chronic fatigue tips if you have depression. You’re not stealing resources. If it helps you, it helps you, whether you were the target audience or not
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Sensory-friendly clothing:
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Two autistic women decide to start a satirical website:
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Include BoingBoing BBS as “Social Media” and that’s me in the picture.
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Add tumblr as social media (HA!), too, also, and there I am.
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My daughter (age 41) has been undergoing evaluation, and just announced that the doctor she’s working with has diagnosed her as having ASD Level 1 (to go with the ADHD diagnosis she received a few years ago.
I can’t say that I ever saw any indication of this as she was growing up - she did well in school, won awards on the speech and debate team in high school, double-majored in English and Classics in college, and was a highly-regarded high-school English teacher in NYC for 14 years(!) - but she says this was something that was always in the back of her mind (as an “I wonder…” kind of thing) and she finally decided to get evaluated.
Her comment: “Sadly, I don’t have any fun savant-like party tricks… but perhaps I will drive slow in the driveway on Sundays. I am an okay-ish driver.” More seriously, she thinks this diagnosis will help her to “work [her] brain a little more effectively” and perhaps to find resources “for the business of adulting”.
Meanwhile, I’m now mentally reviewing the years during which she was growing up, wondering if there was something I should have been able to recognize, and whether she could have been even more successful than she has been if we had known and been able to help her adapt better to the universe in those formative years. There’s probably no answer to that question, but that just puts it in good company with all the other unanswerable "What if"s in life, you know?
Mostly, though, I’m happy if this helps her understand herself better, and I’m still amazed that my wife and I were able to raise the amazing person she has turned out to be.
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You can’t know. Especially with girls, who are socialized to mask more than boys are.
Also: autistic girls/women are significantly (I believe it’s something like 70%) likely to have the trifecta of ASD, AD(H)D, and anxiety. So she might want to consider further testing.
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What chgoliz said. Also, people learn early that signs of difference are discouraged, and signs of distress as well, especially when not even the person knows what’s wrong, just that something is somehow. Telling people about it would just start all sorts of fuss that they’re not ready to deal with, so they just don’t. And anyway, there’s always the nagging feeling that this is just how it is: everyone feels like this, don’t they? And nobody else talks about it, so I shouldn’t either.
It can take a long, long time before something triggers a change in that status quo, whether it’s realising that whenever you did try to talk about it nobody had any idea what you were talking about so maybe it’s not normal, or you get sick of the long nagging feeling that you’re a secret alien, or because the coping mechanisms you’ve spent your life not even realising that you’ve been building are starting to fail, or because those coping mechanisms have failed, or because one too many autistic people have spoken to you for five minutes and said, out of the blue, “have you been tested?”.
“Level 1” means basically “I can hide it”. (Level 2 is “I can’t hide it, but I can function mostly”, and Level 3 is “I mostly can’t function”.) So, basically, your daughter has successfully been undercover for forty years, and now her task is to figure out who she actually is, underneath all of that. She needs to figure out what of her is her, and what is the persona she’s been playing all this time, and what she decides to keep, and what is actually doing her harm.
It’s something she can only do with that knowledge behind her (I described my adult diagnosis as “Corrective lenses for my hindsight: suddenly my entire past came into focus”.) And it’s something only she can do. What you can do best is to accept her just as herself, wherever her journey of self-discovery leads, just as you did until now.
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I continue to be grateful for the amazing people I have found in this space. Thank you, @anon67050589 and @catsidhe and everyone else, for being so helpful and supportive.
My sense of this diagnosis is that it’s a clarification - as @catsidhe said, “corrective lenses for my hindsight”. My daughter isn’t a different person; she’s not a changeling who has suddenly been revealed. Our relationship may change in some ways, or not, but she’s my daughter. I wish I could do some of this work for her, but this is her work to do. She’s been a successful adult for a long time now, and I’m absolutely certain she’ll absorb this and keep on going.
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