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Reminder To Leave Autistic Women Alone And Let Them Dress How They Want

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I’ve done this many a time, or I’ll sit there with my phone and won’t realize the TV has gone off because I’ve tuned it out. My husband will come in and turn it back on and be like, “You didn’t hear the TV again did you?”

I sit there all guilty like ... LOL

*The “are you still watching?” notification pops up on Netflix*

Me: *Doesn’t have enough energy to move and press “continue watching” so sits waiting for 10 minutes hoping it’ll press itself*

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Yes. So much, yes.

For those not having a diagnosis.

It’s difficult to explain your obessions right? 

It’s difficult to explain why you get tired after just 2-3 hours of socializing right?

It’s difficult to explain why making decisions takes so long right?

It’s  difficult to explain your sensitivities, the noise around you, people walking by, the light, the jokes that make you feel uncomfortable?

It’s difficult to explain why your overthinking is actually just you thinking right?

It’s difficult to explain your needs and wants to your friends, or your parents saying that they shouldn’t click their pen, shake their leg, shouldn’t be too close right?

It’s difficult to explain why you can’t relax and stop obsessing analysing people right?

It’s difficult to explain your wordfinding difficulties or the reason why you’re talking too fast right?

It’s difficult estimating if you’re friends or not, if you’re friends enough to go up and talk to someone right?

It’s difficult not to obsess about something you like and then after a few months find another obsession wondering if you will ever find your calling right?

It’s difficult to explain why you feel so down and tired and keep focusing on the negatives even after a pretty good day, your obsessive mind keeps reminding you of the little details people dont even remember you doing or saying it right?

It’s difficult to be in this world where ‘’other’’ people seems to know it all, seems to have it all. Nice group of friends, amazing socialising skills where it seems so easy to come up with new stuff to talk about right?

With or without the diagnosis you know you best. it doesn’t make your problems less real with no diagnosis.

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[Autistic] girls also [tend to have] fewer (or perhaps less obvious) signs of “restricted interests”—intense fixations on a particular subject such as dinosaurs or Disney films. These interests are often a key diagnostic factor on the less severe end of the spectrum, but the examples used in diagnosis often involve stereotypically “male” interests, such as train timetables and numbers. In other words, Frazier had found further evidence that girls are being missed. And a 2013 study showed that, like Frances, girls typically receive their autism diagnoses later than boys do.

Maia Szalavitz

In other words, someone is still autistic even if they don’t have obvious quirky obsessions. Don’t doubt yourself or other people just because you or they don’t check all the boxes. 

(via mindingmyownbrain)

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What boundaries?

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Highlighting the way autistic women and girls have been dismissed may make a difference in diagnosing autism in girls and women, as could new research like Happé’s. Additionally, primary care doctors need to be trained in how to spot autism in girls, and we desperately need more fictional depictions of female autism and for more autistic women and girls to tell their own stories so it becomes something we easily pick up on and recognize. People like me shouldn’t have to wait decades for a diagnosis that will help them make sense of their lives.

Laura James (via mindingmyownbrain)

Facts.

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I feel you. I’m in my early 30s and I doubt I’ll ever get a diagnosis just because of the hoops you have to jump through. I’ve always felt out of place in my life and my special interests, stims, and other signs have been ignored throughout my life. Now that I’m an adult and have been able to research a lot of this stuff and put 2+2 together, I’m seriously wondering why no one else had. Then I remember the era I grew up in and where Aspergers and Autism were still highly only recognized in boys and young men. 

It’s frustrating to say the least.

So… I’ve been officially diagnosed with “high functioning autism “ and I’m pissed…

Sorry I just can’t help it. Warning, rant incoming.

Why pissed you may ask? Well because had I been a boy I would’ve been diagnosed much earlier. And these are facts.

I’ve seen so many psychiatrists and psychologists throughout the years and it’s only now that someone had the perceptiveness to see that something was amiss.

I’m in my late 20s and had I been diagnosed earlier… I would’ve received the help that I should’ve received as a kid, which means a lot of pain could’ve been avoided.

I probably could’ve gone to university which i didn’t because I was deeply depressed, if I had been diagnosed earlier my family (none of my close relatives have autism) would’ve been given the tools to better deal with the black sheep in the family and maybe (just maybe) I wouldn’t have developed panic attacks so early in my childhood, I probably wouldn’t have left my last job due to a near nervous breakdown, and so forth…

I’m pissed and I think i should be pissed not just for the pain that I had to go through but for all the girls and women who have not been diagnosed and are suffering because their autism is so mild that they themselves don’t know they might have it.

All because people generally have the preconceptions (and I had them) that to be autistic you have to be a genius at maths and IT, be terrible at sports and be completely and utterly expressionless without an ounce of wit.

Having a very mild case of anything is always going to be trickier to diagnose but can we at least make it just a little bit easier for girls and women by not spreading these outdated autistic stereotypes?

In fact, can society as a whole just stop dismissing and disregarding women’s pain and anxieties and putting it all down to a fault or weakness in their character or down to their “hormones”? That would also help.

Thanks.

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I prefer mine long anymore. I used to be a constant nail biter (I believe it was one of my stims) and now the thought and feeling of having to cut my nails when they get too long is abhorrent to me. The reason being is it makes my nailbeds itch and twitch and then I have to wait for them to grow back out again. When I do cut them, I don’t cut them too short in order to try and stop that feeling. 

To other autistics - do you like your nails cut short or long? I keep my nails really short because long nails are sensory hell.

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A bit. I did excel in school and got good grades. I masked quite a bit, now that I look back at it. It was exhausting.

Is anybody else bitter that their disability went undiagnosed their entire youth and was treated like a behavioral/personality flaw because they got good grades?

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autistic traits that were ignored simply because I’m a girl:

very obvious special interests in things like animals or hair were ignored as normal girl interests

noise sensitivity was me being an uptight bitch

meltdowns extending into teenage years were seen as typical for dramatic teenage girls

love of colorful, sparkly, visually-stimulating things?? GIRL

vestibular stimming only landed me in cheerleading and gymnastics

severe social anxiety = shy girl!!!

always saying “what”? can’t be her ears bc she has great hearing, must just be another ditzy blonde girl

only eats specific foods/plain food? girls are sooo picky

self-harming? red flag but still typical of girls who are “looking for attention”

awkward laughing at everything because I don’t know what to FUCKING SAY?? giggly girl, very normal and cute (not)

doesn’t go out a lot? the perfect daughter!

not to mention all of the symptoms that WEREN’T obvious because I worked so hard to hide them.

pls educate girls on autism so they don’t spend their formative years wondering why they feel so different.

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Hello.

I’m a bit nervous, truthfully. You see, I’ve been reading up a lot about autism/Aspergers in women and everything I’ve read makes a whole lot of sense to me. So much so, in fact, that it makes me wonder why I was never diagnosed earlier. Why I slipped under the radar as a child and now in my early 30s that I’m finding all of this stuff out on my own. Of course, I can’t go for a diagnosis because of personal reasons, but I just need people to talk to who are like me.

I’ve never been great at social interaction. Most of my young life I never felt comfortable in my own skin. I tried to fit in desperately, even giving up pieces of myself to try to be ‘normal’ and make friends. I had trouble with speaking to kids my own age and found that I got along better with teachers instead of students. More often than not I would be reading books instead of talking to others. I’d watch more than I would play. 

I was bullied often for liking other things or being different. I loved video games and comic books, and wrestling shows, instead of dolls and girly things. Sure, I had dolls because I thought that’s what I needed to like, but that was about it. I didn’t really like them. As you can tell by my title, Sonic has been in my life since I was six years old. I can infodump about the franchise to exhausting degree and know pretty much everything about him, the series, and SEGA. He and the series have been my special interest for almost all of my life.

Of course, I learned a valuable lesson about trends when I was in school. At one time Pokemon was all the rage (I’m dating myself here) and for that entire year I fit in a bit, but when the next school year had rolled around, no one talked about it anymore. I still loved it. I had a bookbag, almost all 150 Pokemon, shirts, shoes. But I was laughed at with other kids saying, “You still like Pokemon? Grow up.” But it was just the year before. 

So, I did the only logical thing in my brain and got rid of it all. Everything. Cards, bookbag, shirts. Everything. I regretted it because I still liked it, but I buried it to fit in. 

When my teenage years came around, my mom started introducing me to makeup, and frilly clothes, dresses, skirts. I hated it all. I tried wearing makeup, I did, but it was so uncomfortable. It made my skin itch. It was horrible and no matter what I couldn’t itch my face or else I would smear it. Most of the time I ended up in the school bathroom washing it off my face because I couldn’t take it anymore. I rarely, if at all, wear makeup. 

As for clothes, I tended to still wear tee shirts, hoodies, and jeans. I hated skirts, dresses, and hose. I tended to shy away from girlish things because they were severely uncomfortable. I would shop in the boy's section for band shirts, video game apparel, jeans that were baggy. The only thing I kept was my long hair, and even then I wanted to cut it off several times because of how much time it took to care for. Yet, it was a habit that I wanted to keep the hair for at least one feminine thing. 

I had my routines, shows I would always watch, times I would always get up for school. I enjoyed choir and attended it every single year. I had very few friends that were girls because they would talk about makeup and celeb crushes. I often talked about video games and comic books, and my crushes were always different. I liked computers and typing, and just things that didn’t fit. I was thought of several times as being a lesbian just because of my attire and mannerisms. I liked boys though, all of my celeb crushes or comic book/video game crushes were men. 

I learned to keep my special interests mostly to myself unless someone asked about them. I was told often of how unladylike I was. How I needed to change and stop acting a certain way, be better. I tried several times, but wound up very unhappy and went back to being myself. I ended up keeping to myself more to avoid being called out for my flaws. 

Later, I found it even harder to socialize. My emotions were not what was expected, and as I came into my adult years I still was told to grow up and it felt like no one was understanding me at all. With limited resources, I just kept being myself and tried to make myself more social amongst others. I had a few jobs that didn’t really end up going anywhere, but it was expected of me since I was an adult to get a job and socialize. 

After that, I finally was able to get into a relationship and get married. My husband, God bless him, understands me to a certain extent and he also helps with a lot of my anxieties, fears, and he loves me for me. 

Yet, recently I’ve been at odds because I love to research things in my spare time and, well, Autism came up from a few blogs I follow. Specifically, Aspergers before it was squeezed into the Autism spectrum. I read a lot of it, and it fits me. It makes me feel validated and gives me relief like I’ve never known before. It gives a voice to my over-anxious and exhausting need to analyze everything, even hours after it happened. It explains my nail-biting in my younger years which has led to leg shaking and now loose skin picking on the sides of my fingers. (These were, and some still are, my stims). 

It explains how I feel things more strongly emotionally. It explains my aversion to certain loud noises including thunder, power tools, snoring, insect buzzing, and certain music genres. It explains my anxieties, my fears, my inability to concentrate at times. It explains my need to make lists in my head, follow a schedule during events, anxiety to stay on budget. My need to sit a certain way at restaurants. My like of certain foods, and my exhaustion socially when I want to leave or other people to leave. It explains my phone anxiety, I hate making calls and someone else often does it for me. 

I just really want to know that I’m not alone...And it’s taking me a lot to finally put this out there and speak to others because I’ve been afraid that if I’m not officially diagnosed, or can’t get one, that I’m not really autistic and my thoughts and feelings are invalid. 

#women autism #adult woman autism #finding myself #aspergers in women #aspie #others like me #need to talk #nervous hello #anxious #autism woman #autisic woman #self diagnosed autism #autistic women