I don’t know how common it is to assume your life is common, but I’m going to guess that many people have that impression. Especially in the early years. You don’t know that your parents might be different from other parents because you have no examples. You don’t know that your siblings might be different. Even you might not be what the average child is like. You don’t know what’s normal, for lack of a better term.

As your world opens up, you get to see a sample of what’s around you, and you can discern some common denominators. To a certain extent you begin to see what you have in common with other people… And what you don’t.

When I went looking for answers about Autism, to see if there was any reason to think I might be on the spectrum, I came across some diagnostic tools online.

…as an aside I’d like to mention that it wasn’t something I first suspected on my own. Someone close to me, who is on the spectrum, recognized some hallmarks and suggested it was possible.

What I wasn’t expecting when I took the first test (The Autism Spectrum Quotient) was how many bells it would ring for me. Even though it did, I wasn’t convinced that the reason for my score had much to do with Autism. I figured that the results had been skewed because of my social anxiety. That made sense to me. I never thought to question where my social anxiety had come from in the first place… What might have made me uncomfortable around people.

It can be a very difficult barrier when everyone around you, yourself included, gets caught in that “normal” assumption. I wanted to be special when I was younger, but as achieving things became more difficult, I fell back on the notion of being unexceptional. This idea often bled over into my mental health and neurodivergence.

The term is imposter syndrome. I couldn’t believe that I really had issues, disabilities, because that would mean I was different. How could it be, when the message I was getting all around me was that I just needed to try harder, apply myself, get a grip. There was nothing wrong with me except laziness, right?

It took a long time to shake that when it comes to my mental health and, to be honest, I still haven’t really gotten over the idea when it comes to being atypical. The logic, when I say it out loud, doesn’t sound like logic at all.

“I’m not anything special, therefore I can’t be autistic?”

But that’s the tug of war. I feel different from most people, and in my head that feels like a good thing. I don’t want to be like everyone else, I never have. It sounds like boasting but it’s the truth. I still don’t like feeling judged or being dismissed or bullied. The difference is I never wanted to change myself in order to fit in. More than that, I feel incapable of doing it.

So if it’s a good thing, then I must be inventing other reasons to be different, right? I just want to be weird, which makes me egotistical and melodramatic about myself. I must want everything I’ve been going through. I’m malingering and making up excuses just so that I can feel special. Right?

Like I said, imposter syndrome.

A few years after that, I was still trying to put all the pieces together when it came to my mental soup. I had a distinct impression that there was an element I was missing. Something that made it more difficult to be treated. My analogy for my experience is that of a plateau. I felt- and still feel, like there is an elusive plateau, and that to stand on it is to be doing well. On the plateau would mean functioning at an acceptable minimum. But I never seem to be able to gain that threshold. I can grip the edge of the plateau, I can lift myself, but I never seem to be able to make that final push. I get tired, I lose my grip. I start to slide backwards and I have to scramble so as not to lose any more ground.

It’s frustrating and upsetting to acknowledge that I have been on that slope below my plateau for years. Likely a decade. Things have been much worse in the past for me, but things don’t ever seem to get good enough. So maybe something is being overlooked? Something that I need to factor in to cope better?

That’s when I wound up looking at other diagnostic tests. I went to a very informative site, neurodivergentinsights.com. I found the Aspie Quiz and went through it to see what I might get. Wow…. The result was a 98% likelihood of my being Autistic.

Ok, maybe there is more to this than anxiety can explain…

I took the information to my psychiatrist, that was only a few weeks ago. Dr. H agrees with me that this is something to investigate. It might not change much for me in terms of treatment, but at the very least I believe that understanding the whole picture could help me with new strategies to cope and eventually improve.

I believe that I can get over my threshold, reach that plateau, I just need to find the right way to do it.