By whose definition, do they not have autism? When you know, you know. It’s been nagging and haunting you all your life that something is wrong, that the world feels too hard, overwhelming, and exhausting, even when you’re living a normal life.
No one noticed I was ‘autistic’, but I sure as heck couldn’t live up to most of the expectations other children, teens, moms my age were living up to and thriving from. I knew I was inadequate, (different), and I knew when I met someone different in the same way. People I had inexplicable kinship with.
People had no problem telling me I was weird, unusual, lacking propriety, even being outright hostile or abusive to me.
When I was alone, I felt amazing and whole. I was a hard worker who could accomplish a lot. A dedicated mother and loved one. I could be perfectly normal as me, when I only had to be me. The only people I ever got to be fully comfortable with was my own children. They knew no other version of me, and shared more than a few of my traits.
It was in context with other humans, that things got hard, and I was told in every way possible I wasn’t doing it, (being human), right.
So I could give you a laundry list of ‘symptoms’ that can be plugged into the spectrum, except they are not symptoms. They are my experiences of the world, and they don’t actually cause me much of a problem on their own. I have traits, that have formed my personality and how I show up in the world. Again, they aren’t a problem for me, until it becomes your, (another person in the world’s), problem, and you can’t deal with it, so you tell me I have a problem.
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