I thought I was vaguely “normal”

I was diagnosed in my mid 30s. I had always thought I was maybe a bit socially awkward, perhaps even had a “bit of Autism” but I hadn’t taken it all that seriously. Yes life could be a bit difficult and there were times in my life where I hadn’t done all that well despite people’s expectations but you know… That was just life.

This was made much more difficult for me to recognise because from an outsider’s perspective, I am apparently “successful”. At least by popular media’s standards anyway. I have a house, a car, two healthy children, a wife, I am well educated and a job that I don’t completely hate. Frustratingly my “success” is partly why I managed to survive as long as I did. Interestingly though, it was when this “success” became too much for me to maintain that my mask properly slipped and my world became chaotic and turbulent and it was really clear I needed support.

It turns out, at least anecdotally, that this is a common story. It is apparently quite common for the big step changes in peoples lives to be the moments where neurodiversity shows itself. According to the stereotype, as an individual goes through childhood they gradually gain more pressure and the expectations on them to conform to societal norms increase. They then go to secondary school and they are finally forced to navigate the world of social interactions with almost no active support. This challenge is compounded by the need to study and sit exams and the expectation that they will be self-motivated and self-regulating. Further and higher education continues the trend of reducing support with ever more complex subjects and higher expectations. You can see the trend here, so take that and then extend it to living independently, getting a job, maybe getting a career, completing professional education, living with other people, getting a partner, getting children, moving home and so on.

For me, my moment came when all that was happening, I had two very small children, I was running a small business, and COVID-19 hit. Suddenly none of the coping strategies, that I didn’t even realise I had, worked any more. I had two very noisy children to look after, I had no idea how I was going to carry on paying any bills, the world appeared to be ending, and crucially, I couldn’t get out of the house to let my brain settle.

In retrospect I recognise that I should have sought out help at the time. Instead though, I struggled on for a few years and happened to have a conversation with my wife about one of our children. I had pointed out a small number of activities they did and said something to the effect of “We should keep an eye on these, just in case there is some Autism going on”. My wife simply replied with “well yes, but those are things you do”.

This might sound stupid and even ridiculously self-unaware, but she caught me by surprise. I had utterly no idea but when it was pointed out, it was so obviously true. I sat on this for a few months but it kept coming back to nibble at me. I ended up reading up on the subject and struggling to find all that much that I could relate to directly, but I had found the DSM-5’s Autism criteria and I was able to see myself in every single one of them. A few more months went past whilst I internally debated the need for a diagnosis.

I paid for an Autism assessment as I couldn’t bare the thought of waiting potentially years to find out. Eventually I was told “We can see why you might think that, but its not significant enough to be Autism, instead we think you should look at ADHD with Sensory Processing Difficulties”. I was confused and devastated as I had convinced myself that it was so obviously Autism. It had taken weeks following the final part of my assessment for me to find this out and I had been left constantly over thinking what the outcome was going to be. Beyond this very terse statement, I had been given no real explanation even when I had asked for it. The explanation I had received was because I had “theory of mind” and “too much empathy” for it to be Autism. A quick online search immediately identifies that these two qualities have been considered inappropriate for diagnostic purposes for many years so I was angry with the assessors. Plus, ADHD is for naughty school boys isn’t it – that isn’t and never has been me…

Another month went by and in this time I had written well over 40 pages of notes on my life experiences as far back as I could remember. I had categorised each of these into the DMS-5 criteria for both ADHD and Autism and had ended up concluding that maybe I had both Autism and ADHD and that I just did a pretty good job of masking.

When my ADHD assessment finally came, it was utterly uncontested. There appeared to be no doubt in any of the teams minds whatsoever. They also said that Autism wasn’t to be ruled out as I was definitely showing some of those tendencies, but that it wasn’t something I clearly had too. So it was official, I have ADHD and sensory processing difficulties.

I struggled to get my head round this so the ADHD assessment provider pointed me towards a specific subset of ADHD resources. It turns out that they stereotype of ADHD is increadibly misleading and that this comes from the original research. It was inherantly biased in nature. From what I can gather the studies only looked at white teenage boys in certain social groups within the USA and most of it was done in the 1970s.

I now see my ADHD qualities in every part of every thing I ever do and have done.