this is what autism looks like

It all started when I was in Paris in May of this year with my best friend in the entire world.

Except, I hadn’t really treated her like that. I felt awful. God, I’m such a shit fucking friend. Why do I always mess things up?

We had just come back from a day of sightseeing. My best friend is the human equivalent of the colour yellow. She lights up every room she walks into, she exudes confidence and people naturally flock to her. And yet, I couldn’t talk to her.

I was mentally exhausted after the day we’d had, and I don’t just mean a little bit tired. I mean I could feel this heavy rage burning inside of me. My whole body had shut down to the point where I could no longer talk. We got back to the hotel and sat down on the bed. I lay there for an hour or so, scrolling on my phone in complete silence, waiting to feel alive again and then, before I knew it, I had turned to my best friend and I was sobbing.

“I don't get what's wrong with me,” I said to her. “I'm just this fucking freak. I clam up, I go silent and I just can't talk to anyone when I'm like this. I don't know how to talk to people. I don't get how everyone else makes it look so easy. Why am I in Paris, on the trip I've been counting down to for months, wishing I could just be back home?”

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Of course, my best friend being my best friend, she knew exactly what to say and how to calm me down. She immediately reassured me that I wasn’t weird, that sometimes she could feel the same way too. That I wasn’t a bad friend, that she hadn’t spent the day secretly analysing every moment I’d gone quiet and adding it to an ever-growing list of reasons to hate me.

And I believed her. Or, at least, I believed her enough to stop crying.

Because that’s the thing: I had spent twenty-nine years finding explanations for myself. I was tired, I was overwhelmed, I was anxious, I had CPTSD, I was sensitive, I was an introvert who sometimes wanted to be an extrovert and I was just a person who needed a bit more time alone than everyone else.

There was always an explanation.

Autism just wasn’t one of them.

Or, at least, not in the way you might think. Because don’t get me wrong, there were multiple times when I thought, oh, maybe I’m autistic. But time and time again, the people around me would dismiss it and almost instantly I’d be met with some combination of:

You can’t have autism because...

It’s just trauma.

Or my personal favourite: Well, now you say that, I don’t think you’re autistic, but I do think X might be.

It was almost comical. I could bring autism into the conversation and somehow, within minutes, we had diagnosed everybody except me, and so, once again, autism became another explanation that didn’t quite belong to me.

Autism felt like a special club that I just wasn’t enough to be apart of. I know that sounds silly. Most people do not want autism, but when you have spent a good proportion of your life thinking you are a total fuck up, a mistake, completely worthless and everyone around you has essentially confirmed that, it was hard not to want to be part of a club.

I was recently diagnosed with autism and my initial thoughts were: they must just be being nice because they know how much a diagnosis meant to me or I must have fooled them good.

Not that it could be, I don’t know... the autism that got me the diagnosis?

No. Obviously, my brain had decided that manipulating a team of professionals who specialise in autism was the far more reasonable explanation.

Given that my diagnosis is very recent, and I am talking this week recent, there is of course so much I still need to learn about myself. There are probably things I do that I haven’t even begun to connect to autism yet and, equally, things I have spent years blaming purely just on trauma. But given my extensive work with neurodivergent people as a mental health practitioner, being diagnosed has finally made me stop and go, hang on, autism really does look different for everyone.

Prior to my assessment, I did what any autistic person who shares similar traits to me would do and researched it extensively.

And I mean extensively.

I had an entire TikTok collection dedicated to autism, with the aim of intensely researching and learning everything and anything I possibly could about autism and, as a result, myself.

Part of what came up, however, was verrrrrry different to my own experience.

I remember seeing various funny clips and slideshows of “autistic people, what spoon are you picking?” and feeling upset that I hadn’t picked the ‘autistic spoon’.

Then I started hearing other people’s experiences of their autism assessments. People talked about being asked to mimic how they brush their teeth or being given various confusing questions involving numbers, animals and God knows what else.

And I remember thinking, what the fuck?

Did I even do an autism assessment?

Had I somehow done the wrong one?

Were they just humouring me?

Because my assessment didn’t look like theirs. My autism didn’t always look like theirs. I hadn’t picked the right fucking spoon.

It was almost as painful as the experience of being undiagnosed for the majority of my life. Once again, I felt shut out. I couldn’t even do this right.

I’d spent so long believing that a diagnosis might finally help me understand myself. That maybe, for the first time in my life, I would find a group of people who made sense to me. People who experienced the world in the same way I did. Somewhere I belonged and now I felt like I had been kidding myself. My brain took all of that and turned it into the same conclusion it had been reaching for twenty-nine years:

You’ve got it wrong again. You don’t belong here either.

Since finally being diagnosed, I can’t even begin to explain the emotions that have come up as a result of having it confirmed.

As sad as this sounds, it feels like someone has finally seen me.

I spent so much of my childhood, my teenage years and my early adulthood hating myself. And I don’t mean hating myself in the way we sometimes casually throw the phrase around. I mean I genuinely, wholeheartedly believed there was something fundamentally wrong with me.

I thought I was a bad person. I was too sensitive, too intense and I thought I ruined everything good that happened to me. I spent years trying to work out why everybody else seemed to have been handed instructions on how to be a person, and I had somehow missed the day they were given out.

For the first time, I told someone all the things I had spent years hating about myself and they didn't see a bad person. They saw autism.

For once, I told somebody exactly what it feels like to be me and they didn’t tell me I was too much. They didn’t tell me I needed to try harder. They didn’t reduce every part of me to trauma or anxiety.

They listened and then they said, yes, we see it too.

There is still so much I don’t understand about myself. I am sure there will be parts of my life I look back on and suddenly see differently. There will be things I have spent years calling anxiety, trauma or simply another one of my many flaws that I will begin to question. I will probably continue to compare myself to other autistic people and, knowing me, occasionally convince myself that a team of professionals were simply being really fucking nice.

But I think I am finally beginning to understand something I thought I already knew.

Autism does not have one face.

It doesn’t have one personality, one way of speaking or one way of moving through the world. It isn’t defined by whether I make eye contact, whether I can hold a conversation or whether I picked the right fucking spoon.

For twenty-nine years, I had been looking for autism in everybody but myself. I was waiting to recognise my experiences in somebody else’s life before I gave myself permission to believe my own.

But autism was there in Paris.

It was there in the hotel room when I lay silently next to my best friend, unable to speak and wondering why I couldn’t just enjoy the trip I had spent months looking forward to. It was there when I finally broke down and asked her what the fuck was wrong with me.

I just didn’t know what I was looking at yet.

I do now.

This is what autism looks like. I am autistic.

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Meredith x