I am...

A few years after my diagnosis, I’m going to be honest: I actually thought I wouldn’t get diagnosed as autistic anymore.

When I was diagnosed, I was almost seeing my autism in hindsight, looking back at my childhood, my school experiences, the things that had always felt different. I was seeing it all in the past tense.

And perhaps, in some ways, I thought things had progressed. That I had learned enough, understood enough, coped enough, that perhaps I had somehow moved beyond the need to think about it so much.

But in recent years, I have realised something else.

I feel more autistic than I ever have.

Maybe hormones play a part. I don’t want to dismiss that possibility, but I also don’t want to use it to explain everything away.

I think it has taken a very long time, combined with some difficult and eye-opening life experiences, to realise that I am autistic.

I am still autistic.

In the last few years, I have had some deeply difficult experiences in relationships. Experiences where, at the time, I didn’t see them for what they were, although I felt them.

I felt that something wasn’t right, but I ignored it. I complied. I adapted. I carried on.

Those relationships began and continued with my compliance. Eventually, when I started to push back, when I began to see them for what they really were, they fell apart, and the impact was enormous.

I will leave that there, because that is a lot in itself.

But something else has happened too.

I feel as though there has been a ripping-plaster effect with my sensory and communication differences. An almost heightened awareness of things that I may have spent my whole life managing, suppressing, working around or simply not recognising.

Becoming deaf in recent years has increased that awareness. It has made some of my differences more obvious to me, and to others, I guess.

I don’t see this as simply becoming more aware of differences because I am looking for them.

I see it as finally allowing myself to see what I haven’t allowed myself to see since childhood.

Perhaps the layers have been peeled back.

Perhaps difficult circumstances have forced an exposure that I could previously avoid.

Perhaps I can no longer convince myself that I am fine simply because I have become very good at appearing fine.

In a few years I will be 50, and I find myself yearning for my parents and my close friends in a way I can’t remember feeling since I was a child.

Perhaps the midlife regression is this, a regression back to those who know me best.

I need support.

That is difficult for me to say out loud.

I have spent so much of my life coping, managing, adapting, appearing fine and trying not to need too much.

But I am beginning to understand that there is a difference between being capable of coping and not having needs.

There is a difference between surviving something and being unaffected by it.

And perhaps there is a difference between independence and having to do everything alone.

So now, in the middle of my life, I am allowing myself to be this person.

A person with needs.

A person with differences that sometimes go beyond coping and managing and appearing fine.

A person who can ask for help.

And I think a big part of this is being in safe relationships where this is also permissible, it is not based on an acceptable presentation.

Perhaps I won’t always need as much support as I do right now. Perhaps this is a chapter, and the next chapter will look different.

But right now, I do need it.

And perhaps I don’t need to solve the question of exactly why.

Deaf? Autistic? Hormones? Trauma? Life experience? Survivor? Some of each? All of it?

Who knows?

I believe the looking back was essential to how to I got here, to lift the lid on these experiences through new narratives that are solely our own and not constructed by others.

Who can ever really know where one thing ends and another begins?

Does it matter anyway?

Perhaps what matters is that right now, this is where I am.

Right now, I am finding it harder to hide from myself.

Right now, I am recognising things I have spent years explaining away.

Right now, I need people.

I need support.

And perhaps the next chapter isn’t about becoming less autistic, less needy, more independent, or better at coping.

Perhaps it is simply about no longer needing to disappear the parts of myself that need to be seen.

So, for now, I am allowing this.

I am allowing myself to be autistic.

I am allowing myself to have needs.

I am allowing myself to ask for help.

And I am allowing myself, perhaps for the first time, to say:

I am. And right now, I need to let that be true.

“Eliza has captured the raw emotion of growing up feeling different, and the silent consequences of never quite being enough… This book is a must read for women looking back on their own lives, for neurodivergent teenagers in the midst of navigating these challenges, but also for teachers, health professionals, social workers and anyone else working with young people.”

Could Try Harder An illustrated journey through an undiagnosed autistic adolescence by Eliza Fricker