Could YOU Be Autistic & Not Know?

Everybody NeuroRebel here and this week, we’re going to talk about how you could be autistic and potentially not even know it. Trust me. I know about this one personally guys. All right. Let’s dive in. I’ve always been autistic, but I didn’t personally know I was autistic until I was 29 years old, almost 30, because my diagnosis was missed for a very large chunk of my life. Uh, there are a few reasons I was missed and there are a few reasons autistic people are typically missed. Uh, but you know, why I was personally missed is when the school noticed something was a bit different about me, the way they approached it scared my family and my family decided not to have testing because there is so much stigma around autism. There is an assumption that this label is going to be put on a child and that label is going to follow them for the rest of their lives but that doesn’t take into consideration that there are a million other labels that if you don’t know you are autistic, society is going to put on you or you will put on yourself.

01:53 - So for example, labels would be: lazy not trying hard enough, not good enough, unacceptable, overly sensitive, too sensitive, too much, talks too much, talks to a little, anxious, rebellious, stubborn. I could go on and I could go into some really worse, horrible, ugly names. Um, and these are things that other people had said about me. I can promise you that the words and labels that I gave myself, because we tend to be harder on ourselves than other people are on us. We’re much worse. Didn’t know I was autistic, but I knew I was different. I knew I struggled well to sit still in class. I knew that my curiosity was often punished by authority, figures and teachers, especially in school. Despite it being a cherished trait at home, I knew. Once I got into the workplace that I struggled with things that other people didn’t seem to struggle with. I knew I was struggling. I knew I was different, but I didn’t have the autism label to explain why I was different. So I labeled myself instead - failure.

03:24 - And when I was finally diagnosed autistic and the information sunk in and I accepted that. That didn’t mean that there was something wrong with me - it just meant that I had been working against myself instead of with my natural neurology and state of being for so many years. I just needed to do some changes and start, you know, start working with myself. It was time to have some self compassion and I needed that correct label. So that I could remove all of those other labels, because I had put so many labels and allowed society to put so many labels on me.

04:07 - So yeah, you can be autistic and not even know it. You’ll know something, but you won’t have words for it. You’ll realize there are certain people pull that you just naturally click with but they’re definitely the minority and you won’t know why. You won’t know why you often feel like an outsider or lonely in a room full of people if you don’t know you’re autistic. You know, you’ll know something, but you’ll feel like you’re missing something as well.

04:51 - Not knowing is extremely painful and that’s why, you know, this information learning you are autistic discovering your autistic is potentially life’s changing and life altering information that can mean the difference between an autistic person, success or failure. The truth is diagnosis right now - it shouldn’t be a privilege. It should be a human, right. But this is not something that all autistic people have access to. Even if someone becomes aware that they are autistic, they may not be able to access the diagnosis. And with adults, it’s hard for us to find service providers who understand autism and adults and autistic adults, and don’t just work with children.

05:45 - And that can be a problem because some of us, especially if we came from low income or other minority, statuses, we may not have been caught. When we were younger, we may have been labeled as behavioral problems and given all of these other names labels instead of labeled autistic or neurodivergent correctly, older we get the less likely it is that we’re going to be diagnosed or be discovered as autism I’m sh I’m starting to actually change how I refer to myself from late diagnosed too late discovered, uh, in, in solidarity for those autistic people who are just as valid, that may not have access to the diagnosis. Uh, so I didn’t discover that I was autistic until I was almost 30. Uh, so yes, you could be autistic and not even know it. Guys, thank you so much for hanging out with me this week. I put out new videos every Wednesday.

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