I've had a lot of interesting stuff come up around this lately. Sorry if this isn't very coherent, my brain's all over atm. Also I'm kind of scared of talking about it for various reasons. Heads-up for internalised ableism, too.
I've always known my neurology was a bit different - I mean, the whole "unilateral sensoneurinal deafness" thing for one (and I would LOVE to find out at some point what actually caused/causes that, in the early 80s they either couldn't find out or couldn't be bothered...just said, "it's either your brain or the nerves to your brain" and left it at that). But other than that I've always assumed stuff was just me being...weird and a bit broken. "Oversensitive" was the big one (oh, the understatement of that >.<); "not paying attention" was the other. And a lot of the rest of it (things like late/poor spoken language acquisition, selective mutism, sensory stuff, social stuff) I attributed to having had practically no hearing at all as a small child. (Heh, just remembering how the Doctor Who episode "Night Terrors" made me want to cry because it reminded me so much of myself as a kid.)
Way back, when I was an undergrad, I got diagnosed with dyscalculia. (By this point this diagnosis wasn't actually much USE, but there you go.) Later on (and after many other dxs of various kinds - generally the "fucked in the head" kind, pretty much all of which got retracted later) I got dxed with dyspraxia + sensory integration stuff, which seemed...accurate but not all-encompassing?
Interestingly, once I started exogenous hormones, a LOT of the coordination/spatial reckoning/proprioception stuff that got me dxed with dyspraxia gradually resolved itself. I now have *decent* spatial reckoning, to the point where I can eyeball a space and work out what furniture's going to fit into it to the inch, reasonable proprioception (I know where my body parts are most of the time!) and vastly improved coordination (I can catch a ball! I rarely fall over my own feet!). I don't just randomly drop things I'm holding any more, my fine motor control is pretty impressive (witness: jewellery-making).
Possibly because of this, and because the improvement came around the same time as the DX, I've never really...hmm, integrated it into my understanding of myself. I mean, there was a level of, "Phew, that's why I had all that crap as a kid, much is now explained," but that was about it. I've never really thought of myself as learning disabled or not neurotypical because of it. And it was casually mentioned a while back by the doctor that, since everything improved so much on T, it might have been a misdiagnosis and it's all some other neurological/developmental thing instead, possibly of the ASD variety. (Which...scared the crap out of me, to be honest, to the point where I never really talked or even thought about it, because of the ableist idea that anything related to "autistic" is the WORST THING TO BE, and more specifically because of the complex overlaps with transphobia in medical treatment.)
Instead, I've really just continued beating myself up for being "weird", "wrong", "broken", "lazy", "oversensitive", "inattentive" etc etc, which was what I got told all the time when I was a kid. I joke that I identify as "a bit weird in the brainpan". Which is...not very helpful in terms of actually understanding myself and finding ways to arrange my life/thoughts so that I'm not negatively impacted by this stuff!
Recently I've been talking with a lot of friends who aren't neurotypical, mostly on the autistic spectrum, and I keep going, "Omg!! I do that! I thought I was the only one!" It's been really, really eye-opening. I'm not going to go into a lot of my "stuff", both because it's tedious for people who don't share it and because some of it is really painful in terms of childhood stuff, but oh god it has been SO HELPFUL in terms of not thinking of myself as just crap and broken. Because it's not just that I'm fucked in the head because my brain works wrong - there are a WHOLE GROUP of people whose brains work THE SAME WAY. It makes me want to cry with relief.
Even just stupid small stuff, like physical habits that people have yelled at me about all my life - to have people go, "Oh yeah, that's stimming, I do that," just...I can't even. I don't have words. All these things that have always been something wrong with me - and not in the way of a disorder or a disease or a syndrome or whatever, but rather something wrong with *me*, an inherent personal failure and flaw.... Yeah. No words.
At this point in time I'm not really that fussed about getting an "accurate" dx from a doctor, for various reasons including the practicalities of accessing it but mostly cos I'm honestly not sure it would be useful. I don't really care right now what the "cause" of all this is. What I *do* care about is that there are other people like me, whose brains work the same way, that it's a difference rather than a failing, that there are people who believe that all these things I've been struggling not to do and be all my damn life are all right..
And people are linking me to articles and resources that help me understand myself and the way I work in a way I've never done, giving me names for things I hadn't even put my finger on but which negatively impacted my life and functioning in a MASSIVE way. I can look at my own stuff so much more clearly, understand it so much better, and rather than constantly, constantly struggling against it in a semi-conscious way actually set things up to allow for it. It's a relief so great that I could honestly just sit and cry when I think about it.
It's requiring a huge shift in how I think about myself, though. There's the whole WORST THING TO BE stuff, the WHY CAN'T I JUST BE FUCKING NORMAL stuff, the horrible I'm-not-like-that-that's-THOSE-people-who-can't-function-at-all-*I'M*-intelligent-etc stuff (bleh, I know, I'm sorry, bleh >.<) - which is actually a bit ironic because so far the main response from ppl I've tentatively mentioned it to has been, either explicitly or not in so many words, "...well, yeah, I always figured you were probably somewhere on the spectrum," (just like when I came out as a) a guy and b) into guys, WHY AM I ALWAYS THE LAST TO KNOW?!). And just finally, FINALLY adjusting to actually thinking of myself as having a developmental disability, which like I say I haven't done even though I've been dxed with it more than once. ("I'm too smart to have a developmental disability!" - ugh my internalised ableism is *gross*.)
I guess if I generally subscribed to a medical model of disability this would all be a lot more painful/difficult for me, or in a different way? - because most people *do* see having a developmental disability, especially anything related to the Dreaded A-Word, as something WRONG with you, something BROKEN. But I'm already so used to seeing disabilities as a difference instead (except when I get into the internalised ableism, obv, which I do sometimes) that it doesn't feel like a bad thing - it just feels like an *explanation*, and a relief. "This is just a way some brains function." Not a personal moral failing. Just like some people are tall/short or myopic or deaf or - yeah, or trans.
I'm not a massive failure, and there's an explanation, and I'm not alone, and I'm not wrong. And I can understand myself and make my own life better, which is the hugest, most important thing. Wow.
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