I would like to preface this story with the fact that I am not a,” person with autism”. I do not carry it around in a bag and abandon it at the airport metal detector. I am autistic. It is not an offensive term, unless you’ve somehow been brought up to believe that ”autistic” is an inherently insulting state of being. Autism is as much a part of me as I am a part of it.   

​And yet, I lived as though I was part of the Neurotypical ”norm” for twelve years.  

​Mother has many times recounted the first signs of my difference. When I was a baby, I would sob and scream and shriek, as any baby does. My mother was told to let me be. Let me cry myself to sleep. But the screaming didn’t stop. Instead, I continued the flood of tears until vomit rose to my throat and I was covered in bile.   

​I was always a sensitive child. The slightest thing could set me off – the worst part about this being that I never knew why I was so provoked. I was just mad. Upset. Sad. All of the emotions and none of the answers.   

​As the years went by it became increasingly apparent that none of the other kids had these issues. They were tame. I was born with questions while they were born with answers. Answers which I would chase and chase to no avail. Not all questions have the same answer. I just didn’t know it at the time.  

​When I was twelve, we finally got a hint. Not an answer, but it was close enough. I don’t remember who suggested it, just that had been. My school life had hit a rough patch just before quarantine had taken effect. The screaming, the blaming, the terror and anxiety and nausea that filled my sixth-grade year still lingers in my thoughts to this day. To add insult to injury, my school refused any form of testing. In their minds, I was ”too smart” to have any sort of issues.   

​So, we did what we had to – outsourced. I missed school on one fateful day, so fateful that I cannot for the life of me remember what day it actually happened. Just that it happened.   

​Everything from the car ride to the waiting room was an utter blur. Shapes and colors, that’s all I can still see. There were no colors in that room, however.  

​When they called me in, I was led from my mother’s arms to a small, white, dimly lit room with only a table and some containers in it. It felt like some kind of sick interrogation chamber. In a way, it was. A strange woman sat down in front of me, I think she was blonde. I think she was kind. I don’t know. I don’t know.  

​She asked me questions. Many questions. Not the kinds you get on tests, mind you. She showed me a series of textless pictures, showcasing a monkey jumping from a tree to get coconuts. She asked me to tell her what was happening in it. I answered bluntly. There wasn’t a story, at least not one I could see.  

​She pulled up a box on toys and spread them out onto the table. She asked me just to play with them. I simply sat there for ten or so minutes, spinning the same disk in the same direction, staring at it and only it. She tried, in vain, to coax me into playing with the barbies or the plastic animals. But I stayed loyal to that disk.   

​She asked me about my personal life, my social circles, my friends, my family, my connections, my everything. For once, I was the one giving answers. For once, I had answers.  

​I went back to my mother. And we waited. It felt like an eternity, one that we’d already waited a previous eternity for. Twelve years. No answers. All of them were locked behind a door as the lady worked mysteriously away from us.  

​Weirdly enough I wasn’t afraid of being told I was different. I already knew something about me wasn’t like anyone else I’d ever met in my small town. What I feared was being told that I was not. If the woman came through the door and told me that nothing was wrong, I think my brain would have exploded. If I was ”normal” then surely, I was just crazy and all the answers I didn’t have were there all along and I was just too stupid to find them.  

​  

​”Autism Spectrum Disorder” and ”Generalized Anxiety Disorder”   

​It was not a surprise. It was the expected, wanted outcome.  

​So, why did I still have questions?  

​The reality is – you will never have all of those answers, you won’t know everything. Not even once you finally schedule that thousand-year anticipated appointment. Small things: I don’t know if that lady was blonde. I don’t know what her eyes looked like. Or big things: why does improvement seem so far away. But I had failed to realize that answers were not necessarily what I needed.   

​What I needed was direction. You will never know what is at the end of the path, but if you can find someone with a decent guess… Well, it’s better than trudging in blindfolded.​