Neurodivergent

CW: self diagnosis

TL;DR: ASD, being trans, it is so much larger and (inter)connected within me.

Update 1: Added Hannah Gadsby’s shows at resources

Oh welp, It is long overdue (by a couple of years) but we need to have a talk on...

... Neurodiversity, and specifically: being neurodivergent. 

First I have a info graph, and then a long watch in the form of a talk on YouTube which I definitely recommend, and then will we switch back to the studio, err this blag. So soak yourself in information overload.

Exhibit a

That feels like me in the centre...

Exhibit b

Are you still with me? awesome.

Maybe zoom back to the mid 90's. I think I got aware around that time that I was not neurotypical as I noticed that I was actually copying and mimicking people's behaviour A LOT. 

On the other hand, my mentor for my university graduation track blurting out "You're an autist" to me didn't mean a thing to me as we all "knew" that those peoples where the ones that could count all the matches in a matchbox and we would call "idiot savants". Haha, the joke is on me.

With work related stuff I got more and more the idea everyone had the script except for me.

I don't know exactly when I started to get more interested in the subject. Maybe the diagnosis of a good friend of mine, maybe my own interest in mental healthcare post burnout, the social media algorithms showing me more and more where I was searching for, my short relation with another friend and their mental health issues. Or all of this together. 

A couple of things happened in quite a rapid succession: Seeing both that infographic and the SHA2017 talk on neurodiversity, and stumble upon "Hoe vrouwen hun autisme camoufleren en daar onder lijden." (in dutch, you might want to put it through a translator, hope it comes out not that maimed)

This sounded all too familiar in too much ways to be mere coincidence. I knew the ASD and "the trans thing" played tag inside me, kicking over a lot of mental pottery whilst doing so but after reading and seeing all that I came to the realisation they where one and the same, jumping hand in hand through my mind like Tigger from Whinnie the Pooh. Hurray.

I got to recognise panic attacks from the past (travel related, all the unknowns at the destination and whether I had packed everything) which seemed to be caused by a lot of overstimulating due to the (temporarily) loss of control and unable to channel it properly. I also realised from my driving lessons that I was more relaxed when there was fog, because that reduced the amount of things to see by a pretty much deal and thus less to process. Long drives exhaust me anyway, but I love going by train (which might be a difficult thing in these post COVID times)

To come back on the subject of masking, or as the Borg say "We are the Borg. We will add your biological and technological social distinctiveness to our own". What I started to wonder was whether "the trans thing" wasn't a coping mechanism for the ASD but the very manifestation of it, as if to complement "the female presentation seen in some ASD males" (ok, yeah still a coping mechanism anyway then).

And that is where the caveat emptor "self diagnosis" comes in. I'm not stating that trans is a very specific ASD manifestation though you see more neurodivergents along the ranks of LGBTQIA+ people than amongst the neurotypical cishets. It might be also why more LGBTQIA+ ASD people seem to be in IT, as it enables them to hide in plain sight and put their unique skillset to work. That is, if leadership is able to support them properly so they won't feel like they're missing the script.

Both genderdysphoria and autism got revised quite a bit in the latest edition of DSM (DSM-V) alleviating the stigmatism in genderdyshoria and simplifying autism which for my feeling tries to pathologise both less than before.

And where does that bring me? I needed to write this off, to structure my mind. To give the accumulated train of thought throughout the years a place. Maybe it will give other people an aha-erlebenis (beware: self diagnosis!).

I'm coming home, some sort of it. But there is a kitchen sink stockpiled with dirty dishes. And that is good for now, because they are my dishes and not dumped over there by a stranger.

Some of the resources I'm using to reflect in random order:

• ADHD Alien
• But You Don't Look Autistic At All By Bianca Toeps (In preparation, I've read the excellent dutch version)
• Liv Strömquist's Fruit Of Knowledge
• Hannah Gadsby’s shows Nanette and Douglas (here is an excerpt from “Douglas”)
• queer / feminist / neurodivergent twitter at large. Twitter is a TERF ridden transphobic fascistic  cesspool the least (as any other social media these days btw), but there are really nice inspiring people too there.