I Sacrificed my Health for Other People’s Comfort
I may never stop grieving the years I’ve lost and the poor health I’ve acquired from not having an autism diagnosis for most of my life
They failed us because they didn’t care to study us. Plain and simple, no one cared about us late-diagnosed autistic adults when we were growing up. The blame is on patriarchy and white supremacy. Same story, a different song.
For decades white cis males were the only children studied for autism. Despite Soviet autism researcher Grunya Sukhereva studying autistic girls in the 1920s, few autism researchers in the last 90 years have included females in their autism studies. Until the last six years.
The “Lost Generations of Autism” weren’t simply missed as we like to say, we were purposefully and willfully stepped over as we fell down before the mental healthcare system, emotionally dying and many times literally dying from years of masking.
As we masked the decades away, we were gathering personality disorders, autoimmune disorders, major depressive disorders, anxiety disorders, eating disorders, addictions, CPTSD, and becoming victims of physical and sexual abuse at an alarming rate.
