What I Feared Before Getting Diagnosed With Autism (And ADHD)
And how I felt afterward
It hurts. The stream of water hits my small body and I shrink in myself. I hear the other children shrieking with laughter. Are they having fun? I’m suffering. But I must endure it. It doesn’t occur to me to just step aside, to run away, as the teacher in the pre-kindergarten sprays us with water from the hose in the hot summer.
It blinds. The light is too bright, too much. I squint, trying to see, my eyes full of tears. I stand rooted in place, blinded. Mercifully, one of the teachers notices my struggle and lends me a pair of sunglasses from a kid younger than me. The brightness stops. I breathe out with relief.
It calms me. I’m standing alone, facing the corner, in a room full of children. I’m dancing with my imaginary friend. I’m not interested in the children. I’m content.
The signs were there from the beginning
In retrospect, it should have been clear. I was a quiet, bookish child, but I often had what my parents called “tantrums.” I was, at the same time, too adult and too childish for my age. I was too obedient, taking things too literally.
I was so picky with food that when my mum asked me, slightly desperately, to write down my own meal plan for the weak, I wrote “eggs” and “potatoes” over and over every day.
I walked through the preschool with my hands balled in fists, a gesture that nobody at the time recognized as a sign of deep anxiety. I didn’t talk much to the other children. I think I was afraid of them. I never picked the “good” toys. Instead, I was waiting for what would be left.
Everybody remarked how similarly I behaved as a child as later my little autistic cousin did. But in my childhood, in a newly democratic country that was still recuperating from long decades of communism, “women couldn’t be autistic.”
The psychiatrists didn’t find out I was autistic. My aunt did.
The first person who had any suspicion was my aunt, who has an autistic child and is autistic herself. Not a single one of the small army of doctors and therapists that surrounded me from my early…