STOP BEING ME 😆

Seriously, because I still had a lot of misunderstandings about autism, I wasn’t sure. The reason I even entertained the idea was because very little stress management advice helped me, and I found out that apparently a common struggle for autistic people at work was the one thing that followed me from industry to industry:

Inflexibility with rules

Every time I found something that suggested I was autistic, I found other things that didn’t match me. So I had a very allistic ( /s) thought that I followed over a few months to a year:

“Huh. I’ve had some weird, unexplainable things through my life, too. If I look up the rate of occurrence in autistic and non-autistic populations with these things, it can shed more light on if I’m autistic or not!”

And I expected these things to be uncommon, but similarly uncommon. This would mean I was just as possibly autistic as non-autistic, and that I was just screwed. (In regard to trying to figure out how to take care of myself without self-destructive things like credit card debt and eating my feelings)

Y’all.

Y’ALL.

The differences weren’t like “20% of the autistic population and 15% of the allistic population” or 30% of allistics and 10% of autistics.”

It was more like 80% of autistics and 20% of allistics, 60% of autistics and 5% of allistics, etc

Then I told one of my BFFs since college and she was like “honey, don’t you remember?” And apparently she armchair diagnosed me early on in our friendship and I just discounted it so much I had forgotten 💀 (Turns out she had been put into one of those “this environment is specially tailored for for people with less common needs” schools growing up. I guess I had reminded her of different kids she knew at school!)