"I Have Autism. Why An Autocracy Scares Me": Daily Kos [View all]

[appalachiablue]

Last edited Sun Sep 19, 2021, 10:44 PM - Edit history (1)

- Daily Kos, Sept. 19, 2021.

~ I want to preface this story with a caveat for people who know me IRL that I am not cross-posting it to any of my social media accounts and ask that this story not be shared on Facebook. My identity on Twitter is less known, so I may tweet a link to this via my “nameless” Twitter feed, but for reasons that I won’t get into here, I’d rather keep this diary semi-anon for now. Maybe that makes me a coward, but I simply don’t have the emotional bandwidth to put my full self behind the boofdah guise “out there” right now. Thanks in advance - boof ~

In early 2018, after a day-long psych evaluation from my psychologist at the time, I received a diagnosis I had not initially expected: Autism Spectrum Disorder, Requiring Support, Without Accompanying Intellectual/Language Impairment. My psychologist had recommended that I undergo the psych evaluation, one of which I had not had previously since I was three or four years old, as a tool for her to analyze tangible data to make such a diagnosis. She was the first therapist I had seen aside from my psychopharmacologist who was also a doctor, and I had the impression that she was more data-driven than LMHCs with whom I’d sought therapy previously.

After completing the psych eval, I dreaded receiving the results. I’d long known that I’d had (and had received earlier diagnoses of) depression and anxiety, but after decades of receiving all manner of mental health counseling, feared that I’d had something more serious that had gone undetected--something akin to psychosis, like schizophrenia, that could have terrible impacts on my personal and professional life and livelihood.

Being diagnosed with autism was the last thing I expected. My psychologist quietly explained to me that she suspected I’d had the condition all my life, but due to my being intelligent and reasonably friendly, my being on the spectrum had gone persistently under the radar. She reassured me that I was on the more mild, Asperger’s end of the spectrum, being “high-performing” enough to have gained a reasonably successful, upwardly mobile profession as a quality-assurance editor and to have also built a loving relationship with a good, kind-hearted husband and raised two children with him that we had adopted...

- More,
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/9/19/2053184/-I-have-autism-Why-an-autocracy-scares-me



- How the Nazis viewed people with disabilities. The image caption reads: "60,000 Reichsmarks. This is what this person suffering from hereditary defects costs the Community of Germans during his lifetime. Fellow Citizen, that is your money, too."