So it turns out I have Asperger's. We took our girls in for a checkup--months ago now--and our doctor, God bless her, remarked on how unusually squirmy our elder daughter was during the eye exam. These tidings were not, for us, fresh information; Sonya has been such a lovely little eel from day one that whenever I hold another baby, they feel so motionless by contrast that I have to keep checking to make sure I didn't set them down somewhere and forget. But apparently, exaggerated photosensitivity can often be a "tell" for autism presentation. In a zany twist, I have the same symptom; and our doc is familiar enough with my abattoir of a mental state that she quickly connected some dots. The condition is often hereditary (sorry, darling), so if she showed signs, it made sense for me to get tested too.
A whole battery of exhaustive evaluations later--broken up, of course, by everyone getting fired from everything for the bulk of this ugly year--I was diagnosed. Ellen, my brilliantly organized and motivated helpmeet, was the one who found me a mind-brain doctor and then importuned her for weeks on end to make her assessment. When she got off the phone with the brain-mind lady, walked into the living room, and said, "You have autism," it yanked a skyscraper of rugs out from under me. For a second, I actually thought I had heard, "You have cancer."
But ultimately, the truth is so extremely not surprising that I accepted it pretty fast. I was homeless, off and on, for 15 years. I invented a poetic form in which every other syllable rhymes, and wrote a 57-stanza epic in it. I feel more at ease curled up inside of a cupboard than in most social situations--that, or I'm so aggressively friendly that people assume I'm either drunk or insane (both, it turns out!). I have bizarre under- and overreactions to almost everything. Most of all, I just don't work right. Asperger's is a neurological condition, a hardware problem, not only a psychological one. All my life I've felt that I simply couldn't process daily life the way I should--the way "neurotypicals" (as we Aspies like to call the normals) do. I was literally right. In some ways, the diagnosis feels very exonerating. And, of course, the "you have cancer" feeling has largely faded in light of the knowledge that this isn't something creeping up or hanging over me: it's already part of me, it has been all along.
Like probably most people, I still hear "autism" and think "Rain Man." But, luckily (?), I'm high-functioning enough to be morally and socially responsible for my own life choices. I smashed and blundered through a whole lot of road hazards to get this far, but now we know. Now we can start, not fixing me, because there's no "cure," it's just how my brain is wired, but we can start correcting for my tendency to pull to the left. Like driving a car with a splashy tire; we just have to lean harder on the steering wheel. As a group of wise men said long ago, "Now we know--and knowing is half the battle."
I'm guessing the other half is drugs? We'll see how it goes.
