Before we go any further, I should probably issue a warning that the timeline of what I'm about to share will jump forward and backward, and you might just feel like you're lost in Marvel's Multiverse. If you hang with me, I'll do my best to make it as obvious as possible when I'm time traveling. Because you see, that's a "feature" of crossing Autism and ADHD together. We can totally time travel... in our minds!
I mentioned briefly in my last post that the pursuit of my own diagnosis came from research I was doing on behalf of my daughter, so let me elaborate. We had reached out to her school counselor about "school refusal" (turns out that's the actual term for it), and her teacher added to the conversation that we should also consider the possibility of autism. So her mother and I began learning everything we could — books, YouTube videos, TED talks, online forums, support organizations. Along that journey, someone pointed out that I seemed to fit into a lot of the categories we were learning about. It gave me pause, because even though I hadn't noticed it before, I knew immediately that it was true.
As I learned more, I sought out a therapist who listed Autism under their specializations. After my first session, I was given a number of tests that could be done online. I'll be honest, it took the first few questions before I remembered to answer them honestly from the heart and not from the "persona" I had masked myself with for so long. The questions were uncomfortable, but I reminded myself that the honest outcome would be a good thing, for myself and my daughter. No one was going to be on the other end judging me — which is the fear I so often carry into answering any question at all. If you know what I'm talking about, know you are not alone with those thoughts. I talked about what followed those tests in my first post.
