I told someone today!

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Today I told someone other than my husband and my therapist about AS and me being AS. I admitted to her that I was self-diagnosed, and felt vaguely foolish doing so. I'm now determined to get an assessment and formal diagnosis. I shouldn't have to, I suppose, but I feel I need to, to be taken seriously about it.

That's all, just wanted to share!

I'm hopefully getting a clinical diagnosis on Friday, because no one believes me. hehe. I'm really shocked at how many people who haven't ever had a psyc class think they can do a differential diagnosis on me.

Maybe since you are not sure (not clinically diagnosed) it may not be a good thing to go ahead and tell people. You know what I mean?

Best psychiatrist I ever had (long history of depression before the AS idea came up) used me more than once to take his students down a peg. Ones who had started to equate mental illness with mental incompetence.

They'd do their work-up on me, with me co-operating, and then I'd take their condescending conclusions and tear them to fragments with careful logical analytical exposition.

One of the best therapies I ever had.

Talk about a self-esteem boost!!

I'm blessed with a psychiatrist who knows as much or more about AS as I do, because her son has it.

I dont tell people.. I want but I am self-diagnosed as well.. I've already had one friend question it.. Quite frankly, I know myself better and don't need a psychiatrist to tell me how I am - I meditate daily for great lengths which educates me more on myself then anyone else could sum me up with using only a limited number of facts available to them..

Yeah - I've decided that telling people was stupid. Because people are stupid. I mean telling people who need to know, like teachers and family... yes. But other people, no.

I'll toss it out of it comes up somehow... some of my more fun conversations involving booze and jolly times have involved my mentioning it at some point in the course thereof.

A short while ago a colleague was really screwing with me for how weird and inept I am. I sent her an e-mail and told her about it. She was just utterly mortified, she felt like the biggest b*tch in the world. She said "by the time I got halfway through your e-mail, it just struck me 'oh my God, it's like I've been making fun of a handicapped person!' And that's something I just don't do." So now we're all buddy buddy... she swore she'd never do it again and she hasn't.

I'm surrounded by people with graduate degrees or who are trying to get one (or their next one) so they tend to be much more understanding than... uhhhhhhhh... what you might find in the average white collar (or pink collar) office or whatever.

I want a copy of this e-mail you sent her, haha. When I tell people I think I have asperger's they laugh at me. I need a good way to put 'I'm a little slow'.

It took me several months to get up the nerve to tell my parents that I was going in for a DX and another month after I got the DX to email them the results.That was a week ago and they still havent responded.I wonder if they ever will...My family has "denial" down to an art form.My boyfriend still thinks the whole thing is "made-up".I almost told my manager at work during my review....she said(as a complement)You treat the DD clients as well as staff...I replied...(No,I treat them much better then staff" and she laughed because that is always what I get into trouble for during my reviews...not getting along with fellow staff(because they are mostly lazy, incompetent, people who spend their "work time" on their cell phones gossiping.

Wow,of on a tangent.I think you should consider getting official DX if it would make you feel better,but I wouldnt count on it making any difference to anyone else.Few people even know what it is and fewer have the depth to understand the subtleties of the DX.IMHO

Serious? If you really want me to, I will.

I should note that I didn't mention AS by name in that letter. She told me that she already knew I had it because I had mentioned it in a group setting once or twice... or maybe she heard it from a mutual friend, I don't know. But she told me that the e-mail prompted her to look it up on the internet. She said the info she read caused her to understand me a lot more. She'd never heard of AS until she met me.

Also, if you were to use the template... well, a lot of it refers to specific incidents, i.e. actual things she made fun of me for, to an excessive degree, while in front of mutual friends. So it'd be like Mad-Libs... you'd have to scratch stuff out and fill in the blanks.

But dang, it did the trick.

I was actually half-expecting her to go ape-sh*t, because I've had bad experiences in the past. One of my quasi-girlfirneds from way back when would treat me like dogsh*t over stuff that wasn't my fault (i.e. AS related), and every time I would try to explain it to her she would get all pissed and think I was full of sh*t, and then start treating me even worse. From what I understand (by way of 3rd parties), she came to the conclusion that it was, like, 99% in my head. What a haughty, presumptuous b*tch... (but I digress).

Well, the person I sent the e-mail to is highly educated (like everyone else in my cohort) in a vein of the human sciences (not psychology, of course, but there's some overlap). And she's pretty sensible and no-bullsh*t, too.

She said the only reason she could think of why she acted that way was because she'd never met anyone with so many idiosyncrasies, and she just couldn't fathom how someone could even make it into adulthood, let alone into a PhD program. Basically, she thought I was some kind of mental m***et or something. But man... my heartfelt e-mail just totally flipped the script. That was the most positive experience I've ever had in trying to set someone straight who was f*cking with me because they thought I was a weirdo.

This is how I ended up telling this person: The person I told was saying to me 'what do you think of (this girl who just started with us last week)?' And mentioned several things about her slightly inappropriate social behaviour, and was sort of pulling a face as she said it, and it felt like a bitching session was about to start. I myself had noticed this new girl's behaviour and thought to myself 'I bet she's Aspie' and in fact had been embarrassed by her just a short while before this conversation took place. So anyway I felt the need to say something in her defense. And that led me to disclosing my own self-DX. I also told her that I had started the process of getting a formal DX. This person was surprised to hear it but did not ridicule me in any way and seemed to take on board all that I told her. I also told her that it was a big deal for me to tell her and that she was the first one I'd told, and she respected this. She then disclosed some of her own personal stuff and I think we bonded a little more as a result (we have a very good working relationship anyway). My main motive in telling her was to alert her to the possibility that someone's odd social behaviour could be due to something very real but not widely understood. I also mentioned that as a wildlife hospital we may well get a disproportionately high number of Aspie-type people coming to work with us because animals and nature are the most common Special Interest and that I recognised traits in quite a few of the people who work at the hospital. I think everything I said was taken well and I'm sure I didn't look stupid. Most people I come into contact with can tell that I'm highly intelligent, if a little weird! If I can play my part in educating people about the autism spectrum, that has to be a good thing as far as I'm concerned.

I like happy stories.

good for you