If things weren’t already challenging enough, might I be heading towards becoming a late diagnosed neurodivergent person?
Uh! Oh!
Right in the middle of a well planned-out and well thought-out nomad life, things were going majorly wrong. The money started running out, the job interviews scarce to non-existent. So, why on earth would I need my whole worldview, my understanding of myself; who and what I am, being transformed into effectively an alternate parallel reality. All that reading-up on manifestation and quantum jumping was finally bearing fruit.
I’m joking.
There are, nevertheless, shades of ‘waking up from the matrix’ about it. A machine I have have been trying to stay plugged into doesn’t really seem to have sockets that fit; leaving me waking-up to a different me than I thought I was.
A Stroke of Luck
Our children’s doctor; what a find! So far from where we started out, we got one who could speak good English; down to her studying in London. Well, she took one sideways glance at me, while communicating to us our daughter’s diagnosis, and uttered in passing that she could well believe me to be ‘Gifted’ and my wife to have ADHD.
Can you be surprised and unsurprised at the same time? The thing was, many years ago, when living in Germany, my therapist there had offered the opinion that a lot of my childhood behaviour sounded like ‘Gifted’. I took that as a compliment, meaning talented or smart, and thought no more of it. These days this seems to be referred to as ‘Twice Exceptional’; which, on the surface does wonders for needy confidence, but I guess really means on the autism spectrum along with being reasonably intelligent.
The doctor said that she would be prepared to test me too, ’cause i’m a parent of a neurodivergent child.
A Rude Awakening
At my regular plodding pace, I had been reading the wonderful book ‘Unmasked’ by Ellie Middleton. The intention was to learn more about our kids, so that we might be able to support and help them better. All the while, I kept having these moments of “This sounds like me”, or noticing myself getting quite indignant about the injustices experienced by neurodivergent folks. Around the same time, I had started attending a language class, to get better at my wife’s language. Deliberately, or subconsciously, we had built a nice lifestyle structure over the previous couple of years, that honoured our needs better, and had social interactions working more on our terms, and manageable by us. All of a sudden, shut into a classroom with a lot of people, lovely though they are, and me having to work hard at those social skills that seem to come so easily to other people. Shocked, I actually caught myself forcing my eyes to make contact. For the first time, in clear contrast, it was clear how hard all this ‘being sociable’ business was. I really do not know what to do, how to do it correctly, or how to be social. It doesn’t flow naturally at all. I can, however, do it; having built up a lifetime skillset of techniques, performances and tricks that are far from innate or instinctive. It became clear that it had always been hard and consistently maintained work. Above all, extremely tiring.
It was going to be the smart thing to take the doctor up on her offer.
The Elephant in the Room
Often enough there had been grumbling before about not liking being in large groups of people, and about how I just didn’t get what people wanted from me. The resistance to being herded into a regular routine had been written-off as some kind of rebellious punk streak. The rest was chalked-up to having social anxiety caused by previous traumatic experiences, but now I was toying with the idea that the previous traumatic experiences might have something to do with being an undiagnosed neurodivergent.
It sure does mess with your mind, to spend a whole lifetime with a strong certainty that you’re in with the normally functioning people; and not having to concern yourself with whether ‘normal’ is a word that should be used here at all, and then having it revealed that you are indeed outside of all that. The one thing that I was always praised for when I was growing-up was my intelligence. That means that my brain’s working fine, if not better than the average, doesn’t it?
Not Wrong Just Different
And yet, a diagnosis of neurodivergence seems to offer the full scoop on a lot of why life seems so hard sometimes; oftentimes. There’s always been this strong sense of being ‘wrong’, my very essence being ‘wrong’. This is something that a neurotypical society can’t help, in their unawareness, but unwittingly make neurodivergent people feel. What if I am not wrong, or bad, but simply different, even disabled? The idea offers the promise of great self-forgiveness, the making-sense of a lot of confusion during many decades of life, and could indeed facilitate giving an easier ride to those who might just not have known what to make of me or how to handle my peculiarities. Could this be a personal ‘Theory of everything’ a magic-bullet, or just a dragging back of the curtain to reveal The Great Oz pulling levers and twisting knobs to create the illusion of neurotypicality?
One thing is for sure, as the possibility of a neurodivergent diagnosis looms, it feels as though a great weight is being lifted, that some self-acceptance is seeping-in from somewhere and I am feeling ever-so-slightly at home inside myself.