Who am I?
Am I autistic?
What do I need?
What do I want?
Is being pedantic an autistic trait?
Do I just need to learn social skills?
Do I need to unmask?
Do I need to let myself have special interests?
Do I deserve the label autistic?
Even if I do, how do I figure out who I am?
I wish I could “get” that it’s ok to be me, but who is the “me” that it’s ok to be?
What’s wrong with me?
Why can’t I just function?
Why can’t I just be normal, and get a normal job?
Why can’t I cope with things that other people cope with?
Why am I comfort eating and hiding in my phone?
Why don’t I want to be me?
When did I learn to be so quiet?
Have I been hiding all my feelings?
Why can’t it all just stay safely buried?
What if feeling my feelings messes everything up for me?
What am I feeling?
Do I have some shame to release?
Am I really scared of my family?
What am I really scared of?
How do I set the weird part of me free?
How do I accept this about myself?
How do I forgive myself?
How do I grieve?
I’m so confused. But what am I confused about?
Can I accept who I am?
Can we ever fully understand ourselves?
Can I truly learn to love my awkward and weird?
What does awkward even mean?
Does accepting who I am mean accepting that I can’t thrive?
What does it mean to thrive?
What support do I need?
What support do I deserve?
Don’t other people deserve it more?
What would happen if I was simply myself?
Realising you might be autistic late in life can feel like an earthquake of questions running through your brain.
All of these questions are taken directly from my private journals – between the day I realised I might be autistic and the day I was diagnosed.
I’m happy to report that now – two years later – I feel much more at peace with who I am and how I feel. I believe it’s a lifetime’s work to keep unraveling the answers to some of these questions. And I think there’s real beauty in that.