Big "AHA" moment for me, probably a no brainer for anyone who knows me.

(This is a reposted entry from another online journal, from the 9th May, just to start this blog off.)

Pretty much my whole life I've been looking for something. Searching for explanations for why I am the way I am, how I act, interact and so on. As a child I thought I was an alien, or adopted (though my strong resemblance to both my parents made the adopted one pretty hard to convince myself of). I didn't feel I belonged.

At first, it was PTSD. Yes, I did have it, and for a while it pretty much covered the issues I had. My attention span was poor, I dissociated, I had trouble relating to others, and I assumed this was all due to that. But then the nightmares, high anxiety and depression abated, and most of the genuine PTSD symptoms were gone, but I was left with still the same issues.

I moved on to multiplicity. It fit with a few things. I knew I had soul-bonded in the past, but the rest was an uneasy fit, even median didn't explain things right. Though I felt I had things in common with the multiple community, it wasn't what I was searching for.

Then this last week or two, I started reading a book. I'd read other books on autism and Asperger's in the past, and even done an online test that rated your likelihood of having Asperger's (I can't find my old score, though I posted it here. My score today was Your Aspie score: 154 of 200 Your neurotypical (non-autistic) score: 60 of 200 You are very likely an Aspie.) But I didn't seriously consider it in relation to myself. The book I started reading is called Different Minds: Gifted Children with AD/HD, Asperger's and Other Learning Deficits by Deirdre V. Lovecky. And reading it, suddenly everything makes sense, not just about myself, but my family.

This last weekend I was at mum's place, and I finally asked her, "Why was William (middle brother) never tested for AS?" Her reply was that in those days (the 80s, pre-Asperger's paper in English) they probably wouldn't have known what to look for. She then related to me a story about a church family nearby to her. Their son, who is good friends with William, had been diagnosed two years ago. When the family told her about it, they said to her, "We think William has it too." Which is right on, because he and William are very alike. My uncle is the same. He eats the same meal every night, and has done for probably his whole adult life. It was always a source of family amusement and slight confusion that William and my uncle could be so alike in their eccentricities, when they hardly saw each other during William's childhood. It was always assumed that it was genetic patterns of behaviour showing themselves, and that was right on the money.

Spreading wider, though, we've also talked in the past about how if my youngest brother Roger was a child today, he'd be prescribed Ritalin in a heartbeat. And my cousin, Jessica, also. They were both very full on, high energy, impulsive, risk taking, tantrum throwing kids. (And by "tantrum" I don't mean little, I mean full-on, rage-for-hours, take-the-hammer-to-things-in-frustration-or-anger rages. And I mean it about the hammer.)They'd very much fit in the current day diagnostic criteria for childhood ADHD. Both calmed down, within a matter of six months, when they hit puberty - a very abrupt personality change, quite jarring, really. Many kids with ADHD do do that, though others will have to manage their ADHD their whole lives.

Roger no longer has the rages, or the hyperactivity, but he still speaks very fast, running his words into one another, and he has been trying to manage his chronic insomnia his whole life. He has always thought, drawn and constructed in 3D. Even from as young as four, his drawings were 3D representations. He was forever driving mum nuts bringing home dead bits of machinery to take them apart, to see how they worked. He's now an IT and database technician in the library at one of Sydney's most elite private boys' schools, head-hunted for the role at the age of eighteen by one of mum's university course ex-classmates who is the librarian there. He programs in his spare time, and he is obsessed with Sega. What doesn't get saved of his salary goes to buying rare cartridges and systems on eBay.

So, four family members living who would have at some point or still do fit with a diagnosis. Then there's the rest of us, who don't seem to have enough to be diagnosed with anything, but have traits and behaviours from one or the other or both, all jumbled up. So much of my mother's behaviour and my own behaviour makes sense now. Just as examples, I have trouble with attention span and holding things in short term memory, transforming ideas into concrete workable goals and breaking large projects down into individual elements (like in ADHD Inattentive Type) but I have social issues to do with things like talking over people, reading other's emotions and non-verbal cues, taking people too literally, and doing things automatically like wandering off or pulling out a book when I'm bored in social situations (which is very AS).

I keep remembering things from childhood, or recently, or just traits about myself or my other family members that make sense now. My mother not noticing my depression, or not acknowledging it, while blithely talking about her day, church or work. It wasn't that she was meaning to be rude or insensitive so much as she had difficulty comprehending my feelings. My sense of alienation and "differentness" in childhood that made me feel so separate from others - and that others picked up on and used when they bullied me. My intense dislike, discomfort and even phobia of social situations. My occasional sensory overload that can lead to me shutting down - often linked to crowds, noise and odours.

A big issue was and still can be my intense obsessions, and difficulty focussing outside my interests. An example being, in high school, Year 11, I started the year in Related (Advanced) English. Our first work - The Crucible. It fascinated me. I was able to discuss it in depth and with opinions in class, but at home, I got sidetracked, searching the internet for hours at a time for information about the original Salem witch trials. Though I loved the challenge of the text, I didn't get any of my homework or assessments done, because I spent all my time looking up about the witch trials, rather than looking for information that was relevant and doing the work assigned. I ended up having to drop down to General English, which had simpler requirements. Around that same period, maybe slightly earlier, I had another obsession - the Titanic, spurred on by the release of the movie. Does anyone normal get excited by the discovery of a cargo listing, or descriptions of the kinds of rivets used on the real ship VS those shown in the film? I did. At one point I had over 100meg of information of the Titanic on our old, family 7gig hard drive, which was also weighted down with my brothers' computer games. (I learnt to keep all my personal files in a folder sneakily renamed "winword" to prevent my stuff being deleted in occasional brotherly purges to free up hard drive space for big games. It worked! They never found it after that.)

I'm determined this discovery isn't going to become an excuse for anything. But goodness, it helps. Already, in the last week, I've found it easier to recognise problems and modify them. I've completed my first assignment for TAFE, with a bunch of help from my partner. And I've been able to put a reason for why I find certain things so difficult. I know it's not my fault, that it wasn't that I just didn't try hard enough, wasn't committed enough, was too busy "daydreaming", too lazy. I have issues that have a reason, and there are things that I can do to work with or around them, to get done what I have to do, and live my life more fully, without self-blame.

Okay, I know some of you are going to be sitting there saying, "Ruth has ADHD and AS issues? Pfftt. I knew that years ago." But I know now too. So we're on the same page, finally.

(My friends are encouraged to reply if they got through this whole post, even if it's just to say "Well, duuuuh!")