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I’m Not Flaky, I’m Autistic
Flaky, weird, single-minded, rigid, boring, ice queen, stuck up, bitch, these are all names that have been assigned to me at one time or another over the course of my life. And for most of my life, I believed them. I was different from everybody else around me, my family, my friends, the general population at large. It was as if I were an alien from a distant galaxy, sent to Earth to live among the humans, to learn their ways and imitate them, to become one of them. Yeah, if that was the mission, I’ve failed pretty miserably.
I didn’t find out that I wasn’t a horrible, bitchy, flaky, ice queen until I was in my late 40s. The news that I wasn’t a terrible person, I was Autistic, was both welcome and not so welcome. Welcome because I finally had a reason for my differences. Not so welcome because as odd as it sounds, I cultivated an entire identity around those differences. In my pre-diagnosis mind, I was a bitch, I was icy cold, I was rigid, and these attributes were all of my choosing. They were my personality, crafted by me for me. Having a diagnosis took that bit of control, artificial as it was, away from me. The security of believing that I was the way I was because I chose not to fit in was gone. That sucked a bit. But, it did clear some things up.
