Autism = Home

I’ve been thinking about this post for a while, ever since those words popped into my head, that Autism is home. My diagnosis of Autism is new but my experience of Autism is something familiar, something that has been with me my whole life. It’s a little odd to have such a new label for an old familiar thing, especially since I feel like I simultaneously am learning about Autism while having experienced what it was my entire life.

Like most things in life, discovering that you are Autistic and that you’ve been Autistic all along is not a linear path. Many have likened it to forever peeling back layers of new discoveries/understandings and connections. I have to agree. Autism continues to explain so much about my life and my past experiences. I am constantly unearthing better ways to understand what has happened to me and the decisions that I’ve made within the context of being Autistic. Autism has always been there, influencing me and impacting literally every facet of my life, maybe I didn’t exactly have a word for it before but it didn’t affect me any less than it does today.

Many people will say that it feels like their Autism got more intense after diagnosis. While I can feel that way too, I think it has more to do with me now having a word that defines my experiences in a way that makes it more obvious/easier to identify. It’s like a magic eye book, once you see the magic word, you really can’t unsee it and it seems so obvious afterward. I see my Autism in everything I do, it is there like a forever companion, both feeling like an inextricable part of myself as well as something distinct and separate, something I can observe, make videos about as if it is it’s own entity yet it is me.

There is something about every Autistic person that feels familiar, like we are both from the same place somehow. There is something that connects us, a shared experience that only we know on a visceral level. We both Autism-Natives, every day we've woken up and lived in Autism-land and experience Autism every second of every day and are intimately familiar with Autism as everything we have ever experienced is filtered through Autism, it's Autism-flavored. And something about that feels like home.