Mary H.K. Choi - What My Adult Autism Diagnosis Finally Explained
Another writer in their 40s discovers they have autism. I’m tempted to collect all of these into a book that tells the same story over and over but with significant and important differences. (If you’ll pardon the niche reference, not unlike a series of Becher photos of industrial buildings.)
Choi’s experience is harder to romanticise than some accounts as her traits were making her marriage hell and she went through a hard process of dealing with imposter syndrome, possibly aggravated by her experience as a child of immigrants, being different and having to mask her way through awkward social situations.
And even if I was officially autistic, was I autistic enough for it to matter? And what did that mean? I’d grappled with impostor syndrome at various points in my life, and the nightmare scenario I kept returning to was that I might tell a colleague or acquaintance that I was autistic only to have them reveal that they had a severely autistic child. I found this prospect mortifying beyond redemption. I was convinced they would rightfully feel that my comparative claim to autism was so marginal as to be deceptive. Did I just, in some grotesque display of privilege, pay hundreds of dollars for a doctor’s note that would excuse me from the social mores by which humans in a functioning society were expected to abide? I refused to be an apex asshole of weaponized therapyspeak, a Coastal Elite victim of the self-care-industrial complex. And yet … And yet.
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