Skip to main content
Georgia on the microphone
Georgia

Awareness
Monday 21 October 2024

Accepting my autism diagnosis: a difficult but life changing process

Being undiagnosed for 18 years of my life created many problems during my teenage years. However, my life did not instantly transform for the better after I discovered that I am autistic. In fact, it marked the start of another new journey – the process of navigating the acceptance, understanding, and even sometimes the denial of my diagnosis.  

I am now 23, and I feel I have made big strides in this journey. So, I want to share my experience to normalise this process, and to assure anyone else who is going through it that things do get easier. The more I figure out what being autistic means to me, the better I understand myself, and the more I can manage the challenges that I face.  

 

An isolating adolescence  

From the age of 14 I had been seeing psychiatrists, and had received many incorrect diagnoses, from borderline personality disorder, a personality disorder, to bipolar and a mood disorder. On top of my reasons for seeking help from these services, this experience in itself was exhausting.  

Initially, I would be pleased to get these diagnoses, but I never truly felt these disorders explained what I was going through and the subsequent therapies and treatments never seemed to connect with me. I remember expressing that everything I was struggling with was coming from the same place within me that all the good things about me were also coming from. Eventually, I accepted that there was something wrong with me that could never be identified or helped, and this was extremely isolating.  

At 18 years old, I was first asked by a psychiatrist if it had ever been suggested that I might be autistic. My initial reaction was confusion, as my knowledge of the autistic spectrum was very limited. However, I will never forget bursting into tears upon researching how autism presents in young girls, and for the first time feeling like I wasn’t alone in my childhood experience.  

 

Denial and imposter syndrome  

Although I initially felt a lot of relief, my life was not automatically improved. Going through my entire childhood with a misguided understanding of what autism is, and with no clue that I may be autistic, made it difficult for me at times to accept my diagnosis or to know what to do with this new information about who I am.  

There were many periods of time when I would deal with imposter syndrome – convincing myself that I wasn’t actually autistic, but that I had just made such a ‘fuss’ that it led to the diagnosis. This led to the strong feeling that I was a bad person. Stereotypes about autistic people added to this misleading opinion of myself and influenced the assessments made by people who told me that I “didn’t look autistic”, or who outright told me that I wasn’t.  

 

Acceptance and growth  

I had the wonderful opportunity to work on a production about an autistic girl, where I spent several months acting alongside other autistic people. I am so grateful for this experience, as it really accelerated my acceptance of being autistic. There were so many similarities in our life experiences, our behaviours, and our minds.  

Being around other autistic people, being able to talk about masking and burnout and special interests, was such a validating experience. They discussed what they found challenging, the coping mechanisms they found useful, and how they would communicate to others what those people could do to help make their lives easier. I began to consider all these things in the context of myself and how being autistic affects me.  

Now I am in a place where I know so much more about myself. Because of my diagnosis, I know what I struggle with, how to avoid or cope with those things, and how to recover when they affect me.  

My advice to those who are struggling to know what to do now they’ve been diagnosed, would be to consider how being autistic shapes the challenges you face, and then to make adjustments in your life to make those challenges more manageable. However, I think my best advice would be to find in-person or online autistic communities and to make autistic friends!

About the author

Georgia is a 23-year-old student at City, University of London, studying a masters in International Journalism. She played Keedie in the CBBC adaptation of ‘A Kind of Spark’, which was a show about autistic girls, acted by autistic girls.  

 

Share
Follow