Here is the transcription of my most recent video blog:
(And here’s the audio on AnchorFM)
Hey everybody, this is Queen Mab. Happy Harvest Moon, and today I am going to talk to you about my own neurodivergence. Now I’ve been referring often in these videos to the fact that I am a neurodiverse person, and in my last video, I straight out told you that I found out in the last year that I am most likely on the autism spectrum.
It’s very important to me to say this publicly if I’m gonna be a person who is creating content on the Internet, because I want to be very up front with people about who I am and what my limitations are. Now, I also have a lot of superpowers – that’s a big part of being autistic, as well – AND, there are definitely limitations, and it is a disability. And that’s something that I’ve also been coming to terms with in the past year is thinking of myself as disabled – and also understanding what disability is, because I really like the social model of disability, which says that disability is not a flaw in the person – it’s a flaw in a society that does not provide accommodations for that person to be able to live their best life. So that’s a big shift for me.
But I’d like to tell you a little bit about how I found out that I am most likely autistic, and also why I keep saying “most likely,” right? Well, you are, or you aren’t, right? Well, if only it were that simple. So I had some very serious mental health struggles during the pandemic, and you know, I’ve had a variety of experts over the years weigh in on what exactly they think my diagnosis is. I’ve had a whole alphabet soup of different labels, which I’m not gonna get into, but I wound up with a label that really didn’t fit, and kind of a…a sentence to do a type of therapy that I’ve…I’ve done, and I have some reservations about, okay? So I was upset about this, and I was talking with a friend of mine who is an educational psychologist, and she said to me, “Hey Catherine – can I say something to you as a professional?”
And I said, “By all means!” Because this friend has known me since we were in the 6th grade, and I trust her with my life.
And she said, “You know, men are diagnosed with…” she said “high functioning autism”…(she and I have since learned that “high functioning” is not a great word, and we can talk about that another time)…but she said, “Men are diagnosed with high functioning autism 9 to 1 compared to women. This might be something you wanna look at.” And then she sent me a TED talk. And the TED talk was by Jolene Stockman, who’s from New Zealand.
And I watched the TED talk and I went, “Oh my God, that’s me.” Like, every single thing that she was talking about…her sensory issues, her social issues, her issues going to the grocery store – one of my least favorite things – her issues with work, her issues with driving…I mean, all of it was there, okay? And this led me down this Internet rabbit hole of reading about autism – or the old name for it was Aspergers, but again, that’s not used anymore, because Dr. Aspergers was not a good guy, and he only studied boys, by the way – which is part of the reason why so many of us who are assigned female at birth don’t find out about our superpowers until we’re so much older, right?
So I just started reading a lot about autism/Aspergers in women, and I got in touch with my psychiatrist and said to her, “Hey – I think I’ve finally found a diagnosis that fits. Can we talk about this?” And she interviewed me for about an hour and asked me a bunch of different questions about my growing up, and my development, and my sensory sensitivities, and all these kinds of things…and at the end of it she said, “Yeah. It sounds like this does fit.” And she wrote up a little – I don’t know, mini-clinical report/summary where she said, “I think that Catherine most likely has Aspergers/ASD” – autism spectrum disorder. I wish they’d say “condition” instead of “disorder,” but that’s another story for another time.
So then I went to my GP and said, “Hey, I wanna talk to you about this,” and she said, “Have you been tested?” And I said, “Oh, I talked to my psychiatrist. Here’s a letter about it.” And she’s like, “No, no. This isn’t enough. You have to have all of these cognitive tests.” The tests cost about $3000 to get the official diagnosis, and insurance does not cover it. Now there are some other ways, some other groups that will do it for less. Many of them have very long waiting lists. So there are a lot of us who find out who we are later in life who just don’t bother going through with the process. There are a lot of Facebook groups I’m in that are very open and very welcoming to self-diagnosis. Every so often, somebody will go in and post and say, “You shouldn’t be self diagnosing!” but it’s pretty rare, okay?
But it is important to me to get the diagnosis, because I want to be able to advocate. And it’s very scary to be posting this video, and it’s very scary to be being so open about this, but if Jolene Stockman hadn’t stood on that stage and said, “Hey everybody, I’m autistic,” I would still think that I was a human piece of garbage, which is what I thought about myself before learning about this. Because let me tell you, I have tried ALL the therapy, ALL the self-help classes, ALL the support groups, and there are certain things about myself that I just can’t change. You know, I’ve learned better coping mechanisms, but…you know, no matter what…I still am who I am and have the struggles that I have. So it’s nice to finally have some idea of why that is, and I’ll keep everybody posted about my diagnosis journey here, but…you know, it was important to me to be honest. And it’s more important to me that maybe somebody else will see this video, and identify and say, “Oh yeah. That’s what I’m going through, too.” Because…you’re not alone. Okay?
Wow, I talked for way longer than five minutes, but that’s okay; nobody’s gonna die. I guess I will see you tomorrow. Don’t forget to like, comment, subscribe. Bye!