Autism Assessment - Part 1

April is Autism Awareness Month, so it's the perfect time to talk about the ASD assessment process...

For the past year or so, I have been on the NHS waiting list to have assessments to see if I am on the Autistic Spectrum.

I have always known that I was different from most of my peers at school, but I just assumed that it was all because of my physical disability. As I grew up, I began to realise that something else was going on.

At school, I was a happy child most of the time, but I hated it when my lessons changed without warning because it meant that I had to get used to a new topic.

At primary school, everyone gravitated towards me, and I think this was because I was in a chair, but they just treated me like another pupil. I don't remember much about my time at primary school, especially in the infants, but I know I didn't have many friends. I had maybe three or four friends throughout my time there.

At senior school, I had multiple people who I knew, but we weren’t friends as such. I just tried to talk and interact with them because they were friends of my three friends. I found myself pretending to find something funny when, in fact, I didn’t understand why they laughed sometimes, or I just didn’t find the same things funny. I would copy people’s mannerisms to look “normal”. I don’t know why I did this, but it felt like the right thing to do at the time, and I didn’t think anything of it.

I enjoyed school; my best subjects were English, Science, especially Human Biology, and I.T. I loved Biology so much that I read through detailed books about the human body and muscular skeletal system that my mum had at home…

School was relatively the same most of the time, so I was ok with that, but college was a completely different matter… If you read back on my previous blog entries, I have spoken about my struggles with fitting in at college… For the first two years, I hated college because it was so different from school, because of the structure and the level of teaching, and in many ways, I progressed backwards because I couldn’t cope with the change, and I wasn’t academically challenged enough. I couldn’t make friends easily, and that knocked my confidence because I kept getting told to try harder to talk to people and make relationships. Plus, as well, I didn’t really want to make friends most of the time. It did happen a few times, but not a lot. If I had the choice, I would choose to work on my own, rather than work in a group.

If I had thought about it more and put two and two together, maybe I might have realised why I was struggling so much. Instead, my frustration was portrayed as anger. I couldn’t explain what was wrong half the time, and when I did tell people at college, I felt like I was being ignored, so I stopped saying things. I was so tired of pretending to fit in that each night, I would cry or sit quietly in my mum and dad’s living room, often looking for catch-up work to do to keep my mind occupied.