Autism in the eyes of girlhood and the teenage diagnosis

I was diagnosed with autism 25 days before my 15th birthday. From the outside in, an autism diagnosis took a morning, I didn't even take the day off school---hell I showed up before mid-day; however what led up to that morning was years of denial, resistance and refusal. Autism is something that is overlooked or overstepped; either you're not accounted for as autistic and you slowly turn and distress and tear into scraps or you're accounted purely as a social reject with something so strangely hilarious to others that you slowly turn and distress and tear into scraps all over again. Pre-dianosis and post-diagnosis because unlike yourself these people know that there is something deep within you that repels their touch, their words, their pressence near you and that is utterly repulsive. 

The reality of knowing of your autism is one that is cruel. Modern attitudes to autism are of hatred and crude humour. Whenever I have argued for my own intellect not in a vain attempt be smug but to prove that I am capable of complexity I have been met by a similar chorus of responses: " You're literally autistic. ", " but you have AUTISM. ", " You're autistic ", and so on and so forth. The burden of not only autism but the knowledge of it in a world where, as a girl I have had to fight for the right to be seen as capable in the eyes of simultaniously my educators and my peers. Where I was unaware I could brush off bullying or even strange looks as the problem of others, if they want to judge me for no apparent reason then why should I give them my time, but the awareness of this judgement stemming from something you were born with and something you will die with is something heavy enough to completely break a person's spirit no matter how carefully it is handled and no matter how hard a person tries. 

As a girl, I grew up with the culture of gossip. No matter how hard you want to disregard it, gossip is something engrained in girls from a young age. However, far different from the teenage gossip of secrecy and scandal, the gossip of young young girls does not maintain the same social understanding or structure; as not only a girl but one with autism and no awareness of it I managed to stay both clueless and cruely aware. I may not have understood the " little chats " the other girls went off to go have but I very much understood the impact they had on me. None of the bullying and gossip was helped by the fact that as a child I was far more masculine than my female peers, being the only girl in your class that has a special interest of dinosaurs and Dr Who sounds far less socially damaging than it sounds because, well, I was about 8 years old; neurotypical children however, are not idiots, they know what is a difference and depending on their environment, they also know how to exploit it and damage the little girl in star wars outfits talking about Daleks. 

Scars from a time where I didn't understand what about me drew hatred and why people felt so negatively about a naive little girl run immensly deep. You don't heal from them, they form valleys of smooth and covered skin, however the skin will forever remain unchanged; a memento of pain that wll never be truly left in the past as long as the scar and it's discoloured glory remains.

Nowadays, this passion for whatever nerdy topic my dad exposed me to has renewed, but shifted. I focus my time nowadays on historical and musical passions. My heart once set on the cretacious period and weeping angels now settles with The Weimar republic and The Dresden Dolls. Yet nothing has changed, I'm still an other even if I can accept that and happily stay out of the spotlight but I will always have that small girl who couldn't understand why she was so pessimistic, so angry, so upset constantly. I still have outbursts of violence whether I break objects or the layers of my skin and I still hate those who wronged me even if I can acknowledge that either I was too young to stop an adult man or we were both only kids. 

I have acceptance in my heart, but that doesn't displace my misfortune.