Autist impostor syndrome
I am “settling in.” The more days that go by where I’m living with awareness that I might be autistic, the less I am able to reconcile a version of reality in which I’m not (for better and worse). At the same time, considering that I’m autistic after four decades of what I thought was authentic and thorough introspection—makes me really really not trust that either.
The result is that I am experiencing something like “impostor syndrome.” That term doesn’t quite fit but I don’t know of a better way to describe it. There’s a sense in which I think I’m just trying to figure out to incorporate that I am “high functioning” (I don’t know what the preferred term is for this) and high privilege. I’m also nervous about a “bandwagon” dynamic, and also terrified of being rejected as autistic by “real” autistic people, like dare I call myself autistic and risk autistic people telling me I’m wrong? That particular trigger I will work very hard to avoid.
I was already aware of rejection sensitivity from the research I did on ADHD in 2020 (I’ve had an ADHD diagnosis since around 2010 or so, but never really explored it because my doctor back then was not particularly into diagnoses… and he has a point; our containers are inherently imperfect). But autism explains it better, and aligns more closely with my own life.
Autistic people experience daily rejection by the world, daily failure to connect on ways that appear natural to others, and often can’t even tell when they’re (we’re!) being rejected. For some (like me!) that causes us to simply assume we are being rejected or about to be… and then when we don’t and then get rejected anyway, it is a massive blow. Life becomes chronically traumatizing. Autistic people tend to be hypervigilant; the ability to distinguish signal from noise is neurologically impaired; there is too much sensory input and the brain isn’t processing it “typically.” The hypervigilance, the rejection, the uncertainty of the rejection, and the many stimuli we get burns them (us!) out.
The math works out… I just don’t know what to do with the result yet.