You Just Want Connection

Someone told me once that I couldn’t be autistic because I wanted friends.

Sat right there, professional credentials on the wall, and said it like it was obvious. You want connection. Autistic people don’t want connection. So you must just be anxious.

I left the office and cried in my car for forty minutes. Not because she was right. Because she was so completely wrong and I didn’t have the words yet to explain why.

Here is what wanting connection looks like in my body: I think about it constantly. I rehearse conversations before they happen and replay them after. I study people’s faces to learn which expression goes with which feeling. I have spent my entire life reverse-engineering the instructions for how to be a person because nobody handed me the manual that everyone else seemed to get at birth.

And then I come home from being with people and I can’t speak. Can’t be touched. Need hours alone before I can function again. After the thing I wanted. The thing I worked so hard to get.

The questions

The test says yes or no. Do you avoid social interaction? Yes. Why? Because it costs me everything. The doctor writes “avoidant” and moves on to the next box.

Nobody asks why I avoid it. Nobody asks what happens before the avoiding. The wanting. The preparing. The showing up anyway. The performing so well that the performance itself becomes the reason they think nothing is wrong.

“Do tags on your clothes bother you?” No. Because I cut them all out fifteen years ago. But that’s a no on the form. So.

The questions were written by watching people who don’t look like us. And then they get asked by professionals who’ve already decided what the answers mean. A woman who makes eye contact and holds a conversation can’t be autistic. Never mind that the eye contact takes active effort every single second. Never mind that the conversation was scripted in her head an hour ago.

What I keep hearing

I keep hearing from women who go through this. Who sit in an office and describe forty years of their life and walk out being told they’re anxious. Depressed. Scared of rejection. As if the exhaustion and the sensory stuff and the social scripts are all separate problems. As if there isn’t one thing underneath all of it that nobody thought to look for.

The hardest part isn’t the assessment. The hardest part is that you already doubt yourself. You’ve been doubting yourself your whole life. And then someone with a degree and a clipboard confirms that doubt. Tells you it’s nothing. You’re fine. Go home.

You go home. You are not fine. You have known since you were small that your brain works differently. You just didn’t have the word for it. And when you finally found it and went looking for someone to say it back to you, they said something else.

I can’t fix the diagnostic system from my kitchen table. I just know what it did to me. And I know I’m not the only one sitting here with the word I found on my own, waiting for someone with authority to stop telling me I’m wrong about my own brain.