Catmachine

As I’ve mentioned many times before, receiving my autism diagnosis about ten years ago was a real game changer. It may have come very late, but nevertheless it made me feel a lot better about myself. I came to realise that it wasn’t me being useless or crap at life. The reason I didn’t fit in was that in general the world wasn’t optimised for people like me. It was as if my mind rolled along on wheels, but there were a lot of mental staircases to negotiate and no lifts. Once I’d realised this it meant I could stop burning up so much energy trying to fit in and please others, right? In theory. I certainly no longer tried to hide my eccentricities, but the people pleasing part of the equation was more difficult to overcome. I rationalised it as avoiding emotional outbursts from others because my own disappointment was easier for me to cope with than their potential reaction to not getting what they wanted. (Far from being non-empathic, autistic people are in fact often overwhelmed by oth...