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10:02pm July 3, 2014
Anonymous asked: So I'm trying to figure out if I am autistic when I was young a therapist said I was 'borderline autistic' and that if there were medicines or anything that were effective for autism then they would have given me that label for the treatment but because there isn't any treatment the therapist person just said that it would be unnecessary to add additional labels to what I was already diagnosed with I'm not sure if I really count though when I read things talking about autism I identify with it

If you identify with things autistic people write, that’s one good sign that you may be on the spectrum.  In fact, connecting with autistic people is one of the main reasons to think of yourself as on the spectrum even without a diagnosis.

If being self-diagnosed (which can take at least as much worse as getting a professional diagnosis, if done right) is too much, the autistic community has always had, and is recently trying to revive, the concept of a “cousin”.  A “cousin” is someone who has something neurological that makes them have a lot in common with autistic people, without actually being autistic.  It allowed autism to have fuzzy borders instead of strict ones, and made sure that people didn’t feel pressured to identify autistic if they didn’t want to.  A common acronym you’d see was “ACs” meaning “autistics and cousins”.  Cousins were considered almost autistic in everything but name.

There was also the BAP, Broader Autism Phenotype, often used when a parent or sibling of an autistic person had autistic traits, but not enough to actually be autistic.

That said, a lot of people who were said to be borderline autistic as children are actually just plain autistic.  The criteria were stricter in the past.  And not everyone knew how to apply the criteria.  People who were afraid of “labeling”  and its effects would be likely to give only oral diagnoses, or to do what mine did and give a PDDNOS/atypical autism diagnosis even though he orally told my parents that I met the criteria for an autistic disorder dx (and later changed it to that when he felt he could).  There was a lot of that going around especially in the nineties and even a little later than that.  Because to say autism could even mean losing services, because people thought autism meant hopeless case.  So they’d “pad” the diagnosis with words like “atypical” and “borderline” to try to make it sound less daunting, either to parents or the insurance companies.  Probably still happens, to some extent.

And knowing that, you can’t really know what they thought.  It could be that you meet the criteria for autism (or AS, or PDDNOS, not that those two exist anymore, but you can bet some people still use the old definitions, and I think PDDNOS is a definition that should have been kept around, as ASD-NOS or something.  To catch the people who didn’t really quite fit but were still autistic).  You just don’t know, because they wouldn’t have told you, and they may not have understood how to apply the criteria.

So my advice is to find out a lot about other autistic people.  Not just those you’ll find on tumblr, but those you’ll find writing autobiographies, those you’ll find offline who can’t read or write at all, just spend time around a variety of autistic people, and see if you click with some.  Clicking with other autistic people doesn’t happen every time you meet an autistic person, and it depends on how rare your subtype of autism is compared to the sorts of people you’re hanging around right then.  But when you do click, it’s a very good sign that you’re on the spectrum or at least a cousin.

I love cousinhood because it relieves pressure to have to be either on the spectrum or off it.  Here’s something I wrote about it recently:

http://youneedacat.tumblr.com/post/88305423555/cousins-acs-autistics-and-cousins-autistic-cousins

I think cousinhood brings a friendliness back to the autistic community that it’s been missing.  So whether you are a cousin, a BAP, or an autistic person, you should be welcome to explore the autistic community, and you should be welcome to use any coping strategies you pick up from the rest of us, and if anyone gives you trouble for that – you’re okay, they’re mean.

Notes:
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