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7:58am July 5, 2014

watchkeyphone:

I had an interesting conversation with my dad yesterday after my diagnosis. He kept trying to use things like functioning labels and the idea of a linear spectrum and I just kept being like “no.”. It just came from ignorance though, so I kept explaining it in different ways and I’m pretty sure he now gets the idea that it’s not just one line with classical autism at one end and Asperger’s at the other.

Also we then talked about the fact that he is quite possibly autistic, or if not then definitely very BAP-y. And then for a while after that he kept going quiet and then coming up with other things from his past and going “you must have also had this weird phase where you re-evaluated your whole life by thinking you might be autistic”. So that’s kind of cool. He probably won’t bother getting assessed because there’s no real reason to, at least not at the moment.

But that also sort of explains the fact that when I was younger, he was very certain that I *wasn’t* autistic - even though my mum suspected for a long while. Because he has more autistic traits than the average person so I don’t seem very different to his idea of ‘normal’, it’s just that his idea of normal is closer to autistic than he previously thought.

That happens in a lot of families that have lots of autistic members.  In order to get diagnosed, something drastic has to happen, or else the person has to have traits that are unusual for that family.  Like my brother came to everyone’s attention as ‘abnormal’ first, not because he’s any more autistic than I am, but because his form of autism wasn’t as normal for our family.