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3:02am September 7, 2014
tris-locked-inthe-tardis asked: that post that you just made on autistic children and bullying-thank you for that post. almost every word of it could describe my childhood, undiagnosed, bullied and blamed for it. the big difference being that you swore not to forget but I've mostly forgotten. I've put a label on most things in chldhood saying "childhood was bad" and buried most of those memories. now 3 years later I'm scared by how much I've forgotten and am scrambling to remember it. thanks for having words on what i forgot.

No problem.  I understand the temptation to forget.  I just seemed to be surrounded by people who couldn’t remember childhood for what it was, so I swore to remember everything.  Everything.

I was not diagnosed until I was 14, so while I have a childhood diagnosis, it was late childhood, and a lot of damage had already been done.  I’d been seeing shrinks since I was 7, but they were badly trained MFCC types, not people who had any knowledge of autism.  It was when I entered the full-fledged psych system that I got a diagnosis for the first time.  (And then there was argument over whether I was autistic or just “psychotic since birth schizophrenic since adolescence”, I played along with whatever I was told, but eventually “autistic” won out).

And yeah it was bad, and I suspect my experiences were far from unique on the playground.  Hell, I bet children who were diagnosed as little kids often had similar experiences on the playground, because having a diagnosis doesn’t always give you protection.  I have a friend who was diagnosed as autistic at the age of four and alternately intellectually disabled and gifted (they kept changing his mind as to which one he was, but nothing in the middle, of course) and he had really horrible experiences in school, akin to mine or yours.

Notes:
  1. withasmoothroundstone posted this