After a diagnosis of ADHD and autism, I now find the world more confusing. How to give meaning to this? | Neurodiversity
I received a diagnosis of ADHD and autism at the end of 2024 after a period of stress and depression. I thought that my profession was to blame (I work, even unpublished, in finance) but I appreciate that I am sensitive to many types of environmental stressors.
It has been difficult to sail in the world since the diagnosis. At the beginning, I was ecstatic, finding a large part of the complexity of my life could be easily answered by natural neurodivergence, but since then found that the world was even more confusing, in particular with regard to the dynamics of relationships. Some people I’ve talked about about my diagnosis started with Baby Me Baby slightly. While before the diagnosis, I could have struggled in certain social situations, feeling a little slowing down the brand, or bored, now I begin to notice a pronounced feeling of my “otherness”, which is quite frightening.
Do you have any advice on how to keep things in proportion after receiving news that can force you to look at life through a completely different lens?
Eleanor says:: What are we learning when we get a diagnosis? You tell a doctor that I have experiences of F. They say, ah, it seems that you have an X condition. And you say interesting, what is the X condition? And they say that an important brand of the X condition is the place where you have experiences of F. A diagnosis can be so useful and so emancipatory, but that does not necessarily let us know what causes or explains our experiences. In many mental health diagnoses, we still don’t know these things. We don’t learn either that we live in the world a particular way – We already knew it. A large part of the strength of discovery learns that experience is not universal, that medicine needed to classify them so that they can be helped, explained, welcomed, etc.
Many of us feel the duality that you describe after a diagnosis: understood, because we can finally name the models, but isolated, because we learn these names at the cost of learning, they are unusual. It looks like good and bad news at the same time.
You have mentioned the feeling of pronounced otherness. Like being outside a fish bowl looking for.
An answer consists in resisting this: otherwise from whom? Many people learn as an adult that they are autistic, or have ADHD, or both; Many people find new ways to understand their mental experiences. As a result, there is much more understanding of these things than maybe ever. This does not mean that you have to develop a residence in communities of the same ideas. This is just to say that when you meet new people, their experiences may not be so different from yours. We never know what’s going on in the minds of others; If it is otherness, we worry, we can be in the company of others than we think.
Another answer, however, is to allow this feeling of otherness. The similarity is useful for connection, it’s true. To this extent, it is scary to learn that we are not so similar to others. That will make certain things more difficult. But similarity is not the only way to connect. You may feel reverence, fear, cherish it, for things that don’t look like you at all. Indeed, being in front of things unlike being more aware and respectful of contrasts in yourself. We feel it all the time with the natural world: many people feel deep love, feel the most themselves, the ocean, the night sky, an animal. It is not because they seem the same as us.
Everything that is to say: this can be precisely by contrasting, and not in similarity, that you can simultaneously appreciate what is true for others And Which is true for you. There is a kind of connection available here based on a real vision of each other, not only on being similar.
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