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Diagnosis at 11, Charlie's Story

  • Apr 7, 2018
  • 4 min read

On Diagnosis

Hello- I’m Charlie, and I’m 19 years old in my first year of university. I was diagnosed with autism at 11 years old, in the last weeks of my final year at Primary School. By this point I’d had a year or so to come to terms with the idea. This is, from what I know, relatively old to be diagnosed- and being diagnosed was one of the best things to happen to me.

I commonly see the process of diagnosis for autism represented in popular culture as something that takes place when the person is a small child. Not only this, it’s typically an earth shattering discovery for their parents. This is a child likely too young to think for themselves, as if this justifies the focus being taken away from them. It’s the parent who apparently must suffer, unless this sort of sob story is being used to develop a very dubious sounding ‘cure’. I could complain for days about the scaremongering of the media about my condition but all that I will say today is that was never my reality.

There is a serious issue with our representation in today’s culture around age. Autism is seen, for the most part, as a children’s thing. I only really found out how frustrating this was as a writer: when trying to do further research on an also autistic character of mine using Google found only websites about ‘Signs of Autism in your Child’ or ‘How to deal with your Autistic Child’ and so on. I start to feel as though it never crosses people’s minds that maybe we are the ones doing the googling, that we can think for ourselves, that we, like all children, grow up. By the time of my diagnosis, I was able to think for myself.

For the first ten years of my life, I didn’t know what autism was. But I knew I was autistic. I knew that there was something different about my brain. I felt that everyone else in the world was in on this secret but me. That for what other people was a trivial inconvenience was for me a catastrophe. Unfortunately, other people also noticed. I did get picked on a fair bit, and I was always a bit by myself. These days, I have more or less adopted the alien motif, and I think it comes from me being aware that I appeared to other people as an alien- as someone who was imitating the human condition very inadequately.

There was, however, another student in my class, who had joined a bit later than me. I noticed that the people that used to make fun of me moved to her. I’ll be honest, I was relieved more than sympathetic, I wasn’t a perfect child. I was relieved at first, anyway. But I always knew she was being ridiculed for the exact same reasons as I was. She said one day when I was ten she had something called Asperger’s. (I thought she said Asparagus.) And I knew straight away that’s what it was. I asked my mother if I had it that evening, and she said she didn’t know. But a few months later, I noticed more and more books about Asperger’s and autism around the house.

I wasn’t aware at the time but one day my teacher asked if she could speak to my mother after school one day. I was told to go and play games on the computer outside with no idea what they were talking about. I now know she was that my teacher was explaining, in the politest way possible, ‘I think Charlie has autism’.

Even though I was embracing the possibility, my parents did their best to explain it in the most tactful way. What they said has stayed with me- that I am significantly better at some things than most people (for example, my long-term memory and learning to read and write much faster than average) and also significantly worse at other things (hand eye co-ordination, social interaction, ability to deal with loud or crowded spaces etc).

As soon as I started reading about autism, every question I had about my life and myself was answered. I shouldn’t be saying so as an English Lit student, but I cannot put into words how much of a comfort it was to me. I had always known that I had something, and this was my own thoughts finally being validated. This was telling me that my alien characteristics were legitimate, and, most importantly, that I was not the only person dealing with this. I understand the notion that we are all humans first and foremost- we are- but ‘autistic’ as a label empowers me.

We often see diagnosis in an odd way. As if the series of doctor’s appointments then gives us the condition, or at least grants us permission to have it. In my case, it was merely a final confirmation of something I already knew. The truth is, I will only ever be autistic. I am not going to shy away from that. I don’t see why I can’t take pride in it. There is no sob story that comes along with this. I don’t mean to say that my disorder never causes me any difficulty or that it isn’t really awful sometimes. I won’t be in the middle of a sensory overload thinking ‘Wow! This is fun!”. But what makes all the difference is knowing why. And that, I argue, is so much better than knowing something is different and never having a word to put to it.

Charlie Hart

 
 
 

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