Diagnosis

a new understanding; a new sub-newsletter

I have always felt weird.

Weird, as in different.

In elementary school, other kids thought I was weird, too. I always chalked this up retrospectively to having moved over ten times, sometimes several times a year. I was always the new kid. That’s why they thought I was weird, right?

Two months ago, when my psychiatrist asked if I’d ever thought I might be autistic, I said no. And then, maybe. After that session, I began remembering things.

I remembered being made fun of as a child for constantly humming.

I remembered that when I got my first walkman I never took my headphones off, and that when I worked as a firefighter I’d keep my earplugs in all the time, even if I wasn’t running a chainsaw. I thought of the meltdowns I often had, where I would flap my arms and hit, bite, and scratch myself. Meltdowns over things that didn’t seem to bother other people. How, as an adult, my headphones have been a staple of my life. I wear them whenever I leave the house, in the grocery store, on erran…