Today, it’s one year since my autism diagnosis, and I wonder if it changed me. Of course, I don’t need to wonder whether I changed during this year - obviously I did -, but whether the diagnosis is at fault. And, associating from there, I wonder whether services that I got because of my autism have helped me or, like my parents think, only caused me to deteriorate. Does my diagnosed autism explain existing difficulties, or does it give me an excuse to invent new ones?
I want to say the autism diagnosis didn’t change me. I want to set the facts straight, that I never did well in high school and had been falling apart from late 2004 on. I want to make clear that I went to the rehab centre in 2005 because I wanted to improve my blindness skills - and I did improve them. That I went to training home in 2006 to refine my independence, and that I learned quite a lot as far as practical skills go, but failed to implement them into a stressful daily life. I want to say that I went to mental health Apeldoorn because of my meltdowns, that had been going on for many years. This is the one thing my parents agree with. I want to say that my diagnosis didn’t change my plans - after all, I was still going to study linguistics at university and live on my own. I want to say that I didn’t choose to get into crisis. I want to say that I still want to make something of my life. I have dreams of going back to school. And yet, there is still a voice in my head that says that if I truly want to prove all this, I ought to release myself from the hospital, go back home, kick out all my support staff, make sure I get a housing transfer to another city where the universtiy staff don’t know about my failure in 2007, and go back to university as someone who is just blind. I succeeded - at least, on the outside - for twenty years, so why not more?
