TW
Trigger Warning
sexual assault mentioned warning
This is something I have genuinely been thinking about for years. Based on what has happened to me, it is extremely likely that I have cptsd, which I know has some similarities to autism which makes it difficult to tell. I'm going to try to keep this post on the shorter side, because I could go on for a long time about why I think this.
First off, why I think I have cptsd, is due to multiple separate traumatic events primarily in my childhood.
This is what the TW is for
When I was a young kid, I was raped multiple times.
- I have religious trauma (related to me being queer).
- I am trans, and growing up experiencing gender dysphoria but not knowing about it, and then also having to live in this world right now... I guess there have been worse times in history, but that doesn't make this time less worse.
I feel like going through all those things and not having cptsd would be very rare.
These are the things that make me think I have autism.
- I have consistently gotten high scores on a variety of different online autism tests.
- I have difficulty being in areas with too much noise, smells, movement, etc. When I was a little kid I would get sick in the restroom when I went to restaurants because of this. Also working in noisy places, even for just a few hours, really wipes me out.
- When I was younger than 5, I would rarely speak and instead physically bring my parents over to something I wanted to show them, or use other actions instead of words to communicate.
- IDK if this is a developmental delay, but I used to get really bad grades when I was in elementary school but when I entered middle school I suddenly started getting straight A's.
- I have difficulty socializing and have been called rude many times, although I don't understand why I was called rude. I also always come up with a script before I enter social interactions. The script not going to plan makes me very anxious.
- I hate being interrupted in the middle of a task or having extra things being appended after I have made a plan for how I want to deal with that task.
- I have a few focused interests that I get very into.
- I have comorbidities. I am diagnosed with anxiety and depression and I take meds for it (could be from cptsd though). Also I was born to older parents and I'm trans. I know autistic people are more likely to be trans.
- Other people think I'm autistic. When I was about 12 I was at the zoo with my mom and some lady came up to my mom and said something about how she has a kid with autism and that she knows what it's like. I genuinely have no idea what I did that made that random lady think I'm autistic. Also one of my old coworkers told me that I remind her of her autistic kid. I have met them and we are now friends. I feel like they are easier for me to talk to than other people.
I also have religious trauma largely from being queer/trans in a religious family. My gender expression has generally been cisnormative so I don't have the same experience of someone who's more visibly gender nonconforming, but my internal gender experience I've come to learn is very much not cisnormative.
I was diagnosed with ASD and ADHD recently at age 29, but I had been self realizing the autism for years before, and before that I did a lot of work healing from what I understood to be CPTSD.
I can't diagnose a random internet stranger but if I could make money betting on this, I'd bet a lot that you are on the spectrum lol. And for many autists who are gender diverse, their autism and gender identity feel totally intertwined.
I would highly recommend reading Devon Price's book Unmasking Autism. It is very queer and trans inclusive.
I would also recommend reading Paul Walker's book on CPTSD. I've found it pretty helpful in a practical sense.
Before I read both those books, there was a book I found very helpful called I Know I'm in There Somewhere by Helene Brenner. While it's not about autism or PTSD, is cisheteronormative, and targeted toward women (and I wasn't even socialized as a woman), I still found it to be very powerful and it resonated a lot with me. I read it before I even really started self realizing ASD, and in retrospect a lot of the traumas it discusses from a lens of women in patriarchy also apply to autists in a NT world, or queers in a cisheteronormative world.