What my adult autism diagnosis finally explained

From the article (archive link)

The common denominator had to be me. Because it wasn’t just my marriage; I was flummoxed by the vagaries of most human interaction. Each one confounded me in its own way. I had yet to successfully hold down a job that required “teams,” which is to say, most jobs. I was “bad at Christmas,” prone to meltdowns and manufactured crises whenever special occasions loomed. Terrible at gatherings, I was capable of making even the most low-stakes kick back spectacularly un-fun.

Early in our relationship, at a pasta dinner with Sam’s family, each of us was given a noodle to gauge doneness. It was a matter of personal preference. Sam and his mother inclined toward al dente, while his sister and nephew erred on the side of mush. I chewed urgently, overwhelmed by performance anxiety, praying for a knowing that never came. I abruptly announced that I hated pasta and ate the sauce with bread.

At another dinner, a friend’s housewarming, I was instructed to bring something sweet. I visited two bakeries and several specialty stores, waffling grievously, overspending, eventually loathing what I’d brought (middling berries, underripe persimmon, an intimidating cake) and wanting to pitch everything in the trash. I was distracted and prickly about it in conversation all evening. Another friend, tasked with the same request, had an assortment of Levain cookies delivered during our meal. It was perfect. Insouciant.

Intellectually, I had always known that this was my undoing: the sweaty, white-knuckled lack of chill. As with Sam on the other side of the office wall, everything felt confrontational and fraught, and I was sure it was my fault. For any request, I’d want to ask 20, 30 follow-up questions just to not feel set up, put on the spot, thwarted. I wouldn’t ask the questions, but they’d be there. Hanging.

I wanted to know how to be breezy. To meet someone for a drink but order food because I’d missed lunch. To free myself of this habit of rehearsing conversations in advance only to be disappointed when none of my prepared talking points naturally arose. To pee when I wanted to, not when the other person did. No matter where I was, it seemed I was doomed to always feel as though I were in the window seat on a flight, prodding apologetically, mincing and smiling for the person in the aisle to get up.

And in the same way that I missed Sam but also didn’t want him around, I loved my friends but didn’t particularly want to spend time with them. I couldn’t stand the gnawing suspicion that everyone was humoring me. Or mad at me. Or shooting one another knowing looks because I was overstaying my welcome or not staying long enough. I reasoned that this was why I had friends but was never invited to their weddings. By my late 30s, I’d concluded I was simply bad at people. I was also indescribably lonely.

This is a very writerly narrative of one person's discovery that ASD is a good explanatory model for her experiences in life. She expresses the perpetual feeling of wrongness, the combined hypersensitivity and obliviousness, the sense that everyone else was born with an intuitive social manual and she has to write hers as she goes along.

Over the years, I've spoken with a number of professional authors, both fiction and non-fiction. It's my sense that the majority are more than slightly askew from the common frame of social reference. The qualities of meticulous observation and taxonomy Choi mentions are incredible assets in writing, but not in fluid social interaction.

In Choi's words:

Minimally, I thought I had become genre aware — that I knew the story I was in. It was identifiable, comforting to subscribe to. I belonged to a definitive other, and my issues must have been grounded in code-switching glitches from a lifetime of toggling among the appropriate roles. I developed a jokey litmus test for my pathological people-pleasing, my instincts to use other people as mirrors and to weaponize their perceptions to keep myself in line: Collectivism or mental illness?

But even in New York, the place where I believed I would forge my own identity and begin my real life, I couldn’t shake this compulsion to keep preparing. Practicing. Stockpiling information about other people’s behavior like cookies on a browser. In time, I developed systems to make it through any scenario. Mental folders filled with scripts, permutations of outcomes, things I’d observed friends and colleagues and strangers do. These were for absolutely every occasion and person in my life.

I'm not a psychiatrist and it's not within my capacity to say, "this person clearly is on the spectrum". Awareness of neurodiversity has grown over the years, as has medical recognition that there are distinctive constellations of behaviors and traits that fit the diagnostic category of "autism spectrum disorders". High-functioning people who used to be dismissed as "neurotic" or "eccentric" are now better able to manage intense personal and interpersonal suffering.

The appearance of the Internet has made social connections among neurodivergent people less fraught. A whole generation has had the benefit of common forums to discuss and share strategies for life. But ASD is still a surprise for the older folks who grew up with all the bad or mistaken labels and never understood anything other than "something is mysteriously, unfixably wrong about you, live with it". Quite a bit of Choi's narrative was resonant for me.

At the same time, I sometimes wonder if something is mysteriously, unfixably wrong with the vast majority of people. Whether the sum of our traumas, the gaps in our knowledge and experience, the stimuli we never evolved controlled responses for, the constant choice demands, the sheer pressure of human numbers, are simply too much.