Is It "Late" Diagnosis When You're Over Sixty? (I Don't Think So.)

                                             

I have sometimes smiled when I've read someone was "late-diagnosed" as autistic at the age of twenty-five or thirty. I smiled because I was first "diagnosed" as autistic when I was sixty-five and a half! (The half year is oddly important to me. It makes my late identification seem even nuttier and more extreme.

But I've come to realize that I'm likely the norm for autistic seniors, and that my diagnosis, though late in life, was pretty much right on time.

I also realize that the twenty-five and thirty year olds are right. They probably should have been identified earlier.

Very few people in their sixties or seventies today would have been identified as autistic as children or as young adults--especially those of us who would for a time have fit best under the Asperger's label: autistic people with verbal skills and normal intelligence. 

We weren't seen as autistic--we were just a little odd. Two friends who have known me for decades told me exactly this. "I didn't think you were autistic. I just thought you were weird!"

Like most autistic people of my generation, I went through life with some painful mysteries and some mysterious strengths and successes. In love I figured I was just unworthy. At work, in my accidental legal career, I figured I had some sort of nearly magic power. Neither thought was true, but my odd life, my odd interests, and my oddly successful career sure made a lot more sense once I began to autistically study what being autistic means. (If you're currently on the same quest, may I recommend my book, My So-Called Disorder: Autism, Exploding Trucks, and the Big Daddy of Rock and Roll.)

Anyway, I think I finally figured out how to make this blog visible to search engines, which had been studiously ignoring it. (My Chuck Berry blog, GoHeadOn! [goheadon.blogspot.com] remains on fire nearly fifteen years after I stopped posting. Same platform. I figure the magic there is Chuck.)

But since I've figured out how to make My So-Called Disorder visible, I'll be posting more often, throwing things into the void, and hoping they catch an eye like yours.