What led me to think I might be neurodivergent?

Signs, realisations and a willingness to explore.........

Do you ever have that sense that things are percolating in the back of your mind and then suddenly a number of things suddenly string together and BOOM a whole lot of things seem to make more sense?

And even before that percolation begins there is the gathering of data points. For years I have been reading things, hearing things and pondering things and I would hear something about how someone else presented in the world and I would think WOW, that is me. And then the next question would be ‘what does that mean about me’?

There is a lot that gets put into the category ‘neurodivergent’ so for the purposes of this article I am going to focus on autism and what I came to realise about myself, prior to any diagnostic process. I will talk about ADHD next. Also to be very clear there are a lot of clusters of symptoms (as per the ICD 11 and DSM 5, which I talked about in a previous post which you can read here) which overlap. CPTSD (complex trauma) in particular has many overlapping areas with various different neurodivergent diagnoses and there is certainly a lot of interplay.

Diagnosis is not an exact science. The role of trauma and the nervous system we arrive in this world with are key factors in our neurobiology, how our environment impacts us and how we develop to cope. I will delve into this more in future posts.

Also, in this article I am not talking about all of the indicators for autism or even all of my indicators/symptoms, here I am highlighting specific areas and how I evaluated these as I learnt new information.