Oh, no! I forgot that yesterday was my one year anniversary of when I accepted being autistic. My autistic birthday. My hatching day.
It was about 8 months after a conversation I had had with a friend I reconnected with, and had told me that she thought that I might be autistic. She is autistic and adhd (as I realize that I am now), and we talked for hours about it. By the end of it I still wasn't convinced, but she'd made a good case. The thing that had stuck out the most for me was her describing it as an "interest based personality". That resonated with me hard, since I could see that in many parts of my life. Like how in school how good my grades were was directly proportional to how interesting I found the class (or even individual subjects in class).
So I did the autistic thing and started researching it. I read a book that my friend had recommended. Read websites. Lurked on online communities. Then 8 months later took several tests on embrace-autism.com and that pretty much cinched it for me.
I don't know when I started hanging out here on Mastodon, but I know I did it because I found far more content here about autism than I did on Lemmy (my previous main hang). I know that I joined autistics.life last August, so I've probably been here roughly a year too.
Anyway, it's been a heck of a journey. Found out that all 5 of my IRL friends are also ND (we make two sets of autist-adhd-audhd triads). And I am certainly grateful to and for all the people I've met and talked to on here, this wonderful community. You've helped me so much.