If you weren’t diagnosed as an autistic as a child, you don’t exist in America . . . even if the diagnosis for your kind of autism didn’t exist until you were an adult. That’s at the heart of so-called autism epidemic: the supposed rise in autistics is just that until recently most of us went undiagnosed. And because our families, educators, doctors, employers, and all the zillions of neurotypicals around us didn’t have provided instructions for us—and they all seem to have the weird idea that autism ceases at adulthood!—life has been . . . raised to several orders of magnitude of hard is an understatement.
I got tired of being erased over and over again. It may not help me at all, but I am not going to quietly fade out of existence. This is my life and my sister’s life, as two fifty-something Aspie women in the United States.