Hello barman, I'd love an Irish coffee please.
It's been a little more than a year after I started the professional diagnosis of why I'm weird. To sum it up in a somewhat offensive sentence.
Now this week, I have the final result on a surprisingly long list of tests that costed significant time and money. Three different health professionals concur to say I am solidly on the spectrum. And that it hadn't be spotted before because it was masked by "intellectual giftedness".
What use does this label have now? It does retrospectively help why I hid under beds when noise overwhelmed me in the student dormitories, tactile issues as a child, emotional detachedness, why several mundane task completely drain me of energy, etc...
As a child, in the country I grew up in, this label would actually have restricted some of my possibilities. But as a younger adult, I believe it would have drastically altered my trajectory for the better. There have been entire epochs in my life where I felt overwhelmed and depressed, which I feel would have been avoidable with an earlier diagnosis.
Better now than later I guess. I feel bitter about what could have been. And bitter to feel bitter about something that can't be changed.
I feel ashamed to share that result around me now. It's the "clever part" supposedly compensating the other aspects that feels boastful and exceptionalist. Basically "I'm functional because I use the power of my big brain to push the weirdness iceberg mostly underwater". But hey, I know how I tick now. That's something.
So I raise my glass to you barman and to you, fair stranger listening to me. I am grateful for this place where I can express myself freely.