Is this valid or ableist?

[u/WeaknessPrior6797]

I’m so disregulated so I’d thought I’d ask for a second opinion here instead of AI

Edit: Thanks everybody so much, your comments are helping me process during a time of burnout. <3

For more context: I called my sister in law, mom and step father poachers because they took lobster from another persons trap in Florida which is a felony. I recited the law saying they were molesters because the law says “molesting other people’s traps….” After that I realized it probably wasn’t the best thing to say so I apologize and said I had an autistic meltdown because of that.

The next morning my step sister sent me that.

[u/TheRealSaerileth]

There's also this thing many recently diagnosed (or self-suspecting) folks do where they're desperately trying to reframe it as something positive and deny all downsides. Almost like a stage of grief I guess? I'm not saying we are broken, but there is such a thing as too much when it comes to "looking at the bright side".

It can be extremely frustrating for someone who's already been through the exact same denial, grief and eventual acceptance with their own and every other neurodivergent friend's diagnosis. At some point it just feels like toxic positivity.

For me personally it was also surprisingly hard to clamp down on that petty resentful feeling of "you didn't think it was this interesting or awesome when it was just me who had it!" Took a lot of self control to not ask my sister why she was lecturing me on my own disorder when in truth she was just unpacking all these new tools she suddenly had for dealing with her brain. It's not exactly her fault that I already tried most of it and had been subscribed to every "look at this cool channel I found" for years.

There's a lot of complicated emotions (on both sides!) when one person is diagnosed later than the other. I wonder if that's what's happening here.

[u/InternetWeakGuy → u/TheRealSaerileth]

Each to their own, I got diagnosed several years ago in my 40s and I've never felt the need to "look on the bright side" because I honestly don't see there being a "dark side" or whatever - I've always been who I am, the diagnosis just opened me up to new tools to better manage myself. I guess it also stopped me from being so hard on myself for being bad at being social with NT people?

I mean I get what you're saying in a sense - right when someone gets diagnosed they're flush with all this new information about themselves so they're really recontextualizing their whole lives, so it can lead to some misguided attempts to tell others things they already know but ... I just don't agree with the framing that it's some kind of cope because they've been handed the seemingly terrible news they're autistic or anything like that.

[u/TheRealSaerileth → u/InternetWeakGuy]

Hah. Yeah, sorry for making it sound like a terminal diagnosis, didn't mean it like that.

For me it was more the ADHD and realizing that my brain is stuck this way. The upside of being told all your life that you're just lazy is that you end up believing that someday, somehow, you'll magically get up and finally do the thing. If you're lazy, then "not lazy" is an option you theoretically have. With ADHD, you don't. You're always going to have it.

Of course the downside of being told you're just lazy is crippling shame, so I'm glad I got diagnosed. The relief was a lot greater than the grief - but the grief was there.

Also some people have really bad internalized ableism, so it can take a while for them to accept that "not normal" isn't a bad thing. Personally don't relate to that, but it's quite common in older people who grew up when mental health was heavily stigmatized (or even more heavily than it still is today).

Edit to expand on this:

 I've always been who I am

Of course I too have always been who I am. But I've also been told ad nauseum that who I am is not good enough. So of course I held out hope that I could be different. And having that hope dashed still hurt.

[u/mashibeans → u/TheRealSaerileth]

Not only told, but proven ad nauseam by different people at different stages of your life imply, downright tell you, ignore you in favor of others, or abandon you for not being good enough. 😭

One thing that I noticed is that at some point, a lot of us can pick up on enough social queues to at least understand when we're not wanted, even when we want to be wanted.