Undiagnosed Autism and Me: Because Apparently Girls Didn’t Have It Back Then
Back in the day, autism was a “boys-only” club — and girls just weren’t on the guest list. So I grew up blissfully (or not-so-blissfully) undiagnosed, cruising through childhood with a secret superpower nobody recognized. It actually wasn’t exactly super fun.
My early childhood? Honestly, it was pretty good, I think. I grew up in rural Manitoba, which basically meant peace, quiet, and a whole lot of books. We actually had two full sets of encyclopedias, and I tried to read the entire sets in alphabetical order.
Me before I started pre-school playing with my toys in a weird way.
Then came school. If childhood was a calm lake, school was like being tossed into the ocean during a storm. I hardly spoke, spent most of the day clutching headaches and stomach-aches, and came home ready to crash like a phone battery at 2%. The noise, the chaos, the endless social puzzles — it was exhausting.
This photo is from my pre-school yearbook. I don't specifically remember that day but I do remember feeling terrible the whole time I was at school. Everyone just thought I was extremely shy.
Don't worry folks, I did manage to survive pre-school and I did it in style in these funky overall pants.
My teen years improved slightly. The classroom got quieter (thank goodness) and I had the same 20 classmates I’d known since kindergarten. Familiarity became my lifeline, and I was lucky to have friends who accepted my unusual interests without blinking. The classes, though? Boring doesn’t even start to cover it. I feel boredom like it’s a physical illness — complete with symptoms like “zombie stare” and “mild existential crisis.”
People got used to my quirks, and I became the girl with the offbeat passions and the weirdly specific dreams. For instance, beside my picture in the 12th-grade yearbook it says: "Future Plans: move to Mexico and join an Aztec tribe."
And guess what? I actually did move to Mexico — and spent six years there. But that, my friends, is a story for another blog post.
My big hair and I graduated high school in 1995. They had to reschedule my grad picture photo shoot because I had been hospitalized for one week. I'm not sure exactly what the diagnosis was but what I do know is that health issues were a-brewin'.
Looking back, I realize I was navigating life with autism without a map. No diagnosis, no guidebook — just a whole lot of figuring it out the hard way thinking there was something profoundly wrong with me and little did I know there would be many painfully awkward moments ahead.