My Experience With Diagnostic Overshadowing
I likely wouldn’t have gotten diagnosed with ADHD and kept my OCD diagnosis had I been just a little less stubborn and persistent.
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One of the biggest and earliest sources of impostor syndrome regarding my formal autism diagnosis is that for a while, it just didn’t quite feel like a perfect match. I had visited a psychiatry practice which had solely focused on investigating my fit for the autism diagnostic criteria and I felt like I still had so many questions. I struggled to relate to huge swaths of autistic people for a reason I couldn’t quite yet put my finger on. I thought I was “bad” at being autistic. It felt as if almost every autistic person had more pronounced traits than me in every way I could think of and like said traits always yo-yoed in and out of existence for me or were offset and insidiously undermined by some kind of contradictory force I couldn’t name.
A nagging question I asked my self for quite some time is why despite supposedly being autistic, I was still such an adventurous person, seemed to have a much longer social battery life than every other autistic person I had read about, was a self-proclaimed foodie who looked forward to trying new…
