According to the neuropsych who diagnosed me, yes.

My diagnosis pathway is nobody else’s business, but I did want to address this as it is a question that is either implied or asked outright by people who have different views than I do on who ought to qualify as autistic.

A note: I view self-diagnosis as valid. Often it is the first step to a clinical diagnosis, and as long as there are barriers to accessing diagnosis, self-diagnosis will be the only type of diagnosis available to many.

Well, I can’t really say what my life would be like if I weren’t autistic, because I’ve never experienced that.

That said, I believe being autistic is a net positive in terms of my day-to-day enjoyment of life and my ability to do my job. Still, a sizable minority of the time there are negatives as I would judge them, and I am aware that there are impacts that other people might judge as negative even if I do not.

For example - I use stimming motions to help me manage stress and the physical symptoms of anxiety. While I do not judge this as a negative - it hurts no one, it provides relief for the tension headaches I am constantly keeping at bay, and it helps me keep focus during times of sensory distraction - I recognize that other people may feel uncomfortable interacting with someone who is noticeably stimming. My most-used stims are facial stretches and contortions, which can sometimes be misinterpreted by others as expressing a negative reaction or emotion.

Another example of this is my hypersensitivity to sound, which includes pitch, volume, and repetition. I have noticeable physical reactions to some types of sound, and find these reactions difficult if not impossible to manage if they come during an unexpected time and I am not well-prepared for them. Usually I wear noise-canceling earbuds, which are fairly unobtrusive and allow me to block out the worst parts of impairing sounds while still being able to interact with people. But sometimes this strategy doesn’t work for a variety of reasons.

In worst-case scenarios, this sensitivity can have a debilitating impact on my functionality, lasting hours or even days, when taken in combination with other circumstances. And at the same time - hypersensitivity to sound can lead to moments of full-body joy in making music with my family, allow me to calm stress and anxiety when I listen to favourite songs and soothing sounds, and retain vivid memories of people I have lost attached firmly to songs I sang with them.

If this is you, your first step should be to look at the resources over at Embrace Autism, which has made available some screener tests that will help you understand a little bit more whether you’re relating to the conversational way I tell my life story or the actual contents of the story.

People refer dismissively to the overdiagnosis of autism and warn against attaching yourself to a diagnosis on the basis of things you saw on social media. I understand where they’re coming from - but also, anecdotally, every single person who has ever come to me one-on-one asking this question has had either a metaphorical binder full of evidence, or a literal one. Given the stigma around autism that still exists in the neurotypical population, this is not a diagnosis people are clamouring for, no matter what some folks imply.

I mean, these are literally the questions I get asked the most that aren’t questions from my children to the effect of “Mum, can you get me some food?”

Honestly, I wish more people asked me about my work instead of spending time and effort litigating my diagnosis, or talking to me about their own worries because so few autistic professionals feel they can be open about it.