Progress Of The Autism Assessment

I managed to book the autism assessment at the start of this week, for Monday next week. I had to wait about 10 days for GoFundMe to transfer the money! Since they like to keep it for a while as cash flow for their investments operation, no doubt. But it was annoying as I didn’t know ahead of time and had to just wait impatiently!

After booking the assessment, they sent me a questionnaire to complete before the assessment. The questionnaire turned out to be the most complete and exhaustive questionnaire you could(n’t) imagine. Which is good, but it’s quite tiring and I had agreed to get it completed for Friday, so that the psychiatrist could read it over the weekend. I’ve asked to re-arrange the assessment video call so that I have more time. With the number of questions and my desire to be explicit, there’s a lot of writing and mental recall involved. Which is understandable as autism is a very complex and wide-ranging thing and they need to be careful.

I’ve struggled a lot with anxiety and loss of motivation this week (because of the usual environmental stresses etc). That just shows how destructive that anxiety can be, given my extremely high level of motivation to do the autism assessment. And of course that’s made me feel extra dissatisfied for being unable to make progress with it for the last few days. But I’ve done a lot more of it today. And without even any writing OCD, in fact! Which is incredible given how much I struggled to write anything at all when I started my blog.

I felt self-conscious in describing myself as being extroverted and suffering from lack of social contact and the energy which it gives me. Especially considering my childhood and early adulthood were very introverted! I fear the toll it might have on my ‘autism spectrum score’ 😆.

But then my conviction is renewed again as I describe a long and detailed list of employment problems and sensory sensitivities 😄. If they’re not going to diagnose me with autism then they better invent a new condition with me as the holotype specimen. Free use of emojis also helps, I’ve heard 😉😉.

So that’s the stage I am at. The fundraised money hasn’t disappeared into a mystery black hole! 😀

🌪