So, I made this public today: I’m autistic.
I posted a transcript about being autistic on Patheos.
Today, on World Autism Awareness Day, I decided to come forward about being autistic. Below is the transcript for this video for those who would prefer to read.
Introduction
Hello, this is Father Matthew Schneider and I want to be open about a part of my life that I haven’t really talked much about before. I’m autistic.
My whole life I felt a little different. I never really fit in and I never understood why. I was a good student, passed all my classes got into engineering, did okay there, but I was never cool. The biggest trouble I got into as a kid was when I got grounded for two weeks for being out late… at a chess tournament.
And there were always certain signs that in themselves don’t necessarily mean I’m autistic, but put together, kind of point in that direction, such that I would have been investigated; I would have been probably diagnosed back in the 80s as a kid if the criteria then were the same they are now. I was picked on. I had bad handwriting. And I always kind of had little things like that, that just were a little off that would have pointed towards an autism diagnosis.
And I think when we talk about the growth of the numbers who are diagnosed with autism, we have to think of cases like my own. In the 80s I wasn’t diagnosed, not because I wasn’t autistic but because we had criteria for diagnosis that wouldn’t have included me.
Read the rest on Patheos.
