These are the quotes that really resonated with me from “What My Adult Autism Diagnosis Finally Explained” By Mary H.K. Choi in The Cut www.thecut.com/article/m…

working from adjacent rooms in our New York apartment. Anyone spying on us from the building across the street would have found us each equally absorbed at our desks. Seemingly content.

But according to Sam, there was a tone to our separateness that was disquieting. A year into the pandemic, he began to point out that, for several months straight, I’d refuse every entreaty for a stroll or a lunch out on a sunny day, even when I wasn’t on deadline. He couldn’t pinpoint it exactly, he said, but it felt as though I were avoiding him.

What I didn’t admit was that I was lying. Often, I’d find myself listening through the wall for his movements, emerging for the bathroom or a snack only when I knew I wouldn’t run into him.

And in the same way that I missed Sam but also didn’t want him around, I loved my friends but didn’t particularly want to spend time with them. I couldn’t stand the gnawing suspicion that everyone was humoring me. Or mad at me. Or shooting one another knowing looks because I was overstaying my welcome or not staying long enough. I reasoned that this was how I had friends but was never invited to their gatherings. By my late 30s, I’d concluded I was simply bad at people. I was also indescribably lonely.

The ASD evaluation, conducted over Zoom, consisted of four psychometric tests — questionnaires that screened for both autistic traits and the propensity to hide them. That was followed by a 75-minute interview, a sprawling conversation covering everything from my childhood to my lifelong fixation on snacks. The whole thing took less than three hours. Later that day, a four-letter and PDF. Made out to someone named Amanda.

The whiplash was constant, the code-switching dizzying. I was besieged by a conviction that I was always in trouble, a pervasive dread that I would never instinctively know how anything worked, so I would have to memorize it. Except with Korean church folk, my parents were private, mistrustful, and didn’t like drawing attention to themselves. They didn’t speak English, so I became adept at forging my mother’s signature on dispatches from school and never told them about parent-teacher conferences. I couldn’t bear exposing them to potentially patronizing situations that I would then have to translate. To save their faces as well as mine, I had to learn the rules and learn them well.

I moved to New York at 22. As an adult, I began reading personal essays by Asian Americans who’d been singled out for toting smelly lunches to cafeterias peopled by milk-slugging tweens who subsisted on bologna. Or articles about tiger moms and han, a particularly Korean cultural phenomenon that centers on ineffable anguish and rage resulting from repeated hostile occupation and invasion.

But even in New York, the place where I believed I would forge my own identity and begin my real life, I couldn’t shake this compulsion to keep preparing. Practicing. Stockpiling information about other people’s behavior like cookies on a browser. In time, I developed systems to make it through any scenario. Mental folders filled with scripts, permutations of outcomes, things I’d observed friends and colleagues and strangers do.

For years, I sought out booze, weed, sugar, binge eating, caffeine, other people (especially of the unavailable, intense variety) — anything to distract me from the purgatorial torment of my efforts. It was reassuring, even thrilling, to be directly responsible for the pain and shame, even as the substances heightened the sense of peril, the mania, the self-centered paranoia. But by my 40s, I’d found 12-step, meditation, medication, several modalities of therapy, and heroic doses of psilocybin under the care of trauma therapists. I learned more about the nature of addiction as well as how to navigate a whole array of other issues I was tackling — CPTSD, ADHD, ED (eating disorder, not the other one), workaholism, dissociative tendencies, rage, a history of sexual assault, and racial trauma.

Still, I was mystified by this niggling, needling conviction that, in all this self-interrogation, I’d missed something. That one day someone would publicly point out some glaring defect of mine that had been obvious to everyone all along. And that I was the one in the dark.

ASD is a spectrum, but there is often a presumption that the spectrum is a linear gradient from mild to severe. In fact, the disorder is not a spectrum but spectra, a solar system of sprawling constellations in 3-D that differs from one person to the next. Within autistic communities, they say, “If you’ve met one person with ASD, you’ve met one person with ASD.”

For Sam, the diagnosis altered everything because it framing of our relationship changed. I learned about pathological demand avoidance, a pattern of behavior that is still up for debate in the ASD world but that for me represented a seismic OS update. It explained why I would unfailingly refuse to do something when asked, and why a demand or request would trigger an overwhelming sense of panic and certitude that I would only disappoint the person asking. This was me when Sam knocked on my door.

I feel shy in these moments — like I’m really going out on a limb — but Sam is kind and receptive. He pushes off from his desk to wheel around, putting his headphones down to offer me the favored seat by the window. When I see his delight, I am delighted. And relieved.