It Took Until Midlife To Learn I Had Asperger's

Katherine May always knew she was different but she didn’t understand why – until her diagnosis

I can pinpoint the precise moment when I started trying to explain that the world felt different to me. It had taken 37 years for me to speak up. I was standing in the middle of a London street, trying to get to the Museum of Childhood. My baby son was crying. There was nothing unusual about that: he was tired and needed a nap. If I could only get him into his pushchair, I knew he would be asleep in seconds. The problem was that I couldn’t handle it. Because I find it very hard to block anything out, the stress of trying to calm him amid so much noise was setting off a series of tiny explosions in my brain. Everything went white. The next thing I knew, I was shouting at my husband and my mind had gone completely blank.

Not for the first time, I felt as though I had lost control entirely. I decided it was time to tell my husband how I felt. “I don’t think I’m like everyone else,” I said. “I don’t seem to have the same feelings.”

It still took a long time for me to understand that I’m autistic. That’s partly because, like many people, I had a very stereotypical view of what that might mean. I had read books like The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which portray awkward, naive boys who are overtaken by their obsessions. I knew that wasn’t me. It was only when I heard a woman on the radio talking about her experiences of Asperger syndrome that everything fell into place. I knew, finally, what I was.

Unable to fit in

When I was a child, it was hard to put my finger on exactly how I was different – there was nothing obviously wrong with me – but I never seemed to match everyone else. Nothing I said ever landed as I intended it. I would try to join in with classroom banter, only to find I’d offended people. Everything I did was clumsy and awkward.