Clarissa's Blog

It’s useful if you have spent your whole life knowing that you are weird and experiencing shame and secretiveness because of that weirdness. The knowledge that it is a thing that exists and that many other people have it can relieve the guilt and the anxiety. Once you get rid of the guilt and the anxiety, you can start looking for ways to mitigate certain manifestations and accept the rest of them.

If you’re already in a place where you don’t feel that you need to go to great lengths to conceal your weirdness from others, then I don’t see how it is useful. At a certain point in my life, it gave me enormous relief to find out about autism and realize that I have some form of it. I thought this was a character flaw, but it turned out that it was a neurological condition. Since then, I have mitigated some things and accepted others. I don’t think about the autism label anymore because I no longer need it.

You don’t owe anybody to put a label on yourself. If the label helps you in some way, then that’s fine.