Now, this might not come as a shock to some. But to me? Boy. I have had to do some serious re-evaluating. I must admit, my energy levels have been better recently, but since I was around ten years old, I would always complain about being tired all the time. My mother still tells me this sometimes and tries to use this as evidence that I am gluten intolerant (I’m not – but that’s a story for another time).

  I have a theory that from my childhood, through late primary school and into early high school, I was showing signs of autistic masking. To put it in non-technical terms, I was pretending to be less weird in order to fit in.

  Side note: when I was ten or eleven, I put things into categories because I wanted to. Even if those things had already been categorised by someone else, I would take joy in the process of sorting things into categories. I don’t know how I didn’t know I was autistic sooner. One of the things I loved sorting was the freaking geological time scale of Earth. I don’t remember much about what that is, but it is dividing the history of the Earth into aeons, eras, periods, epochs and ages based on rocks. Yes, that is exactly what it sounds like.

  But I never really told anyone I did that, and so no-one was ever like, “hey, this kid’s freakin’ weird.”

  But yeah – I think one of the reasons that I sometimes feel really tired a lot is because I suppress a lot of urges (stims) that honestly don’t do anyone harm, but can just be distracting, especially when in a group or classroom setting. You have no idea how frequently I have the urge to imitate trumpet noises with my mouth but don’t because it isn’t socially acceptable. Is this something that people find relatable? Probably not. It’s probably just a weird insight into who I am as a person. The thing is, my trumpet impression is pretty good. But that doesn’t mean I can just do it willy-nilly.

  I think if I had my way, I would always be playing a musical instrument or singing.