A Mushroom Among Wildflowers

The Story of How I Discovered I Am Autistic

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In a world of wildflowers, I am a mushroom.

In late-2024, I penned those words into a journal. In those nine words, I described the change that had recently altered my entire identity. To explain, let’s backtrack a few months…

In mid-2024, during the midst of my wedding preparation, I discovered that I am autistic.

For about a month afterwards, I went through an identity crisis. I felt like I was in a daze. Everything I had previously thought about myself was questioned. Thankfully, it didn’t last long.

One day, my fiancé (at the time) and I joked that maybe I was autistic after taking something literally for the trillionth time. A few days later, he came up to me rather shyly and said he had looked into autism out of curiosity and found that he saw a lot of autistic character traits in me. He showed me a short list of the most common “autism symptoms” and gently suggested that I look into it for myself. (He made sure to preface this with how it wouldn’t change anything about our relationship.)

To say the least, I was a little shaken—everything I had learned in school about autism was incredibly negative—but my curiosity was piqued. As someone who has always been fascinated by psychology (specifically personality) I could not resist.

I delved deep into research on autism for the next several weeks, consuming as much information as was available to me. I read articles, watched videos, analyzed my personality and past experiences, and listened to the stories of many different autistic people who had bravely come out as autistic on the internet.

It didn’t take long for it to click with me—I had found my missing piece.

I am autistic.

I approached my fiancé. While he had already affirmed to me that discovering I was autistic wouldn’t change anything about our relationship, I was still nervous. What would he think of me now that I have confirmed his suspicions? Would it really not change the way he sees me? Despite what he told me, I couldn’t help but wonder if he regretted asking for my hand in marriage.

Our conversation was, quite literally, life-changing. He reaffirmed everything he had already said, further elaborating by saying he already accepted all of those attributes as part of who I am before we got engaged, we just didn’t know they were a part of me being autistic.

His acceptance of what I believed to be some of my worst flaws beautifully broke something in me—a deep-seated self-hatred that was ironed into me from rejection after rejection. He doesn’t love me despite the fact that I am autistic; he loves me because I am autistic.

The next few months consisted of continuous, rigorous research. The more I learned about autism, the more pieces of my life seemed to make sense. But one thing was still nagging at the back of my mind: If I was autistic, why hadn’t my parents noticed at this point? At the time, I was 23 years old and had lived with them my entire life to date.

As I researched, I collected all the information into a document to help sort out and explain my thoughts. Once I felt I had gathered a sufficient amount of “evidence,” I approached my mom, and with my fiancé by my side, I showed her the document and asked if she and Dad had ever considered that I might be autistic.

It was an emotional conversation. Mom said yes. They had when I was little, then again, years later, when I went through (what I now realize was) autistic burnout.

With this confirmation, I breathed a sigh of relief. It wasn’t all just in my head.

The more I learned, the more I began to truly see myself and understand why I act the way I do in certain situations, why social engagements are so hard, why my mind seems to be in a different world, why random sensory stimuli bothered me more than the average person—why I have always been so different from everyone else.

At first, it was briefly debilitating. Without knowing it, I had been trying to change the parts about being autistic that I hated all throughout my life. Now that I knew they stemmed from the way my brain was wired, the fact that I would never succeed at snuffing out those abrasive parts of me gripped my heart in a choke hold. If it wasn’t for my fiancé (now husband), I may still be listening to that brain rot, chained to the lies I’d come to believe as my life motto.

Needless to say, coming to terms with the fact that I was autistic wasn’t easy, but it became less about accepting the “autistic” label, and more about accepting the fact that it was always there to begin with. Instead of chaining me to despair, it became liberating.

For the first time in my life, I felt like I was beginning to understand myself. I’d taken almost all the personality tests available, but none of them had come close to explaining that one thing about myself that no one—not even myself—seemed to understand. That little something that separated me from everyone else.

The true freedom came to me one day when the most painful pieces of my past began to make sense. For a little context: I have been deeply hurt by friends who have abandoned me. The reasons they left were always the same. Over time, I had come to believe that there was something inexplicably wrong with me as a person (I even thought I might be cursed). That the closer I got to someone—the more they saw the real me—the more likely they were to pull the plug on our relationship.

Through the lens of me being autistic, everything made sense. They left me not because I was broken, a bad friend, or cursed; they left because they didn’t want to deal with some of my autistic traits. And you might think: Well that’s depressing. Wouldn’t that make you hate being autistic?

No. You see, for me, autism was the reason they couldn’t accept me—not me as a person. I could finally stop blaming myself for their rejection, because there isn’t something inexplicably wrong with me. I am always going to be the way I am; I am always going to be autistic. For them to look at me, pick out all the reasons they don’t like me, and walk away isn’t my fault. They just couldn’t accept my autistic traits.

And that’s the thing I think all autistic people know deep down: Most people won’t accept us.

But here’s the most important thing: Some people will.

And it’s going to be the “some people” that matter. Rather than focusing on the majority of the population that refuse to understand, accept, and accommodate me, I would rather focus on the few that love, accept, and accommodate me. They’re the ones who truly matter.

Now that some time has passed, I am learning to embrace my autistic traits more and more. It has been challenging, but rewarding. I’ve learned so much, and I want to share the knowledge I’ve gained with the world.

If sharing my experiences helps just one autistic person find and love themselves, or if I can help one allistic person (someone who is not autistic) understand and cherish an autistic person in their life, then all of this will be worth it.

My name is Elodie Rose, and this is my story.

I want to thank everyone who read this post to the very end. If you would like to get notified when my next blog is posted, please share your email with me in the subscribe section. Thank you so much for walking with me on this journey.

Welcome to the Misfit Mushrooms Club!