Recently my daughter is searching for information about disorders that supposedly could be related to her condition. Social anxiety disorder, autistic spectrum disorders, neuroatypical disorders… She diligently reads information in English, watches videoblogs – also in Englsh, because, according to her, information that could be found in Russian Internet is all outdated or prejudiced. For the same reason it’s hard to find a competent specialist in reality, espedcially in a provincial city like ours.
Based on this information, she tries to analyse her own behaviour, habits, feelings, childhood memories. And she finds many things that look like symptoms of some condition… She explains to me that she never thought something was really so wrong with her. She took it as normal that her time in pre-school was only suffering and she was unable to communicate with other kids. Then at school… I admit it, I also took it as normal, never finding it too disturbing. Partly the reason is that me and her father, we are quite shy and have poor communication skills. So I thought like, it’s normal if a child hates school – so what? everyone hates school. And so on. Lack of information is a bad thing…
Anyway, I’m glad that she is doing this research now. I’m glad to see her interest, and I deeply respect her great thinking work. I can’t imagine what her future will look like, but I’ll do everything possible to support her…