Sara Codina

Language: Spanish

Hello! I am a 44 year old mother of two wonderful people whom I love more than anything I could have ever imagined.
I am autistic from birth but didn’t know it until I was 41, after living for 4 decades carrying an increasingly heavy backpack and struggling to appear “normal” while searching for answers.
I have lived years knowing, or rather, feeling in a very intense, very strong and very painful way what I “didn’t want to be but should be”.
You cannot imagine the exhaustion of living like that. To the point of wanting to fall asleep and not wake up again from the fatigue caused by the effort to fulfill every “duty”; to behave in an impeccably correct way.
Why did I do it if I was so tired? Because I was not aware of it.

A lifetime of trying to understand why I feel different. A feeling difficult to explain: a feeling of not belonging to anything or anyone. A continuous feeling of abandonment in front of a life that no matter how hard you try, you don’t understand it and without realizing it you are absent and you are adapting your clumsy socialization techniques to each stage.
With the feeling that everyone was born with a road map that I was not given and I try to see what it says in the others’.

After going through different situations, psychologists, psychiatrists, anxiety crises, depression, sick leave, constant changes of job, groups of friends, hobbies … after all the years of struggle for and to understand me, I finally said it loud and clear: “I do not know how to explain it, I feel different, I feel that I am not interested in people and every day I am more tired of living being someone I am not. I have such a great and inexplicable exhaustion that I am starting to feel powerless”.

Result: Autism Spectrum Disorder Level 1 (formerly known as Asperger’s Syndrome).

For some it will be a simple diagnosis, for others a label more…. for ME it is a breath of fresh air and the starting point to really start living. Because now I know that it was not “nonsense of mine”, now I know that what I always knew, is so.

Now I know that being aware that my difference makes me special has become the wings I was missing to fly.

During the weeks of diagnosis I have had to analyze many moments in my life from a very different perspective. I have cried, I have screamed and I have laughed. I have been surprised by how strong I have been and chastised by how long it has taken me to discover myself.

I hope that this new stage is the end of so much mistreatment of myself and of so many demands to understand a world that, from what I am seeing, I was hardly going to understand alone.

July 2020: The world stops, my world. Silence. I close my eyes, breathe and get ready. Let’s go. No rush but no pause.

MEDIA OUTLETS: https://mujeryautista.com/medios-de-comunicacion/
INVISIBLE AUTISM IN FIRST PERSON: https://mujeryautista.com/jornadas-autismo/
WHAT I OFFER: https://mujeryautista.com/participacion-en-eventos/