Hey! I'm Daphoenodon (named after a large, extinct member of the canidae family) and I'm working on getting my GED. I'm about 70-80% sure I have SPD, and am looking for some help understanding the process of diagnosis and treatment for an adult (or almost-adult).

As a child, I was always very disconnected and airheaded. The way that they present Luna Lovegood in the Harry Potter books is an extremely good example of the kind of kid I was, and how other people treated me. On a daily basis, I felt like when you get back from the orthodontist and there's cotton in your mouth and your brain feels like it's floating away but your body feels so, so heavy. I spoke and acted like it too. I always tested well, in everything from Bible school to Kindergarten to first grade and so on. The local preschool and refused to take me because I a.) Could read, and b.) Knew all my body parts. Is that really all kids learn in preschool?

Anyway, by the fourth grade, I was testing on levels ranging from 12th grade to post-college in everything except Math and large parts of Science. Otherwise, if I had been given the opportunity to study it, I aced every test they gave me. I stopped getting any further in Math somewhere around multiplication and division- anything past the 5 tables just does not compute, and even then, I have to count it out on my hands. The school refused to put me in gifted classes every time I asked, saying that if I needed them, my parents would put me in them (it was a small town and a tiny school- nobody interfered with somebody else's parenting), while at home, my parents refused to let it enter my mind that it was even something I could have asked for because of bullying my dad had experienced when he was in school. (I experienced it regardless, but all that matters is their own experiences, right? A kid couldn't possibly have a fully-formed opinion or ability to make decisions about their own life.)

As I said earlier, while I was book-smart, in practice, I seemed completely incapable of functioning. I messed up basic instructions, misheard something in nearly every conversation I participated in, couldn't (and still can't) speak to save my life, had little to no practical knowledge, and failed the most basic tasks. I hated markets, stores, restaurants, and public bathrooms- I would burst out crying in stores if too much was happening, I made my parents take napkins and wipe the sauce off of all my food, and I had to have someone take me to the restroom so they could hold their hand over the sensor on the automatic toilets or wait to flush it until after I'd left. (Some of that has actually gotten worse- restaurants and stores make me physically ill, and I get carsick constantly, so really, I can't even leave the house at all.) Some days, I would have screaming fits that lasted hours, over hating my clothes for no reason I could articulate, or being forced to eat food that was "soggy" or spicy, or my siblings teasing me with bugs and worms or holding me down and letting the dogs lick my face. I was also extremely shy and anxious in general- fearing other people came naturally to me.

When I entered kindergarten at five, I began to realize for the first time how different I was from other kids my age. The most blatant thing I could understand out of the differences I saw, was that during recess, other kids could play harder, longer, and do more before they had to stop, without really being in pain, but I couldn't play kickball or swing for five minutes without ending up with pain shooting through my ribs, coughing and panting and unable to breathe, so I latched onto that, and have been fighting with my parents about going to the doctor for that ever since. That, too, has gotten worse the older I got, but my parents still refuse to take me to the doctor.

At ten, after moving to a different tiny town in a different state, I failed an eye exam given to me by the school. It was strange, because I had passed plenty of other eye exams at other schools, but the moment I went to a new school system, I failed them repeatedly. When they gave us back the results, my mother took me to an optometrist. At that point, it was discovered that I'm nearly half blind. Glasses still benefit me a lot even now, but since then, my eyes have gotten so bad that glasses can't make my vision completely clear anymore. As a kid I had a lot of symptoms of visual under-responsiveness or sensory discrimination, like tripping and bumping into things constantly and not being able to "see" things without picking them up, but it would be impossible to tell the difference between my inability to see and sensory discrimination, even if I did have both.

All through school, I was every teacher's dream student- even if I couldn't work with numbers at all and seemed so socially inept and uncoordinated that I would never be able to use half the knowledge I had. I was quiet, I did my work- for the most part, I even paid attention, at least when it was important to. I never caused trouble and I could always be counted on to ace any test I was handed, as long as there was no math computation in it. I even aced math, when it was word problems and application with as few straight-up numbers as possible.

Then I hit sixth grade, and it all went downhill from there. I went from A's and B's to D's and F's, I was tired all the time, I stopped getting hungry and sleeping at night. I was extremely depressed and had panic attacks constantly. I believe I experienced dissociative episodes and depersonalization. I couldn't stand to be around people AT ALL, including my immediate family, and spent hours on end locked away in my room reading, writing, or on the computer, or else locked in the bathroom, sitting on the counter and staring at myself in a mirror. The only thing anyone noticed was the drop in grades, and for that, I got several hours every week of lectures and yelling about how I had to pull them up, what I was doing was nothing compared to being an adult, I couldn't possibly know what hard meant. After the lectures started, I learned to hide it all, well and quickly. No one ever suspected anything unless I wanted them to, until two years later when another kid noticed me texting in class and got my phone taken up. The conversation I had been having was a grim one, including a detailed account of all the things I had been experiencing, and the teacher immediately sent my phone to the principal's office and had my parents called in for a conference within the hour. Even then, all they did was force me to assure them that i had been lying or exaggerating at risk of being on the opposite end of one of their infamous seven-hour yelling episodes (yes, I once clocked them at over seven hours), and then they yanked me out of public school and gave me schoolwork on the computer. No counseling or therapy or doctors at all, just enough change to save face and control my outbursts.

I went back to public school for the first semester or so of tenth grade, and by then, I was so deep in my issues that it was like I wasn't there at all. I barely even remember going back at all, only I experienced twice as much stress and was twice as deathly tired from it as I'd ever been before. I got crippling migraines constantly, I had panic attacks by the dozen, I vomited until I dry-heaved in school bathrooms more times than I can count. But my grades stayed B's and C's, even with the minimal amount of effort I put in during class and not doing homework at all, so either no one saw or no one cared.

And that's pretty much where I am today, other than that I moved again after that first semester of tenth grade, so I went back into homeschool and spent nearly two years living in an RV [shudder], moving all over. My folks settled back down for a while, so I managed to get a job this past summer. I was ""let go"" before I even received my second pay check- they said it was money issues, but I have a feeling that having barely learned the register at all and hardly knowing what I was selling had something to do with it. So now I'm in a program to get my GED, and then I have no idea what I'll do with myself, but I have a feeling I'll be forced to brave the living h-e-double-hockeysticks that is college. I have never received a diagnosis, and as hard as I have to fight to get everything else in my life, I don't think I could manage the parental battle to get one. I had (and still have, and have since developed) a lot more symptoms of SPD, but this is getting pretty long, so I'm capping it off here. (Plus I feel a migraine coming on, so I'll probably take some benadryl and try to sleep.)

If anyone could give me some idea of what to expect for someone my age when I actually do find myself able to seek a diagnosis and get treatment, that'd be great. Thanks for your time ??