It's been a red letter year for Stefanie Preissner. The accomplished screenwriter and author just rang in a one year anniversary for her wedding to political advisor Noel Byrne.
Married life, she says, is "not what I thought it was going to be", as she joined Brendan O'Connor on RTÉ Radio 1.
"I was always kind of independent. It was just me on my own, paying my bills and doing my things and I've turned into one of those women who's like, 'what's the log in for the Bord Gáis? We need a meter reading.' The suffragettes would kill me!"
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However, she's also marking another anniversary: that of her autism diagnosis, which she received at the end of September 2021.
She says the diagnosis answered questions she'd had for some time. "I did always suspect there was something different. I never suspected it was autism."
"In fact, it was suggested to me three times that I get an autism diagnosis and I just thought, that's absolutely mental. I'm sitting here, looking at you, making eye contact, being terrible at maths, not being Rain Man. I'm not autistic."
She had been in therapy since 2013 trying to understand what made her feel different from other people. "School was fine, I was really good at school", she says. "And then you go to university and you attend a lecture and you're the only one in the lecture theatre because it's Rag Week and the lecturer's actually a little thick with you for showing up because now he has to teach the class!"
She says she found it hard to adjust to the structureless time schedule in university. "All of that going-to-find-yourself in university, I found very very stressful because the expectations were not clear."
From there, Preissner began having mental health issues.
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"I was an anxious child and I turned into an anxious adult", she recalls. "At the end of the summer, I had to know who my [school] teacher was going to be for next year and where my class room was going to be. I took things quite literally. I really needed predictability."
When she was younger, she would explain these needs away as being due to her parents divorcing, being born in Germany where order was encouraged, and even being a Taurus.
"It was easy to put different labels on different parts of my autistic traits that explained them away, but if you looked on the whole... it was very clear."
Preissner says some traits she has now would be a clue to her diagnosis, including being "direct and very honest".
"I think neurotypical people... they value politeness over honesty, that's something that I've noticed. Autistic people tend to value honesty over politeness. I always felt a gap between my communication style and other people's expectations of that, and there was always a bit of tension there."
She would also overthink many things, she says, and felt like she didn't fit in. She says she would "drink excessively" to hide her discomfort in certain social situations. "When I'm drunk, I don't feel the discomfort and the pressure."
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She says she became dependent on alcohol, "so then for a while I identified as an alcoholic".
Preissner also says she had an eating disorder. "I was very very underweight, I lost my period for three and a half years because of it. I was anorexic. If I had been with trains the way I was with food, tracking them, writing everything down, standing and watching them, learning the numbers around them, it would have been very clear that this is autistic behaviour.
"Because it was around food and because I was a woman and weight issues are so prevalent and you're praised so much for losing weight, I didn't really see it as something that was a problem because I was getting so much positive reinforcement from it."
Now, she's able to work with a therapist who deals with autistic people with eating disorders. "It's just one of those reasons why knowing the way your brain works and knowing you're autistic is so crucial."
To listen to the full interview, click here.
If you have been affected by issues raised in this story, please visit: www.rte.ie/helplines.
