A Silly Tale

My Executive is not functioning
Their suit is creased,
They cannot find their papers
And their briefcase
Is full of ash.

The ash is from my burnout
And it spills all over the office
In great clouds,
Covering everything
In a fine dust
That will take some time
To clean up.

In the meantime
My constant hand flapping
Is spreading the ash still further
And it reflects the light
Coming in from the windows
And makes stimmy patterns
In the air.

When the ash settles on the desk
I like to run my fingers through it
And make circles in it
And then wash my hands
Because it feels a bit weird
On my skin.
Sand is nicer to play with.

My Words keep going AWOL
But they never leave a forwarding address
They just disappear.
I think they go off for a holiday
Sometimes.
Or perhaps they’re just down the pub
Enjoying a few pints
And a pie and chips.

Maybe that’s why my Diagnosis
Was so late.
It was sitting in the pub
For 45 years
Eating pies and drinking beer
And because it has such
Severe
Time agnosia
It didn’t realise that it had missed
The last train.

Although it finds trains
Rather stressful anyway.
And leaving the pub
Would have meant change,
Doing something different.
So maybe
It just gave in to
The inertia.

And, of course
Because everybody has such poor
Communication skills
Nobody was able to tell anybody
Where it was.

And night after night
My Executive got home
And ate the same takeaway for dinner
Every night.
Because even before the burnout
They couldn’t function very well
And needed their friend Routine
Who liked to have the same thing
Every night for dinner anyway.
And keeping Routine happy
Was always good.

Mask bullied my Executive
And tried to make them function properly
And told Routine to stop being so stupid.

Mask was an annoying tit.
Irritating and itchy,
No matter how many labels I cut out of it.
It looked good though
Everybody told me so.

But it got too warm.
Overheated.
It kept trying to keep the Words
At home
But they kept slipping out
The back door
And vanishing.

Then things started to melt
At the edges
Senses went a bit haywire
And there were explosions
And people started to notice.

My Executive stopped coming home some nights
And stayed at the office
To keep cool
And avoid the bullying.
Routine gave up eating
And sat in the corner
Rocking hard and hitting themself and tearing their skin.

And then when the Words got home
After a night on the town
They told me that my Diagnosis
Had been seen in the pub
And that closing time
Was fast approaching.
Last orders had been declared.

When my Executive
Returned from the office the next evening
They found Routine crying in the garden,
Clutching a fidget cube and a furry tangle.
My Words explained what had happened
By typing into an iThing.

Mask had got too hot.
Way too hot.
Melting down had increased
No time to cool.
Mask had cracked in the heat and would no longer stay on.

Sparks, flames, and total burnout.
Explosions so loud that ear defenders were needed.
Piles of smouldering ash everywhere,
Which my Executive tried to put into their briefcase,
Though they didn’t help with functioning
And eventually made a mess in the office.

But just as all seemed lost,
My Diagnosis finally got back from the pub
With an official Report
(And a kebab).

Mask should never have been worn for that long
Masks when worn for long periods
Can overheat
And are a burnout risk.
Safety procedures had not been followed.

Report said that
Routine needed care and love,
My Words should be allowed to come and go as they liked.
My Executive needed an assistant to function
(And would also have to sweep up the burnout ash,
Which could take a while).

Diagnosis explained that communication was hard
For everybody
And that Report had said so.

And everybody finally understood
What had been going on
And jumped up and down to celebrate.

Diagnosis was a bit drunk by now
So they went on the Internet
And ordered loads of spinners and toys and pretty lights
And everybody settled down
Under their weighted blankets
To recover from the events.

And they ate kebabs every night for months.
Because they always ate kebabs.
Because Routine liked them.

Limitations

Advice often seems
To tell me
To consider
“The positives”
And to focus on
What I
CAN
Do.

If I’m honest
This strategy
Isn’t always
Terribly helpful.

I’m perfectly well aware
Of my strengths
And achievements.
They’ve been pointed out to me
Many times
Over the years
(Because people seem to like
This sort of
“Feel good”
Stuff,
I think).

I don’t need this information
Again and again.
I already have it.

What I am finding
MUCH
MORE
HELPFUL

MUCH
MORE
HELPFUL

(Twice,
And capitals,
For emphasis)

Is to learn
What my
LIMITATIONS
Are.

I have been told
All my life
About working hard
And succeeding.

But the things
That I
CAN’T do
Have rarely been
Considered

Or have been ignored
Or have been thought
To be the result
Of me being lazy
Or wilful.

So,

I have continued
To blame myself
For my failures.

I have struggled
To learn strategies
To compensate
For my difficulties

I have never learnt
How to ask
Other people
To help me.

(Because I have always been told
To focus on my abilities
And strengths
And how strong
I am).

If I’m honest (again)
Then allowing myself
To admit
What I CAN’T do
Is a sweet blessed relief.

To learn that I am disabled
Means that I’m not bad and lazy.
It’s Not. My. Fault.

To focus on my struggles
Means I can start
To work out
How to cope.

To drop the “strong” act
Means that I have permission
To ask for help.

(And it’s even OK
To admit
That there are things
I will give up
Even TRYING to do
Because they use
Too much energy
For me).

It is relief.
Really really big
Relief.

After 4 decades
Of trying
To live up
To the high expectations
That so many people
Have had.

Can I stop now?
Please?

Can I give up the quest
To be impressive,
High-achieving,
Sparkling,
Witty,
Attractive?

And just be me.

Not impressive.
Not special.

Just me.

And allow myself
To consider not my strengths
(Because I’ve done that
For too long
Because that’s what people
Have told me to do)
But the things I cannot do
The things I need support to do
The things I find difficult
And the problems I have.

Because I need to do that.
I need to learn
I need to discover
What I CAN’T do,
What I’ve been faking
All these years,
And where I have been
Pretending
To be capable
And where that pretending
Has damaged me.

I need this time.
I need this space.
I need to be allowed
To be weak
And to learn
How that is
For the first time in my life.

Because that is new to me

It was never part of my mask

Or my plan

Or any plan anybody else
Had for me.

I was never taught
How to give up
Or to let go
Or to rest
Or to relax

Or to accept
That there are things
I cannot do

And that it’s OK
To stop trying
To be strong.

I believe
That only
Once I have examined
My weaknesses,
Accepted them,
And worked out
What to do about them,

Will I know
What my true strengths
Really are.

How To Be

I’m aware that this blog is becoming a bit erratic. There is still the story of my diagnosis to complete. There are hanging bits of part stories about discovering I was autistic. There are still random bits of semi-poems intermingling with journal entries. And I have yet to write about significant topics in a way that I eventually hope will be properly useful to others. It’s all a bit of a mess really. And I still have comments to respond to, and so many times where I’ve stated that I need to write a whole blog post about something and haven’t yet. But I can only do what I can do. My spoons are often somewhat limited and I work pretty much to capacity at all times, so I can’t do more.

And that’s just on the actual blog. Inside my head it’s even worse. There are fragments of posts, ideas, notions, concepts and so on. I have note after note after note on my phone, half-typed half thoughts about various things. It feels like I need a year or more to go through them all and construct coherent writings from them. There is so much to do, I’m so behind with things that I need to do to keep my life just about ticking over. And there never seems to be enough time, and by time I mean the sort of time where I’m functional enough to achieve things.

Maybe, however, this erratic situation, this state of chaos, is actually reflective of my own state of mind and my own current situation, which is also erratic and chaotic. Over a period of 24 hours last week I went from hating being me and not wanting to exist, to being content and still feeling this huge relief of realising who I am. I am still struggling to speak or get out of bed some days, but can be quite capable on others. And I have also realised over the last couple of weeks, that when I am out of the flat, in public, with other people, I have a situation that is still not resolved, and not even close to being resolved.

I do not know How To Be.

The problem is this:

I have always been regarded as somewhat “eccentric”, and even, maybe, some would say, a bit weird. That’s OK, I’m cool with that, it’s not a problem to me, I’ve dealt with it long since. After over 4 decades of being a bit on the interesting side of things I’m pretty used to it. I got really upset about being bullied and so on at school until I was around 15, but by then I’d largely learnt that it was just part of life and although it wasn’t much fun, I’d learnt to act “normal enough” to survive out in the world. I’d learnt to live with it, to cope.

The problem, of course, was that in learning to act “normal enough” and in learning to cope, what I’d actually done was literally learnt to act. I’d built a mask, and a pretty effective one at that. And the mask that I built was one of a rather strong and confident person. I wasn’t the stereotypical autistic girl “flying under the radar” by sitting quietly in the corner in the class, unnoticed. I wasn’t failing exams or dropping out of school. I was strong-willed, brash, and externally confident (even internally confident to an extent, because however much of a failure I was at friendship and sport and so on, I could learn things and pass exams reasonably easily, so that was what I did). I was told that I was capable and could achieve great things (largely because of the exam results and my capacity for learning things), and so the mask that I built was one of a high-achieving confident young woman.

However, this mask came at a price, and that price was my mental health. Constantly “being strong” and “achieving” in the way that I did in my early 20s was breaking me inside, and by the time I got to my late 20s I was very very ill indeed, heading for the serious episode of burnout at around age 30, from which I never really recovered, and my life was falling apart.

Up until last year I continued with the masking process to a considerable extent while out in the world. I continued to believe that the strong me was the real me, and once I’d recovered from being mentally ill (I really believed I’d get better at some stage) I’d be back to full strength. However, that continual masking was breaking me yet again, and, perhaps inevitably, I fell apart again completely, in the summer of 2016. And by that time the world had caught up sufficiently for the events to occur that eventually led to me being diagnosed autistic.

And, because of the sort of person I am, having discovered I’m autistic I’m determined to BE autistic. I don’t consider it something to hide away, I don’t consider it something to try not to be. It’s a huge part of my identity, and after over 4 decades being “somebody else”, the relief at being a more authentic version of me is huge. I suddenly realise it’s OK to allow myself to eat the same thing day after day after day if it makes me feel better, I’m allowed to stop forcing myself to take part in group conversations until I’m so sick I’m at the point of collapse, I can stim and fiddle with things and know it’s not me being wilfully annoying but is just part of my neurology, and I’m finally learning how to be myself after decades of trying to be the person society expected me to be and failing at it.

Which is all very well when I’m at home, or with tolerant friends or someone who can care for me and explain. And is absolutely fine when I’m in safe environments and have enough spoons to take care of myself. All very lovely – in theory all I need to do now is to be my fabulous autistic neurodivergent hand-flappy rocking-back-and-forth sunglasses-wearing eye-contact-no-longer tell-it-like-it-is self! Neurology explains everything, no more need for acting! Yippeeeee!

However, I’m a grown up person. I have to live in the world. I have to go out to shops to buy food. I have to be able to deal with other human beings if I want a life beyond the television and the sofa. I want to participate in activities that will be full of neurotypical folk who think it’s great to have a spontaneous chat about nothing at all and that such a thing takes no effort, who sit and stand too close to me for comfort, who are irritated by my stimming, who will expect me to use polite social niceties that mean something to them, who don’t even know what being autistic means, and who mistake my lack of social finesse, my sometimes inability to speak, my lack of eye contact, and so on, for rudeness or disrespect or similar, which, of course, it isn’t, it’s just that my natural way of being is different from theirs.

And so I come up with a dilemma. As I’m starting to emerge from burnout and beginning to go out into the world again a bit more, I’m finding that there are times I slip back into the old mask, which is probably inevitable after 4 decades of living that way and it becoming such a practised part of my act. It’s very obvious when I do though, because I start to feel very ill and bad rather quickly and I don’t have the stamina to maintain it for very long. There are also times when I catch myself doing something really obviously autistic (like losing speech or flapping my hands or something) and realise that if something went wrong or somebody challenged me, I’d be in deep trouble without being able to explain properly what was going on and with no carer on hand to help. And how DO you deal with a stranger who is standing so close to you that their “person vibes” are making you feel ill, when they don’t even understand the concept of “person vibes” (which, incidentally, is a term I just invented now)? They think you’re being awkward, but you’re not, it’s just that you can’t cope with that much person that close in that time and place.

I have no answers at this stage. But I’m coming up against the same problem that I read about from the parents of autistic children, but for myself, not a child. I’ve seen discussions about the extent to which autistic children should be pushed and made resilient and able to cope in life, and the extent to which they should be encouraged to be their fully autistic selves with all that that entails. I’m now considering to what extent I need to continue to use the mask I’ve developed in order to survive in the world and to what extent I can allow all my autistic traits and tendencies to dominate. On the one hand, trying to make autistic people “look” neurotypical can be massively damaging to mental health (don’t I know this from bitter experience), and how well we “fit in” or “look normal” is no measure of success in an autistic life because it denies who we are and can cause huge burnouts, but on the other hand we have to survive in the world somehow and that needs a certain amount of resilience and coping ability, especially given how little support there is in most societies for autistic people, particularly those of us who are adults. Add on to that the complications of late diagnosis and the concomitant identity crisis that arises from this huge change in life, and it’s easy to see how difficult it is to know how to proceed from here.

And this is not just about societal attitudes, but about practical survival and physical health. I’m not at the stage where if the supermarket discontinues my usual food that I don’t eat at all, but I did sit and cry for half an hour the other morning and declared that I wouldn’t eat or drink that day because we’d run out of the milkshake that I usually have when I first get up. My autistic brain said NO in big shouty letters, and I had to use my rational “learning” brain to argue with it. I had to allow myself to recover from what was basically a mini-meltdown over a milkshake, and then gently persuade myself that I was going to eat and drink and it would be OK to drink something different until my husband could get to the right shop to get the right sort of milkshake. This all takes energy (and, in my case, a very understanding husband), and it’s nobody’s fault – it’s just the way my brain works being at odds with what I know to be good for my body and overall health!

And going out into the world and coping with everything that the external world throws at me takes even more energy, even when people are trying their utmost to understand and be helpful. I’m quite good at it because I’ve been practising for a long time and I’ve learnt a lot of social skills which I can maintain quite well for the duration of most social events as long as I get enough downtime in between, but I’m also determined to be as autistic as I need to be where possible, because it’s so much easier, more relaxing, and SO much better for my mental health.

Also, while knowing I’m autistic is an amazing liberating relief, and while I really like being autistic me because it’s so natural and right and comfortable, I also rather liked the strong capable mask person (which is possibly understandable – since I created a persona it probably made sense to create one of someone I liked rather than someone I hated). I don’t want to lose some of those strong bits (being “tough” is something I enjoy in many contexts), and I still need some of that resilience to survive and to live any sort of sensible life.

However, I know that, aside from the briefest of interactions, I have to be open about being autistic. I read of people who hold down jobs and don’t tell their employers that they’re autistic – that wouldn’t be possible for me as I’m too obviously different, and at my best I can maintain that level of mask for only about 3 days absolute maximum, even when I’m going home in the evenings. In the past the jobs have just failed, and I’ve lost them. Without significant and noticeable adaptions there are things I simply can’t do. At the moment I’m not even close to being able to work, but if that ever changes then there’s no way I could hide such a big part of me. I can currently act neurotypical for an hour or so at most these days, certainly not long enough to hold down a job!

So I’m now stuck in a bit of an inbetween state, trying to work out where to go from here, trying to work out how I can take this new discovery, be myself, be openly autistic, enjoy the benefits that brings to me, even manage to advocate for other autistic people and educate others about autism, but still manage to live a life that doesn’t mean I’m sidelined for things, or unable to participate in many of the sort of events that make life interesting and worth living.

This post has turned out to be more a list of questions, of musings, of ponderings, than anything else. Maybe, a year on from discovery, six months on from diagnosis, and slowly emerging from burnout, this is a phase I have to go through. I have to ask the questions before the answers will start to emerge. I have to consider how I’m going to live my life, what I’m going to push myself to do, how much I can ask for adaptions to do things I’d be unable to do without them, how much I’m going to give up on some things because it’s too much, and where the balance will eventually lie. Maybe there will never be a full balance, but some sort of compromise between the bit of me that craves adventure and activity and the bit of me that needs solitude and peace.

And after two thousand words of analysis and consideration…

I still don’t know How To Be!

I am still having, consciously, to make decisions about whether to present the old mask to people, which is practised and known and I can do only for short lengths of time, or whether simply to “be myself”, which is new and unfamiliar to me and others and requires explanation and education but is so much more relaxing and feels so much more honest and authentic.

I suspect I’m still learning, trying things out, sometimes getting it wrong, sometimes getting it right, discovering what works and what doesn’t. I suspect that learning How To Be as an authentically autistic person who can actually manage to do things out in the world without getting constantly broken will be an iterative process, and I’m still very much at the start of that process.

Lost Day

I woke early, feeling exhausted, and not a proper sort of sleepy exhausted, but an odd sort of depleted exhausted, like all the energy had drained out of me somehow and I could hardly move. I could hear birds, very very loud birds, wood pigeon calls burning the insides of my ears.

I knew I had to be somewhere today. I knew also that getting there would be difficult. I looked at the schedule for the rest of the week, which I had photographed and saved on my phone. I tried to work out what I might be able to skip without causing too much inconvenience or annoyance. My head wouldn’t think very well, so I started to try to type into my phone:

If this were real life and I’m at sensory levels of now and tiredness. Would be schedule looking.

This was how the language emerged from my finger. I knew it was wrong and that it needed editing. And I also know that when WRITTEN language becomes difficult and starts to go wrong in that way, that I’m heading into shutdown. This is something I’m starting to learn, now that I’m actually observing myself with some knowledge, rather than just declaring myself “ill” or declaring that “my head went wrong” as I have done in the past.

I attempted to speak. There was nothing. No surprise there. If the written words are starting to go wrong then the spoken ones are almost certainly non-existent.

It was still early. I still had to get a message to the outside world that I wasn’t going to be where I was expected to be. The best I could do was to message my husband a few words and hope he could interpret what I was trying to say in order to convey some sort of message to those who needed to know that I wouldn’t be appearing for rehearsals this morning. He received the following messages:

Fail now. Is. Words. Morning. Not.

Now. Schubert. Prob. Can’t.

Tell.

Write hard. Speak not. Food not. Later.

And because he has long experience of such communications, he was perfectly able to send a message saying that I wasn’t able to get to the Schubert rehearsal and had asked him to pass on the message and that I didn’t need food and wouldn’t be able to communicate for a while.

At some point during the morning someone brought me a cup of tea and left it outside my tent. I was unable to respond, unable to move from where I was curled up under the duvet, unable to do anything at all for a while. This is all absolutely normal for me at such times, which have been happening since my early childhood. My mother observed the behaviour, still remembers it well, going right back into my early childhood, and even had a word for it, zonking, which I mentioned in Losing The Words.

Having successfully conveyed a message of sorts to the outside world, my brain then simply closed off. I slept a bit. I lay there staring at the side of the tent, a bit of plain fabric being as much visual input as I could take. I didn’t move. I couldn’t move. I don’t usually remember much from these times, just a feeling of being utterly drained, no energy at all, and something like a deep depression, not being able to form thoughts properly, no ability to translate things into words, nothing. My head is simply closed for business and my body follows it. There is nothing to do at that point except wait – it’s like some sort of reset is required before my overstimulated and exhausted brain will function properly again. I don’t respond, I don’t communicate, I just lie there and breathe, nothing more.

After a few hours I regained the ability to type and to form words and typed some of the thoughts that had by then started to emerge from my head into the notes app on my phone. Having established that I could once again produce proper typed sentences, I was then able to contact the outside world by facebook without my husband having to make the sentence structure for me. It was lunchtime. I was aware that I hadn’t eaten or drunk anything all morning (and couldn’t have – something else my mother had observed about zonking was that food was an absolute no during those times, and when I have attempted to eat or to keep functioning I have simply ended up physically sick and it’s been assumed I had some sort of bug or similar).

Somebody brought food and left it outside my tent. I was unable to thank them except online, but was able to eat by mid-afternoon, and was, it seemed, by this stage, quite hungry – even though I didn’t feel any sort of hungry, once I started to eat it was obvious that I was.

It took another couple of hours for the shutdown to be properly over and a further hour for spoken words to fully return. Although I can’t always tell when I’m going IN to shutdown, or that that’s what it is (though I am getting better at recognizing it as I’m learning), it’s really obvious when I’m emerging because I start to stim again, I start to rock and to move and get back to what for me is “normal”, a state of dynamic equilibrium as I like to think of it. For me, being still either means I am masking furiously and working hard to stay still, or I am ill and in shutdown, or I am asleep, or, occasionally, that I am relaxed under a weighted blanket or completely immersed in something or similar. The rest of the time I move, and that movement restarting is always a good sign – it’s the feeling that you didn’t know something was wrong until it was solved, and the minute it’s solved it was obvious how wrong it was before!

My sensory system remained on high alert for the rest of the day – I managed to go and sit in the audience to hear some of my friends singing and playing music, but used earplugs against the applause and was deeply grateful to a friend who asked others to move away from me to give me some space during the performance.

By mid-evening I was able to drive home, where my husband had “the food” (whatever I’m currently eating we call “the food” – I have cyclic obsessions with food where I eat the same thing every day for months, and always have done) ready and waiting for me, and I spent the evening doing all the familiar routines and being with the animals and recharging properly ready for the next day.

But what should have been a day participating was basically lost to a massive shutdown, and there was nothing I could do about it. I would have liked to have been in the rehearsals that morning. I would have liked to go to tea that day. I would have liked to join in the celebratory feasting and dancing (although I knew that the feasting would have been a non-starter anyway and I’d have been eating alone somewhere quiet), but I couldn’t.

But at least I know what causes these times now, and I have a word for them, shutdown, which makes sense to me and enables me to understand what’s going on. At least I have people who are willing to understand it too and to bring me food and so on and to help me out when it happens. And I know that I’m not getting some sort of illness (as has been suspected on many occasions in the past) and that I will feel better in a few hours’ time – I just need to wait, to be on my own, and to have as little input into my system as possible.

Last year, when the same thing happened, all I knew was that I felt inexplicably awful and couldn’t even tell anyone how or why. I spent a night silently crying in my tent in the dark, without food or help, with nobody even knowing where I was because I’d lost all ability to communicate and wasn’t even able to type a message to my husband. And short of “something mental health related or maybe a virus”, I had no idea why I was like that.

This year wasn’t ideal. It’s not really how I want to live my life, missing out on good times, having to skip rehearsals, having to sit on my own because my system can’t cope with much social interaction or noise, and so on. But it is better than the distress of previous years, than the anguish of desperately trying to function, trying to make things work, having to call in with some “unknown illness”, making myself worse by continuing to try to speak or function as I “should”.

I don’t like having to live this “half life”, which is what it feels like. But knowing why these things happen means I’m much less self-blaming, much kinder to myself, gentler to myself. And simply allowing the inevitable shutdown to run its course and not trying to push myself out of it means that I actually recover more quickly and am generally healthier as a result. Maybe once I’m more fully recovered from the recent burnout I’ll be able to do a bit more – I do hope so.

It does still all feel very much like a work in progress still. I have my answer as to why these things happen to me, but I now have to work out the best way to live, which I haven’t quite managed yet.

Dark Thoughts

This post should, I think, be one that carries additional content warnings beyond those on the home page of this blog. As you might guess from the title, material that some might find triggering or distressing might well be included here, so please protect yourself if you’re vulnerable and only proceed if you feel able to cope or have safety strategies in place. I should also add that I’m not in any immediate danger, despite having regular thoughts about my own place on this planet, and I have my own strategies sorted for the time being.

I find myself in a slightly odd situation when writing about and publishing posts about the darker side of my mind. When I started this blog one of the things I wanted to do was to be as honest as possible about as much as I could as possible, partly because that is just the way I am, partly because one of my hopes is that by discussing the more difficult topics (such as suicidal ideation) I will, in some tiny way, contribute to destigmatising them, and partly because there might be others who, like me, will read that there is someone else out there experiencing these thoughts and feeling and will feel comforted by the knowledge that they are not alone (even though this usually raises the rather odd situation of “I’m glad it’s not just me,” hastily followed by “I don’t mean that I’m really glad you feel horrible and want to end your life, just that I’m reassured that I’m not alone”).

However, when I am at my worst, one of the things I struggle to do is write about it. And, even if I do manage to type any words (usually into my phone while curled up under a blanket), the chances of my having enough functionality actually to publish them on this blog are pretty much nil. So I’m always playing a sort of “catch up” with the dark thoughts!

I’ve had a pretty rough week this week. Regular readers of this blog will know that I was away from home and spent a LOT of time surrounded by people during the preceding week. I didn’t know whether I’d even manage to be there, and it was only because of quite a lot of people giving me quite a lot of support that I was able to manage at all. However, even WITH that huge level of support and acceptance, it took every ounce of energy I possessed just to cope with an absolute minimum level of activity, so this week I have, unsurprisingly, been utterly wrecked.

I’ve done a lot of thinking about the amount of effort put in, both by me and by others, and have been considering hard whether it’s worth pursuing some of the more difficult things that I keep trying to pursue. I’m clearly disabled enough that I need care and adaptions just to enable me to participate in many things. I haven’t yet managed to process all my thoughts about this, and certainly if you’d asked me on Monday, I’d have declared that I was never leaving the flat again, ever, and that there really was no point continuing with life. I managed to post a couple of blog posts in the better moments, but that was about it.

However, time and solitude have meant that (I think) the worst is now over, and I’m gently starting to resume life, and to start to think more sensibly about my future exploits in the outside world. But, looking back to Monday, I thought it was important at this stage to acknowledge that this process of autistic discovery is not all wonderful relief. The wonderful moments such as those described in The Magic Spot and Liberation! are part of the experience, yes, but there is also a bleaker side of an autistic discovery, particularly, perhaps, for those of us who have a lot of anger and sadness at the way our lives have turned out. I could, if I wanted, make this blog all about the wonderful bits, a great celebration of beautiful stimming and hand-flappingly joyous discoveries and solved mysteries and so on, but it would feel like lying, so I won’t.

The darkness of this week has in no way been comparable to that described in The Aftermath, although I have, once more, had to work seriously hard to persuade myself that it is worth staying alive for the time being. It’s all very well accepting myself as an “out and proud” autistic at home, but once I have to interact with people in the outside world I have to work out exactly how I do that – there’s a blog post fermenting in my head about it – and that causes me to ask a LOT of questions about my value to the world and my purpose in the world and so on. The immediate answers delivered by my head are not all that encouraging, and I have to do a lot of work to debate them.

And, it seems, I am not alone. This morning somebody shared an article on facebook. I haven’t checked its veracity so I am merely reporting something shared by a mainstream media outlet (I don’t have the spoons to go back to the primary source right now), but the report talked of “investigating concerns about suicide rates among autistic people” and “research shows that two thirds of adults newly diagnosed with the condition had contemplated suicide.” If this is the case, then I’m certainly part of that two thirds.

Research results such as these are no surprise to me. In fact, from my own personal experience, I’m amazed it’s not higher. I have been contemplating suicide for as long as I’ve known what suicide was. I sort of assumed that most people did, but that, like me, they just didn’t talk about it. My feelings were borne out last autumn when I read Philip Wylie’s Very Late Diagnosis of Asperger Syndrome (Autism Spectrum Disorder) in which he described a further suicide attempt after his own diagnosis at 51.

Having such thoughts and memories does, for me, prompt me to review my “progress” as far as my own process of discovery and diagnosis is concerned. After so long in the mental health system I’m also very attuned to mood monitoring, and I’m also continually trying to assess my state of recovery from burnout in order to try to work out what level of functionality I might eventually hope to achieve and what kind of goals and plans I might make for the future (probably my strongest motivators to keep living are to achieve goals, to learn “things”, and to “find out what happens next”)!

I wrote the words below back in February, three days before I received my diagnosis. At the time I considered them too dark to post, and, since I was diagnosed just days later, and then life changed again a few days after that, they were never published. I feel there’s sufficient distance to publish them now, and I’m very aware that there are others still going through the diagnostic procedure who might relate to some of them. Also, however dark life has been this week (and it has been quite dark), it hasn’t reached the stage it was at back then.

If they don’t diagnose me
I can’t see the point of going on living.

Because I hate my life so fucking much.

I have always hated life.
I don’t know why people care about it so much.

I do not belong in this vile place.

But I was told to behave.
I was told to smile.
I was told to work hard and be good.

So I did.

But everything still turned to shit.

And I smiled publicly through the shit.

And unlike the kids who got spotted and got shrinks and stuff
I used those fucking accursed bastard brains to compensate.
And destroyed my mental health in the process.
The smiles hiding a ticking time bomb
Of mental illness and desire to be dead.

They thought I was happy because I passed exams.
But the exams were the retreat from the misery of people.

And later I drank myself oblivious when alone.
And cried.
And tried to end this hell.

And still nobody has believed me

45 years.

Still fighting.
Still not knowing who I am.
Still being told that maybe I have brain injury.

Why why why.

How much fucking longer?

I’ve written quite a lot more dark words about dark thoughts this week too, more about how angry and frustrated I am at my inability to function in the world, about how long all this took to discover, and about how much I struggle with some aspects of life. I’ve also had cause over the last week or to consider the vast gulf between some of my abilities and some of my disabilities, and how that gulf makes life so very complicated and unpredictable. I’m still working on trying to formulate those thoughts into something coherent though, so I’ll stop for now as this post is already quite long enough and my writing ability is almost exhausted for now – I can feel the sentence structure is no longer flowing and easy and that I’m having to use large amounts of brain power to translate my thoughts into readable words, so it’s time to stop!

Hypothesis Formation

Yesterday, the following status appeared in my facebook memories from one year ago:

Did all that just happen? Now to try and remember what I was doing 3 weeks ago. And to consider what to do with the new information concerning how my head reacts to stuff.

At that point I didn’t mention on my facebook wall that it had been suggested by several people that I might be autistic. I just vaguely alluded to “new information” about “my head”. As far as I was concerned, the notion of me being autistic seemed extremely strange, extremely unnerving, and, as far as I knew at that point, extremely “not me”!!!

Oh, how I laugh at that last bit now!!!!!

I certainly wasn’t going to start chattering on about it on facebook at that time, and, as far as I can remember, I was still really regarding the whole “me being autistic” thing as one of those slightly wild ideas that folk have and that would eventually fall by the wayside as being just another one of those theories. I didn’t want to post something up on my wall, be shouted down by a whole bunch of people, and then unfriended by a whole bunch more. I wasn’t confident enough of anything at that time to mention the idea to more than my husband and one or two friends.

However, the fact that several people had, independently, suggested that I might be autistic was enough to make me take the idea seriously enough to do some research and see if I might find out what was at the root of their suggestions.

I did what anyone brought up with a toe in the world of science would do. I formed a hypothesis, which I called the “autism hypothesis” (i.e. proving the hypothesis would mean that I had gathered enough evidence to confirm that I was autistic, and disproving would mean that there was insufficient evidence and I wasn’t autistic and I could ditch the whole idea and just go and have a drink and forget about it).

So then I had to investigate the hypothesis. Gather evidence. Find out what this whole “autism thing” was actually about!

A friend of mine had sent a copy of Liane Holliday Willey’s Pretending to be Normal to me and I’d read it with a certain amount of bemusement – apparently it was something to do with autism, but it just seemed like a fairly ordinary account of someone’s life as far as I could tell. It was enough to convince me to investigate further, but I needed more INFORMATION! Actual information, not a life story.

And so I did the modern day equivalent of what my father told me to do when I was young. Back in my childhood if anybody wanted to know anything the answer was always to “get a book from the library” and to find out that way.

I have not been into a lending library for many many years (I think the last time I went into one was for a job interview and I was unsuccessful). And I don’t believe a lending library would have been much help to me.

So I tried Google, which was also no help because it presented me with page after page of search results about small children and parenting and so on. The world of adult autistic blogs was still inaccessible to me as I didn’t know what I was looking for, or that it existed, or how to find it. And it certainly wouldn’t have occurred to me at that stage that there were groups for autistic people on facebook or hashtags on twitter or anything of that sort.

So I went back to what I knew, which was books, and typed “adult autistic” into the Amazon search bar. And discovered a book with a promising title: Cynthia Kim’s I Think I Might Be Autistic (or as it subsequently became known in our household “The book with the pencils in the wrong order”).

And on the 23rd August 2016 I downloaded the sample from the start of the book onto the Kindle app on my iPad and had a look at it.

It pleased me from the start. It provided what I wanted – information, an outline of the diagnostic criteria for autism, and the start of a list of questions that was evidently continued beyond the free sample that I had. This book was speaking my language – it had facts and lists and promised to provide me with exactly what I’d been looking for to start to work on proving or disproving the newly-formed hypothesis.

My Amazon records show that I ordered the paperback copy the same day. And that was the day on which Time Stood Still for me. The 2016 calendar STILL shows 23rd August as the date, and maybe it always will. In Time Stood Still I referred to some sort of mental breakdown, which I now know to be a huge episode of autistic burnout.kn

It was to be months before I started to emerge from that burnout (and I still haven’t, fully) and from that moment almost my entire life was taken up with investigating the newly-formed hypothesis and, later, with trying to obtain a formal diagnosis.

I read the criteria from the sample of the book on my iPad over and over again, and waited for the paperback to arrive in our mailbox so I could try to work out what the diagnostic criteria actually meant, and whether any of them had any relevance to me.

With all that’s happened in the last 12 months, and with the knowledge I now have, it seems utterly extraordinary that it was only a year ago that I started seriously to investigate the possibility that I might be autistic.

And I certainly wasn’t telling anyone who didn’t need to know about it at that stage!

If anyone had told me I’d be blogging about it publicly within 4 months I’d have thought they’d gone mad!

Leaky Head

I have been inattentive to this blog recently. My head has been so full that processing thoughts into words has not always happened. I have also been back to the place mentioned in The Discovery and, more recently, in Going Back, Doing My Best, and Packing.

I am still analysing the experience of returning. I am still recovering from being with so many people for so much time. My husband went away for a couple of nights an hour after my return and I have now not seen another human or spoken a word for over 40 hours and I am starting to regain a little equilibrium.

I am also trying to work out what any of it is for. And I spent a long time yesterday “persuading myself That I even want to [live]”, which is still not a foregone conclusion for me. In the end, I gave up trying to work out why I do anything at all, and simply reminded myself of Scott Jurek’s words: “Sometimes you just do things!” These words have served me well on many occasions over the last few years.

Better analysis will have to wait for a while. Pouring so much energy into things outside my normal routine has left me somewhat depleted and also very behind with blogging and “desk work”. There is much to catch up on, and it will take time. I am having to take things very very gently.

However, the last day I was away, the 20th August, was a significant anniversary for me – exactly six months since my formal diagnosis. And, at four in the morning, sitting in a tent in a field, I typed the words below into my phone. Just something to try to mark the occasion somehow.

They’re very unformed thoughts. I have not analysed them, nor edited them (beyond dealing with a couple of autocorrect fails), and my head’s not really in a place for discussing some of them yet. I suspect I’m also repeating things I’ve said before. Maybe this is the way my brain is doing the processing, still trying to work out what has happened in the last year and where to proceed from here.

Please don’t challenge me on the thoughts below. I’m not up to being challenged on them. They are my truth from where I am at the moment. I do not want positivity. I do not want reassurance. Those things are uncomfortable to me right now.

My head needs space to process the thoughts and I need to challenge any that might need challenging by myself, in my own time. I do not currently have the strength to debate them with others. I merely present them to you as they are.

My head is full of anniversaries.
The end of this summer’s music
Reminding me of how things ended
Last summer…

Then
I was just at the start
Of exploring
The “autism hypothesis”
As I called it.

Me? Autistic?
No.
I did not “suspect”
I had not “wondered for a while”
It hadn’t occurred to me
At all.

TBH I hardly even knew what autism was.
I sure as hell knew nothing about
Sensory issues
Executive functioning
Autistic inertia
Social imagination
Burnout
Masking
Stimming
And so on.

Except that I did.
I knew all these things
Really really well
Because they had been part of
My normal
All my life.

I just assumed the world was
The same
For everybody.
And that life was basically
A competition
To see who could cope
And be tough
And behave “properly”
Like they tried to teach me.

I knew I was weak
Because I couldn’t tolerate it well
And got so mentally ill
That I wished to be dead
Most days of my life
For as long
As I could remember.
I assumed this was normal.
Most folk wake up
Wishing they hadn’t,
Don’t they?

I knew I was bad
Because I was still naughty
Even when I was trying to be good.
And I was still lazy
Even when I was working my hardest.

And then I discovered I was not
“Normal”
After all.
And please don’t think
That telling me I AM normal
Is in any way helpful
Because it is not comforting
Nor reassuring.
It is invalidating,
Gaslighting.
And upsetting.

There is
A weird feeling of discovering
That most other people
Perceive the world
Differently.

Must be odd for them!

I wonder what it’s like.

But I’ll never know.

My head is full of anniversaries
The date on my calendar app
Reminding me of how things ended
Exactly six months ago…

Then
I was at the end of exploring
The “autism hypothesis”
Because it ceased to be a hypothesis
And became a formal diagnosis.

Six months of learning about
Autism
And
Sensory issues
Executive functioning
Autistic inertia
Social imagination
Burnout
Masking
Stimming
And so on.

And discovering that my normal life
Wasn’t so normal
After all.

And that most other people
Weren’t being tough
In the ways I thought they were.
The assessor was clear on that.
And absolutely totally clear
That I fulfilled all the diagnostic criteria
Even things I hadn’t discovered:
My gestures and expressions
Limited and atypical.
Things that should have been
Learned intuitively
I had instead
Learned cognitively.

My head is full of anniversaries
And I think I should be
Writing something more
Organised?
But life has been sapping my energy
And my mind still needs
More processing time.

The thoughts are just there
Undefined
Randomly swirling.
Logical arguments not yet formed

But the anniversaries are there.
Six months since diagnosis.
Half a year.
That should be significant?
Maybe?
Perhaps it is and that’s why I’m even writing this.
It feels significant.
Six months since liberation.
Six months since it became OK
To stop trying to be “normal”
To give up the old life
(Though I’m yet to work out
How to proceed from here)
To recognise how disabled I really am
And how much care I need
Though, perversely, I’d rather be independent.

Six months is a long time
A lot has changed.
Six months is a short time
There is still a long way to go.

I am still learning.
There is so much to learn.
I’m still new to this autism malarkey.
Both new to the whole idea of it
And the theories
And debates
And arguments.
And to how and where I fit
Into the whole neurodiversity thing.
Confusing complexities of language.
The triggering effects of so much exposure
To children and childhood and parenting discussion
An area of life I had cut myself away from because it is so alien and painful.

And while I have lived for decades with my “normal”
Redefining myself as autistic is odd.
I was colourful, eccentric, weird, something special and different.

Now I discover I was just a common or garden autistic all along.

I feel much less unique.
More bog standard.
But I also know now I’m not normal.

Paradox.
I’m odder and less odd than I thought
Simultaneously.

And I have to learn to live
Practically.
And keep persuading myself
That I even want to.

Now is not really the time
After a week of memories
Almost no sleep
Meltdown
Shutdown
Self-injury
Dissociation
People
Music
Trying to cope.

But today is the date
So I have allowed
Unformed thoughts
To escape from my head.

My head is full of anniversaries.
So full
That some thoughts
About them
Have leaked
Out of my finger
Onto your screen.

Packing

To return to the place
Where my old life ended
And my old self
Disintegrated
Into a million tiny fragments.

I messaged a friend
A year ago
And said
“It seems like I might have
Some sort of autism”

I laugh now at the terminology
And ponder what “sort” it might be
I’d quite like it to be purple
With a side order of cheesy chips
And a glass of beer.
Maybe also a beard
And nice eyebrows!

I digress

A tweet set me thinking:
Do I have a love-hate relationship
With this place?
I’m not sure.
I’m not given to loving
Or hating
Anything much.
They always seem
A bit strong
And the words are loaded
With overwhelm.

But

I got it.

The paradox in my head
About this place
At this time of year
After the events of August 2016…

Two words
Describe it
Perfectly for me

Supportive
And
Traumatic

The support of good people
I know they are good
My brain tells me
But they are still people
And
As always
With a crowd of people
I get that sense of
Disbelonging
That I always have.
No matter how much I belong
I never do.
And if I feel I might start
To be part of something
I get uncomfortable
And withdraw.

The trauma of multiple meltdowns
My life falling apart
The eventual admission
Of just how disabled I really am
And that to return
I need adaptions
I can no longer be
“A normal customer”
And I know the truth
About my life.
The eventual comfort
Of knowing why I can’t
Do what most people can.

I have nearly cancelled this trip
So many times.
Decided I cannot go.
Too much.
The risk of meltdown.
The inevitability of speech loss
In a place where face to face interaction
Is valued.
At what point do I just give up?

Apparently not yet.
Because I have started packing.
To return to a place of

Unsettling support
And
Reassuring trauma.

Where all the feelings get intermingled.

And the routine
Is simultaneously
Comforting and constraining.

The discomfort of becoming
Part of a community
Of never quite knowing
What to do
Or how to be.

But I am drawn back

Simple to say it is the music that draws me
But it is more than that.
Observing people.
Intrigue.
Maybe even as close
As I come to being
Part of a community.
Skirting the edges,
Watching from the sidelines
Because throwing myself
Into the middle
Breaks me too badly.

I cannot keep up the acting
Or make so many conscious decisions
Or remember how to chat
Or cope with the noise
Or concentrate that hard
On doing the right thing
Or on explaining
Why I am not doing the right thing
For days on end.
It is too exhausting.

Adaptions are being arranged.
Separate eating.
People knowing I am autistic
And need time out
To recover.
Disclosure not optional
For me.
Essential.

It feels strange.
After so many years
Of “just work harder”
To realise that I can’t.
And the only way I can do anything
Is with adaptions
To enable me to cope.

I feel sad that I cannot join in
“Properly”
But I have tried this
For so many years
And always the result
Is disaster.

Prior to my mask disintegrating
I could do 3 days
Before meltdown or shutdown.
Now it is more like
24 hours
Before I need to be alone
To recover.

But I have still not cancelled.
I am still going.
Facing things that terrify me.
But going to a place
I want to be,
Even so.
I said, a couple of years ago,
That if I wasn’t ill,
It would be perfect.
(I only knew myself to be “ill”
Back then).

It’s a place where the old, “strong” me,
The heavily masked me of my early 20s,
Would have flourished
(Although collapsed upon return)
But the me of now can barely cope
Because I am so burned out and mentally ill
After so many years of masking.

And now the place is imbued
With heavy significance.

Had I never gone there
Would I still not know I was autistic?

The question hurts my brain.

I cannot cope with the notion
That something involving people
Is so significant.

That makes me too vulnerable.

Part of me wants to stay away,
Forget.
Part of me needs to go back,
Remember.

Because everything changed.
My entire perception
Of my whole life.

It is all too big.

So I shall focus only on practical survival.
Arrangements.
Food.
Packing.
Loading the car.

I shall count socks
And think about jumpers
And try to organise things
As best I can
Because I know
My executive dysfunctioning
Means I will struggle
With the most basic things
After a short time.

Even the packing is a challenge
Right now!

Doing My Best

So we have come to August. And to the month in which, last year, people started to suggest to me that I might be autistic.

Today is the first anniversary of me starting seriously to fall apart, to not cope. A year ago today I sat in the leader’s seat of a viola section and a remark made to me by the conductor was the last straw after three days of total overload and unknowingly masking furiously without a break and I sat, tears rolling down my face, hardly able to speak. I think I managed to say “I’m doing my best” and that was about it. I was broken. I’ve reviewed that incident in my mind hundreds of times, often berating myself for not being tougher or more grown-up, for not coping as I should have done, for not acting with sufficient professionalism, but eventually I’ve learnt that how I coped (well, didn’t cope) that day was completely out of my control and there was nothing I could have done differently.

At the time, of course, I didn’t know that this meltdown (owing to circumstances, I suspect, a quiet, inward-turned one) was the start of many more that would occur over the next few weeks, nor that it was the start of something that would change my life for ever. I just knew that I felt very very bad and that it was probably some sort of mental health issue. I assumed that I’d go off and have a little rest or something and then be back to “normal” and carry on with life as usual. So I put my viola away after the rehearsal was over and went to have lunch in the dining hall, shaking and terrified, and struggling still further with the sensory overload that I was so used to that I didn’t even know it was making me worse.

I got through the rest of the day, sort of, feeling wrong and dissociated, and trying to do what was expected of me, but the breakdown of my abilities had happened and was irreversible, and by the next morning I couldn’t work out how to dress myself, couldn’t get to breakfast, and I knew I was in big trouble of some sort. My ability to act “appropriately” had fallen apart, and all I knew was that I was a broken down mess.

Fortunately, those around me (and some with whom I was communicating online) were largely sympathetic, and some of them were also knowledgeable, much more knowledgeable than I was, about what being autistic actually looked (and in at least one case felt) like. A year ago today I was only days away from people starting to ask if I’d considered the possibility that I was autistic, having both witnessed my behaviour and listened to my accounts of how the dining room and the vast numbers of people made me feel. This, added to my long history of mental health problems was enough to convince them, and for me to have heard the suggestion from enough people to go away in investigate the possibility thoroughly and to find out what “being autistic” actually meant.

Life has never, of course, gone back to “normal” and I suspect this will be the first of several “it’s been a year since…” posts as the anniversaries keep coming throughout the next year. Had life gone back to normal, you wouldn’t be reading this blog, nor, indeed would many of you have ever encountered me. The meltdown of a year ago today set in motion a chain of events that led to the most life-changing year I’ve ever had.

A year on, I’ve learnt so much. And am still learning so much. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to go back to the same place in a few weeks’ time. I have already returned for a weekend (as I recounted in Going Back) and I’m hoping to be able to go for longer.

There are two ongoing jobs on my jobs list at the moment. One is to finish writing up my assessment for this blog (I’m doing my best with that too, and with responding to comments and so on – apologies that my brain is working on such extended timescales at the moment) and the other is to try to work out what adaptions I might need to get through a week of orchestral playing, living away from home, without completely falling apart. I went last year, as far as I knew, as a very broken neurotypical person (though I don’t think I even knew the word neurotypical at that stage so would never have described myself thus), but this year I’m going back as an autistic person still recovering from a massive burnout.

Which is a huge shift. After over two decades of progressively worsening mental health I’ve become used to the fact that I have “issues” and can’t function like most other people can, but it’s now evident just how disabled I am (and I am disabled, and by more than just society and expectations because my executive functioning is so poor and my ability to care for myself is sometimes almost non-existent – there’s another whole blog post to write about that sometime when I have the capability). And admitting that to myself sufficiently to ask for help is massive for me.

I’m still, also, very much in the process of trying to work out what adaptions I actually need. It’s already been established that eating in the dining hall is beyond my capabilities because of the immense sensory overload, but even then there are still further issues to consider and I’m only just at the start of working out what they actually are. I’m working on them as hard as I can, trying to be as helpful as possible to the people who are trying to help me in order that I can keep playing orchestral music in that environment at all. There will, I’m sure, be times when things still go wrong, and this will be an iterative process as I discover ways to cope in the light of the new knowledge. I’m also feeling a little guilty about needing any adaptions at all, having spent so long just trying to work harder to deal with all the problems I’ve had, but I now find myself in a position where I simply cannot work any harder. I’ve spent my life doing my absolute best at everything I’ve ever done, working as hard as possible, with the result that my energies are spent. My perception of myself is rapidly changing. I have moved from the stage I was at when I wrote Farewell Strong Woman and Expectations Gone, but there is still a long way to go.

As I said to a friend recently, if I say I “can’t” do something, I really genuinely can’t and it’s not that I just don’t want to. But even so, it’s really hard to adjust to asking for help (which I was never very good at) and my social skills and understanding of how other people perceive me are not sufficiently good to know when people are happy to help, and when they’re thinking that I’m just a pain in the arse and it might be better if I gave up trying to do whatever it was because it’s really beyond my capabilities and the adaptions are just too much trouble for people. That’s something I’m still trying to work out too.

What I do know though, is that life has permanently changed as a result of the events of last August, and that returning to the same place, even with the same conductor (which is somewhat scary) and many of the same people, is going to be a very interesting experience if I can manage it. The expectations I had of my future life a year ago are so drastically different from the ones I have now that it still sometimes feels like I’ve stepped into some sort of parallel dream universe and that I’ll wake up one day and life will be back to normal again and I’ll think that was a jolly peculiar dream!

But it isn’t a dream (I don’t think)! It’s a whole new life, a whole new way of viewing my entire life, right back to when I was a very very small. The old life had been stretched and stretched right to its limit (and beyond on several occasions), but that moment, just before lunchtime a year ago today, was when it finally snapped, and people were there to witness it and to make the suggestion as to WHY it had snapped. And from that point it wasn’t about trying to fix the old life, it wasn’t about continuing to try to be “normal” or taking the “advice” that I’d been taking for so long about what would help (and often didn’t). Rather, it was about starting again, with a new set of parameters, building a new life with a different perspective on the world.

And that’s something I’m still doing. A year on from that moment I’m still trying to understand and to rebuild my life – it’s very much a work in progress!