Wasting Energy

I pressed my back into the corner of the cold wall behind me, as hard as I could, hard enough to distract me from the need to twirl or flick my fingers or flap my hands, hard enough to counterbalance the brightness of the light emanating from the interior of the van parked in front of me, next to my stricken car. I’d changed out of my sunglasses into a pair of ordinary specs, because I knew that wearing sunglasses on a December evening would attract questions I didn’t want to have to answer.

My internal dialogue was on a repetitive loop: “Mask like fuck, mask like fuck, normal, normal, normal, mask like fuck, mask like fuck, normal, normal, normal…”

“How long have you lived in your current place then?” said the breakdown man.

I felt my spouse, who was standing beside me, tense. I knew the thought process that would be going through his head: “Why does he want to know? He’s going to come and destroy our lives isn’t he? How does knowing when we last moved house help with mending the car?”

I knew that dealing with this sort of inane chatter was my job in these circumstances. My spouse, who had managed, half an hour earlier, to make the telephone call to the breakdown services while I sat on the floor in the dark rocking back and forth in a total panic, would simply be unable to manage such questions, so it was down to me.

“About 4 years,” I said, using one of the learnt scripts I keep in my head for such occasions. “It’s handy for the shops,” I added, hoping this was good small talk. It seemed to be OK.

Further questions followed. I reminded myself that the man was probably just trying to pass the time, and that he probably didn’t intend this to be some sort of cross-examination under torture. I did the best I could to smile and chat, my brain feeling like it was working so hard it might actually explode, my body tense and stressed from trying to keep still, my back pressed hard against the cold wall for a bit of relief.

The computer sitting on the car engine finished its diagnostic work. The man started to show me graphs, figures, numbers, and to talk about the state of the car battery (totally knackered). I relaxed a little. This was relevant, and seeing graphs was calming and made sense. There was now a purpose to the conversation.

The breakdown man said he had a battery on the van he could fit there and then. Since it was 2 days before Christmas, late in the evening, and we were quite a few miles away from home, this was a good outcome. Battery specifications and prices were discussed, the battery was fitted, and a further few “social” remarks were made. I didn’t challenge his (incorrect) assumption that we’d been Christmas shopping, although I did remember to thank him and to convey appropriate seasonal wishes I think.

By the time I got home my speech had failed and I was utterly exhausted.

***

Since I discovered and disclosed that I’m autistic I’ve attempted consciously to conceal it, and to mask my autistic traits, on only a handful of occasions, such as the one above. That night I was low on spoons (energy), having already been out in the world for a few hours. We didn’t know what sort of breakdown repair person might show up, or whether they’d know anything about autism. We didn’t know what prejudices they might have (over the years we’ve found motoring to be a problematic area of life at times – my spouse doesn’t drive and the car is mine but because he looks like a man and I look like a woman (we’re both nonbinary) frustrating assumptions have often been made), and we didn’t have energy to educate or to explain – we just wanted to get home with a fixed car.

So the decision was made to mask, to act as “normal” as possible. Changing my glasses, removing the wristband I wear that says “Autistic” on it, remembering to smile and make some sort of attempt at eye contact if necessary, putting my tired brain into overdrive in order to interact and maintain speech, frantically searching through my mental library for scripts, remembering not to tell my entire life story or talk too much, no jumping up and down, no pacing around, no swaying back and forth or pulling at my hair, and definitely no flapping hands.

I managed it. But only just. Since going into burnout a couple of years ago (I’ll discuss burnout elsewhere), my ability to act non-autistically has been pretty poor and I’ve only been able to do so for very short periods of time without getting ill or having some sort of meltdown or shutdown. The whole carefully constructed facade that has characterised most of my life in the outside world for the last 4 decades has simply crumbled and fallen to pieces as I’ve run out of energy to maintain it. Some skills I’d previously learnt have become patchy or disappeared completely, my sensory system has gone berserk, and the amount of care I need has increased significantly.

Of course, everybody, whatever their neurology, masks to some extent. People “put on a brave face” when they have to deal with difficult situations, they dress up in uncomfortable clothes to go to formal occasions and job interviews, they walk into work on a Monday morning having had terrible weekends and sleepless nights and when asked “How are you?” respond with “Very well, thank you.” even if they feel absolutely awful and want to kick the cheery Monday morning questioner in a painful place. People with mental illnesses, chronic pain conditions, and even folk who are simply having a difficult time will experience an even greater need to put on some sort of a “public persona” at times.

So, what is so different about autistic masking? Well, I haven’t yet done enough study or research to give a definitive answer (something I’d ultimately like to do is really investigate such questions – since I discovered, nearly two years ago, that well over 90% of people on the planet experience the world differently from how I do, I’d really like to find out about their experiences, but I haven’t had the energy so far). All I can do at this point is speculate. I think, perhaps, that much of the difference is to do with a matter of extent and from the number of situations in which a person feels they need to mask in order to fit in, not to cause a fuss, or to function in the world.

Back when I was well enough to work, I “acted” at job interviews. I suspect everyone does that. But what I’d one day like to explore is the point at which most people cease to act, start to feel like they’re in some sort of “comfort zone” (a concept I’d also like to explore sometime), and when they are basically able to “let their hair down”, be themselves, and have little or no anxiety (obviously, for those who have an anxiety disorder, this will be different). From what I’ve observed of people’s behaviour (unless the whole world is performing an elaborate act and everything is fake), I suspect that many people feel free to be themselves when out having a few drinks with their friends, playing sport, at a concert, going to pick up a few bits of shopping at the supermarket, watching TV with their families, or at home with a partner. These things might be more or less enjoyable, but most folk seem to be reasonably relaxed when I’ve seen them in these situations. I am not, and, perversely, I’m probably no more likely to be stressed in a job interview than I am having a few drinks down the pub because my stress levels are so high for so much of the time that the differentials between different situations are rather small. If you’ve ever encountered me in any of these situations and I appeared relaxed, it’s because I was masking.

The situations when I can essentially be “me” occur only when there is a locked door between me and the rest of the world (and even then, there is a fear the safety might be breached). The only other person who has ever seen the full real me is my spouse, although my best friend of many decades has been close. At all other times, I am on high alert, I am stressed, I am anxious, I am acting, to a greater or lesser extent. Alcohol helps me with the act, although it’s obviously not an ideal strategy. Some autistic people, especially late diagnosed ones who have been masking to everybody for decades, cannot even be themselves with their spouses.

I find it difficult to explain this matter of extent to people – I often post things on my facebook and am greeted with a chorus of “Oh, don’t worry about that, it’s absolutely normal, everybody gets…” which I suspect is meant comfortingly, but just makes me feel very invalidated and disbelieved. Maybe my communication style is misunderstood? Maybe I’m not adequately able to explain that it’s not a question of, for example, liking or disliking supermarkets and shopping, but that the energy required to cope with the noise and the light and the people and so on is such that even a short trip out can sometimes mean I melt down at the checkout to such an extent that I have to bite my own arm and bruise it (see the picture at the top of this post, taken earlier today) in order to cope.

Of course, by the time I’m melting down at the checkout, the mask has broken. In the past I’ve been accused of being drunk, been threatened with arrest, and often simply run away from situations I couldn’t cope with. One of the reasons autistic people DO mask and hide their unconventional ways is precisely to avoid accusations of drunkenness or getting arrested or even worse. Masking can sometimes be useful and even essential. That’s something I hope to discuss in the future.

Nowadays with more knowledge and less masking I can usually manage to buy a small amount of shopping by using strategies such as wearing sunglasses and ear defenders and allowing myself to stim (more on that another time). I’m fortunate in that my circumstances generally allow me to be openly autistic and I have no problem with being so. The result is that I’m starting to learn to conserve energy where I can and to use the limited resources I do have to try to improve my quality of life, which has, over the last few decades, generally been declining rather rapidly.

I have wasted a huge amount of energy over the decades trying to live my life in order to fulfil societal expectations. Sitting still, making eye contact, sitting in a chair with my feet on the floor, wearing various sorts of clothing, speaking when it is making me feel sick, dealing with pain from lights and sounds and textures, consciously trying to work out when to talk and practising what to say, trying to maintain employment in overloading environments, smiling when it is really difficult, trying to pick out one conversation when others are happening, forcing myself to go to social events, and so on. Even the simple experiment I did when I was first investigating the “autism hypothesis” as I called it, gave an indication of just how MUCH energy masking can use.

Masking is exhausting. Utterly utterly draining. I’ve had people say to me many times over the years “But WHY are you so tired? What have you been doing?” and I’ve been unable to work it out. Even in my 20s I used to collapse with exhaustion on a regular basis. The brutal truth is that for an autistic person simply EXISTING in the world is knackering – never mind trying to hold down a job or have any sort of social life. And many of the standard recommendations for “improving mental health” (such as seeing more people in real life, spending less time on the internet, sitting still and being “calm”) simply make matters worse – solitude, rest, and stimming are much more useful tools. We need a LOT of downtime in order to recover from what, for most folk, are the ordinary things of life.

And this is at the core of the problem of masking. The perpetual acting, the perpetual stress levels on a par with what most folk would feel when at a job interview, the huge physical effort of sitting still and coping with sensory overload, and the conscious process of trying to work out how to interact with other human beings eventually takes its toll. In the short term it can lead to a meltdown (as it did with me in the supermarket the other day). In the long term it can destroy mental health and lead to autistic burnout.

Many autistics mask for years, putting in huge amounts of work to try to fit in to the world. Those of us who were diagnosed very late avoided some of the therapies that essentially force autistics to mask by using punishment when they exhibit autistic behaviours, although we were often taught to “behave properly” and the cane in the corner of the headmaster’s study was a constant threat throughout our childhoods. Some autistics become so good at masking that when they present for diagnosis they are turned away or misdiagnosed and when they tell people they are autistic they are met with disbelief and invalidation.

I’m probably one of very few late diagnosed autistics who hasn’t been told “But you don’t look autistic!” or disbelieved (in fact, when I published The Discovery most people simply said “Well, of course you’re autistic – you really didn’t know?”). My mask was evidently somewhat transparent as far as visible traits were concerned and it turned out that even with the huge effort I was making I didn’t actually succeed in fooling many people and those who knew me and knew anything much about autism (which I didn’t) weren’t surprised at all. I’d also long since accepted that I was one of society’s weirdos and grown comfortable with that (in fact, I still feel very strongly that I used to be rather special and interesting but now I’ve actually discovered I’m nothing more than a common or garden autistic)!

I’m also now beginning to realise that a huge part of MY masking was not just trying to “appear normal” but was actually trying to lead a life that was way beyond my capabilities. “Taking off the mask” for me is not just about openly stimming, wearing dark glasses and ear defenders, and allowing myself to look noticeably different from other people (I’ve actually found that bit pretty easy). It’s much more significantly for me about learning to rest, learning to pace myself, working out new ambitions, new goals, ones that might, once I’ve recovered from this burnout as far as I’m ever going to, actually be possible and within my capabilities. In short, working out how to spend my remaining time on the planet living a life that isn’t going to damage my mental health still further or cause any more huge burnouts.

That’s still very much a work in progress!

Reactivation

This blog,
Inactive for the longest time
Since it began.
Months and months
Without a post.
Comments unmoderated
And unanswered.

Apologies.
I will get to them
When I can.

So why now?
Why am I attempting a return?

The reason odd.
Makes me uneasy.
Because I am “joining in”
With something.
Or,
At least,
I’m going to
Attempt
To join in
With something.

I have generally,
Throughout my life,
Spent more time
On the edge of communities,
Observing,
Rather than actively participating.

Even when
I’ve thrown myself wholeheartedly
Into a community of any sort
I’ve usually withdrawn
To the edge
Or even departed completely
Pretty quickly.

Likewise with the autistic community,
I maintain a position
On the edge.
Observing.
Learning.

I do not know whether this is because
I find the whole notion
Of any “community”
So very very alien
To my way of being.

Or because
Everything is still so new
And I am so very very
Underqualified
To contribute.
A beginner,
Observing those
With way more confidence
Than I possess.

Maybe.

I don’t yet know
If I will have anything worthwhile
To contribute
Or what my energy levels
Will permit me to do.

To what extent can I “join” any project
As me?
To what extent will I have to mask
My true self
To participate?

The subject matter chosen by others,
The timings chosen by others
(If I even manage to stick to them)!

(Although I don’t discount
The possibility of posts
On other subjects too)!

But,
I feel it is time to try,
Time to return,
Tentatively,
To this blog.

My life
Still very much under review
As I try to figure out
What to do with
However many years
Comprise my future.

And how to live those years
As best I can
As an authentic autistic me.

How to survive in the world
And meet basic needs,
How to build some sort of life
That provides sufficient satisfaction
And is worth the effort,

And how to do this while
Spending as little energy as possible
Pretending,
Acting,
Masking.

Another Step

Having admitted to myself that I was autistic, and having already approached the doctor to be referred for diagnosis, I knew there was something else important that I had to do. I had to let my family know what I’d discovered, and the obvious place to start with that was to call my mother.

I recorded my feelings about doing this:

Deep deep breaths. That was a biggie. Told my mother.

And then noted some of the things that she had immediately said when I’d told her that I would need information about my early childhood and please could she start thinking whether there were any incidents that occurred in my early life that she could remember, or any ways in which I differed from my brother (who is not autistic) when we were young, and could she possibly just start thinking back to the time of my early childhood and triggering memories because the assessment people would want to know.

And without even a pause for breath, my mother remembered being summoned to my primary school (as I’ve described in Circles) when I was 4 years old. She recalled me learning to read at age 3. She recalled my nursery teacher commenting on my behaviour at nursery. She recalled something about a hearing test at 7 months that went wrong because I didn’t behave like a 7 month old should and the person administering the test telling her off about it. She told me how I didn’t respond to spoken words as a baby, only to singing, and how I hardly slept and constantly fidgeted in my pram.

And all this was instantaneous recall, the moment I asked, with no pause for thought. Memories from over 40 years ago. Little things, none of which seemed significant at the time, and none of which was ever followed up (because it was the 1970s and I seemed healthy as far as anyone could tell and when my mother asked what babies were supposed to do (I was the first child and my parents were young and inexperienced) she was told that all babies develop in their own ways so not to worry about anything), all started to indicate that my development when I was very young was, in fact, rather a long way from what would be considered “normal” by most people.

This first conversation was, it turned out, only the “tip of the iceberg” as far as my childhood was concerned. There were further pieces of information to follow, and I’m still, really, in the process of absorbing them all and trying to go through the questionnaires that we did as part of the assessment process. Maybe I’ll manage to write about it all thoroughly at some point, but that point is not yet.

My instant reaction to these revelations was to make a bunch of hashtags:

#theplotthickens
#wouldseemivebeencausingtroubleforalongtime
#thiswholethingisratherextraordinary
#ialwaysknewiwasabitunusualbutbloominheck

I subsequently went through a phase of finding these discoveries about my early life really rather odd and weird, and in many ways, traumatic. It was strange to think that there were things I’d never have discovered about myself and my early life if I hadn’t been going for an autism diagnosis. My husband and I had started to document my own memories of childhood a couple of weeks earlier, but this phone call to my mother took things to a whole new level, because I started to discover things that weren’t part of my existing life narrative.

Furthermore, since I was never able to have any children, I didn’t know whether the things my mother was telling me about my early life had any resemblance to any sort of “normal” childhood development or not, and I ended up having to do a lot of really triggering research to find out, research that brought back horrible memories of infertility clinics and pain and heartbreak and failure, so it turned out to be a triggering and difficult experience from that point of view too.

And, of course, my own memories of childhood had to be activated. And many of them weren’t that much fun either – I was bullied consistently through school and even when teachers tried to find out why things weren’t as they should have been, they weren’t able to come up with any answers, despite sometimes trying, as I described in Head’s Office.

These things are things I still haven’t yet worked through, things that still upset me, things that I know would have been picked up if I was a child today. I can’t help feeling that had I known that I really was different when I was growing up, not just naughty, that I would have felt less bad, been less self-blaming, and not become the suicidal burnt out adult I now am. I’m still not really in a place where I can consider all the things I want to consider – I have to do it a bit at a time, because it is difficult.

My mother, somewhat comfortingly, said to me a few months after that first conversation, that she wishes she had a time machine. Of course, there are so many factors at play that it’s impossible to say that changing one thing would have produced this result or that result (I KNOW all the stuff about autistic kids being “written off” and told they’d never be able to get anywhere in life – I had exactly the OPPOSITE problem and was consistently told how bright I was and given massive expectations accordingly, expectations that I could never fulfill so I was doomed to failure). However, maybe I’d not have been chastised for meltdowns, not been forced to wear wool polo necks which hurt me and so on, and not have learnt, through my early years, to behave and to internalise everything because I was frightened of the consequences and the punishments.

Furthermore, because I learnt fast and turned out to be academically able, by the time I was at secondary school exam stage nobody worried about me. I was succeeding academically, top grades of my year, therefore I must be happy. What nobody knew is that I hardly bothered revising for my O-levels because I assumed I’d be dead by the time the results came out. I didn’t tell anyone because I’d learnt by then that you just didn’t talk about that sort of thing. You worked hard, you behaved, you churned out the exam results, and everyone was happy. It was all part of the act.

Except that the act had a massive cost for me – the thing that had eventually made me as well-behaved a child as I was able to be, turned me into a mentally ill twentysomething and a burnt out thirtysomething. And nobody really knew why until I was in my mid forties.

Getting an autism diagnosis late in life is a weird thing. It opens all sorts of cans of worms that have been sealed shut for decades. I had long since closed the door on my childhood, and on everything to do with children in general, sealed away in a place in my head marked “Do not open – just move on with life!” but I was forced to reopen the door, to take the cans off the shelves, and to let the worms loose all over the place. It was part of the assessment, and it is part of coming to terms with why my life has turned out as it has. It’s something that needs to be addressed as best I can in order to move on and try to build some sort of future with whatever life I have left. I’m not sure it was something I particularly wanted to be doing at this point in my life – having just moved away from all things child-related after my own failure to have any, the last thing I needed was to go back to my own early life – but it turned out to be necessary, and perhaps going through the painful stuff now means that there will be less of it buried and I’ll eventually be less mentally ill as a result, more at peace with it all, and maybe, possibly, more at peace with my own childlessness and consequent response to children, which is something I still struggle with terribly.

And, as I have read in so many places and am experiencing for myself, getting an autism diagnosis late in life is not only about the future, and learning how to live from now on, but also about reframing past experiences, reviewing all of life that has gone before, looking back at so many times when things have gone wrong, or been inexplicable, and looking at them from an autistic perspective. It’s part of the process of making sense of life, and, of course, the later the diagnosis, the more of life there is to go through.

And in my case, it’s not just me who is reframing past events. Many of my friends have now made sense of experiences they’ve had with me over the years. My husband now understands things that have long been slight oddities in our marriage. And my family are trying to understand the whole thing.

I made the first phone call to my mother a year ago today. It had taken nearly 45 years for her to find out why her non-sleeping fidgety baby had messed up a hearing test at 7 months old. As soon as I asked the right questions and explained what I’d recently discovered, it became obvious.

I didn’t even know I’d had a hearing test at 7 months until I started gathering information for an autism assessment!

Still Here

It’s OK
I keep telling myself.
People take holidays from things
All the time.
Maybe I haven’t failed
At this blog…

…I’ve just had a break.

There is so much still to say
And I need to respond,
STILL,
To messages and comments and so on.

But this last week or so
I have been a bit broken.
The price I pay
For doing things
That sap my energy
And require me
To be out in the world.

And there have been other stressors
Recently
I tried to list them yesterday
But couldn’t.
However,
I might manage today:

Washing machines
Our living situation
Bills and so on
More forms (triggering)
Childhood, children
Gender identity
Invalidation
Suicide awareness
And ideation
Further anniversaries
My biggest breakdown
(16 years ago today)
Starting to examine my childhood
(1 year ago today).

I have been low
And
I have been expecting too much.
Pushing too hard.

Accepting the limitations
On my life
Is not easy.

But I risk my recovery from burnout
If I don’t take things gently.
I have to keep reminding myself
That I am disabled
And that’s OK.

And it’s OK to take things gently.
And nobody will tell me off
If I don’t blog for nearly a fortnight.

I am still here
I still have many posts to write
But life has been a bit of a struggle recently
So I’ve been a bit absent.

But I’m still here.

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!

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!