“Wait. What??”
—You (Or maybe it was Me)
I am a self-proclaimed terrible storyteller. I have a well-established reputation for long-winded, meandering explanations. I cannot deliver a (funny) joke to save my life. And I have many many times been accused of “burying the lead.” I’d like to start challenging these narratives.
Two months ago, I was diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder.
“Wait. What??” you say. Or I say?
Whatever, it’s cool. Pretty sure I beat you to the punch, but we can pretend you said it first.
And now I’ve gone down the rabbit hole. I’ve taken a deep dive into myself. (Again.) Researching autism to wrap my mind around this deeply misunderstood condition. Re-searching myself through this new lens to uncover what—unbeknownst to me!—I’ve been hiding all this time. Making meaning of this startling epiphany, and seeking connections and anchors along the way.
I am, it seems, an evergreen detective in the mysteries of my own life. And it turns out I do my best sleuthing when writing about the riddles. Won’t you join me? I’m a bit biased, but I daresay it’s an interesting story.
(I haven’t hit on the funny joke part yet. Stick with me; we’ll get there.)
For decades I have diligently, passionately—sometimes obsessively—sought to make sense of my experience in the world. Mostly I’ve been mystified. By my inability to make heads or tails of the vast inconsistencies in my choices, behavior, character, and inner life. By my failure to change so many aspects of myself and my life that seemed to want (or need) changing, in spite of heart-wrenching effort and constant striving. By my lifelong felt sense of elusive otherness that thwarts true intimacy with others. By my apparent insistence on remaining a stubbornly exhausting paradox.
My diagnosis has offered the first real hope for unraveling these abiding mysteries. And a glimmer—no, we’ll call it an illuminating ray—of encouragement that I can discover a new, more joyful, more intentional, more authentic way of navigating this lifetime.
It’s like that moment when you try on someone else’s glasses just for fun, and everything is suddenly crystal clear and surprising. You never knew you weren’t seeing properly before, but now it’s so obvious what you’ve been missing.
Or for you lucky ducks without impaired vision: when you’ve been fiddling for ages with the twisty knob on your binoculars and are about to give up—but wait! That moment when the tension dissolves between background and foreground, and you see with perfect clarity the precise bird or bit of landscape you’ve been yearning to know up close. It’s sort of like that.
At the same time, the startling revelation that I am autistic has been incredibly destabilizing.
This subtle twist of the binocular lens is shifting my perception of so much I thought I knew. Wading through the murky waters of misinformation and stigma to seek clarity about my condition—to understand how it has shaped and defined me (without my even knowing it), and figure out how to harness the power of this new information—I have so far mostly floundered, adrift in an ocean of conflicting research, perspectives, values, and motivations. And fear. Always with the fear.
Now, I am not a strong swimmer. (Massive understatement.) But I can doggy paddle with the best of them. And I am very persistent.
So as I educate myself and work to process this personal sea-change, I’m leaning on the practice I’ve developed these last many years to steer my ship through difficult times. I’m trying to simply do “the next right thing.” (While simultaneously proclaiming my deep and abiding love for the Frozen movies.)
My next right thing? Jumping into the fray to share my own unfolding experience, paddle stroke by paddle stroke. Because in all of my wandering and learning, one thing has compelled and inspired me more than any nifty statistic, body of research, or cool info-graphic ever could: the first-hand stories and voices of others who have lived—and are living—through similar life sagas.
And because writing about things seems to help me more than anything else.
And also because I believe there are a great many other neurodivergent sink-or-swimmers out there like me who could stand to feel less alone in their own wild whirlpools.
Last March, in a moment of desperation, I started this blog. It was a first for me, and something I’d never considered. Writing about my own experiences—never mind sharing it with other people—all felt a little (a lot) too self-indulgent and vulnerable and, I don’t know, icky?
But something inside of me was feverishly seeking a way out. Deep truths were clawing at the insides of my skull, clamoring to escape the confines of me. It was visceral and all-consuming. The desire to express myself was maddening. A sense of urgency to be seen, to be heard, to be known more authentically by others swelled in me with a disorienting ferocity. I didn’t understand it in the slightest, but I knew I had to do something about it. So I began to write.
After publishing several intense-ish autobiographical installments of my fledgling blog, the impulse to write was gone as quickly as it had come. The pressure to externalize my inner experience subsided altogether. My voice grew silent. But something new was growing inside.
The act of writing out so much heaviness cleared a patch of fertile soil in my brain. Realizations took root and fresh insights unfurled. As I sifted through the stories I’d told and tilled the space each day with gentle thoughts, next-level questions emerged from the loam:
Why is my prevailing experience of life always of stress and resistance? Why is it impossibly difficult for me to grasp certain things that seem second-nature to the majority of my peers? Why do I struggle so completely with questions of identity and purpose? Why do I have the constant uncomfortable feeling that I am—quite literally, physically—an imposter in my own skin? Why, when I make such concerted efforts to show up authentically in my relationships, do I feel I’ve been unwittingly playing a character in somebody else’s story? Why, when I have been blessed with so much privilege, abundance, and an embarrassment of intangible riches, does everything still feel so damn hard? Why does every aspect of my life feel so intense? And why with all the incessant questions???
For what it’s worth, I suspect many of my early readers wondered the same thing about me. <Insert your choice of grimacing-while-laughing-through-tears emojis>
As I said, this blog was born of an overwhelming urge to express all that I was feeling but couldn’t understand. It was, more than anything, an attempt to process all of this internal “bigness” through the act of writing. And also to broker peace between my brain and my heart, who spend a lot of time yelling at each other inside of my body like small children.
But I was also consumed by this unexpected notion of sharing my words with others—mixed with abject fear and not-a-clue of what people would think of these unruly thoughts and windswept memories. I was perplexed by my own motivations, and compelled to do it anyway. (This is a very familiar feeling for me.) And so: baby steps. I shared my little blog with a smattering of trustworthy friends and family. If you’re still reading, there’s a good chance I’m referring to you!
Somewhat predictably, the feedback was mixed and… well, confusing. It was also, Dear Reader, incredibly useful information for cracking my case. The feedback, you see, was rife with clues.
A few responses mingled diplomatically-phrased encouragement with subtly perceptible head-scratching. One or two of my people seemed to carefully distance themselves from further engagement with generically supportive words that did not invite follow-up. A couple more offered specific and insightful reflections; and a notable few went out of their way to get curious about what I’d written, making time to chat about what it meant to me, asking sincere questions, sharing their feelings and observations.
But mostly my tiny handful of confidants were, to varying degrees, a bit bewildered by what I had written; maybe even worried about me. They seemed to feel that I was overthinking things, too “in the weeds” of life, taking everything so seriously.
Interesting. These were clues.
<And now I’ll interrupt my own broadcast to clarify something important>
I harbor no delusion that people are obligated to read what I write, even if I share it with them directly. Even if they are my close friends or family. Most people are busy and already shackled with the unreasonable burdens of an overly demanding world. Everyone has the right—the responsibility, really—to prioritize their time and tend to what aligns with their own needs and values. And I would never want anyone to read my words from a sense of obligation anyway.
As such, I went out of my way to frame the blog for my baby-steps batch of beta readers as something for which there was no expectation whatsoever for them to check out or respond to but just, you know, if they have time and interest, but no pressure at all! This caveat totally tracked with my aforementioned, authentically held belief.
AND I’ve realized it was also a passive way for me to appease the distorted concern I’ve carried since childhood that my desires and requests will be a burden to others, while simultaneously failing to recognize and care for the part of me that deeply longs for others to find me interesting. Worthy of attention. The opposite of an obligation? Whatever that would be!
SO, when a couple of people very close to me never responded at all (not even to acknowledge that I shared the blog, much less with thoughts on having read it) let’s just say I did set myself up for that one. At the time I didn’t fancy myself a terribly sensitive person… but ouch. It really stung.
Good feedback though! This time from within myself. More clues.
See, our emotions are fundamentally just information. Complex biochemistry designed to send non-verbal messages from the inside out, “Pay attention to me!” they coax, “It’s okay. I’m trying to tell you something important.” If we ignore them—push them away or cover them up with more convenient, self-manufactured alternative emotions; if we deny their expression—we deny ourselves the opportunity to learn from them.
But if we give them some safe space to just be, without judgement; if we get objective and try not to take them so personally; if we can get truly curious about them, like a detective—we will learn something about ourselves. About who we are and what we need. Something vital that wants to be known. It’s a brilliant built-in system. Doesn’t come with an operating manual, sadly, so it takes some trial and error to figure out. But brilliant just the same.
Anyway, I got curious about the clues.
I soon realized that people simply didn’t understand why I was writing about this stuff. Why now? Why all the intensity? Like, what was the actual problem I was having? And how could they help me fix it and get on with things? Start enjoying life and taking it easy and having fun!
The subtext of some comments even seemed to be that—despite the many demonstrable proof points that I am a competent, responsible, top-notch adult… maybe on the inside I was… kind of just… failing to move on with accepting my situation as a grown-up here in the “real world.”
Huh, I thought to myself. I’m… not sure. I had started to feel secretly that perhaps these things weren’t possible for me. I had started to wonder if maybe everyone else was right about me.
Obligatory note to pacify my integrity: by “everyone else” and “right about me” I refer to nothing based in fact. These are my interpretations of oblique comments, insinuations of behavior and such. Actual proof that anyone actually has these types of beliefs about me = zero. <Insert here another self-effacing emoji. Dealer’s choice.>
But never mind all that. Inquiring minds need to know! What was the actual problem I was having? And why was I so intent on telling people about it?
Here’s the point to all of this. My kindhearted readers, like countless others across my life, just didn’t quite know what to make of me. Neither, as it turns out, did I. This much was clear.
Not only that, but all of the musing and reflection and self-evaluation and awareness I’d been eeking out didn’t seem to make much of a difference to the bottom line. I was still a total mystery to myself. And all of the conventional approaches to solving that mystery were not only not working, they were sort of making things worse. The clarity hadn’t emerged. The answers weren’t coming. And I was fed up with endlessly wondering why.
Now I can see that I was simply asking the wrong questions. Now that I know I’m autistic, it all makes sense.
NEXT TIME… I’ll share the story of how I first began to suspect I might be autistic, and how the process of figuring it out all went down.
(I still owe you a funny joke. I didn’t forget.)
Keep wilding with me! Subscribe to the blog HERE👇🏻
Till My River Runs Wild 