June 17, 2024

The First Self-Assessments

After I completed the assessments tonight I walked my dog Penny and tears flowed, heavily from a deep place. I cried in a way that felt new. A way that I have not cried before ever. Not sadness, no regret, no shame, and lacking anger. 

I cried a release. Letting go of the armor, the facade. Letting it all finally drop with the admission and the acceptance. What I have always felt my whole life was in fact different and maybe ‘abnormal’. But consistent to me and therefore it is not wrong. 

For once all the things I have, every single thought, the mind patterns, desires, fear, yearning. They all were finally in unison, one conglomerate of me. Not disparate. Not even necessarily a disease. Just who I am. 

None of the labels mattered. Maybe none of them were true. Co-dependent, hypervigilant, people-pleasing, abandonment issues, emotional, anxious, depressed, sick, suffering. In that moment, while tears fell the only thing that matter was that my experience has finally been validated.

HOW I have always experienced the outside world, inside me, was different, but all one. The realization that finally made it all make sense:

I am a woman who has lived on the spectrum of autism undiagnosed my whole life.

I must tell my story. 

I know I’m not alone. 

I cried a sort of neutral release that was gentle yet the longest awaited cry of my entire life. From when I was the baby, who I’m told needed to be held constantly, to this very moment. I cried a lifetime of tears.

Then something came over me, not laughter per se. It was something else, a lightness, a feeling I’ve never had. I suppose there aren’t words for this feeling. Not yet. 

How odd, to know oneself is truly and apparently the greatest gift. Maybe it was a feeling of home-coming. 

At the same time, I feel slightly foreign to myself right here and now. Am I this? Can I say these words and take on the label that unifies them all? I haven’t actually said it out loud yet, I am autistic. 

I have to. And I have to speak. 

Suffering in Silence

As a society, we do not speak about what is happening inside of us. 

We do not share the inner workings of the mind, and how our thoughts formulate.

How clouds in the sky look like to each one of us.

How numbers tumble around in the mind.

How sounds and smells are experienced. 

We are here with these beautiful evolved brain processors. With these senses and we are experiencing life each second. Yet we don’t share our internal experiences!

The movement  – share your inner world!

I have never vocalized some of the things that I saw on the tests today. I was astounded to see my internal life organized into questions that described my habits perfectly. The epiphany that my mind works in a way that is totally different from a neurotypical or totally similar to a neurodivergent. I never thought about what the world looks like or feels like to others. Why did I assume that we all felt the way I do?

About Sensory 

I did have the revelation recently that I am not “always cold”, a label that I was given me in childhood. Part of this discovery was that I realized that I’m not metabolically cold instead I don’t like the way cool air feels and I figured out that it’s not actually the temperature. It’s the air as perceived by me is painful. The solution was always to get the cold air off my skin by covering myself up and warm, soft clothing and blankets.

I’m not cold. I just don’t like the way it feels. 

This is a subtle but hugely important thing for me to know. I had no idea that I had so much sensory happening. I had no idea about so much of my experiences and to what extent I was not acknowledging them. I was before now unable to validate my own encounters with life.

This is only the beginning.