I like to use the pronoun “we” when describing myself in the past because it let’s the “self” be more than one person. I come from an Internal Family Systems language of self where we have many parts. We have many narratives, experiences and responses along the way of living. Seeing myself in this way, gives an expansive view that can hold multiplicity!
The old is gone. The past is complete. We know more now. A lot more.
We know that when we were six and witnessed our brother die, we were traumatized.
We know that when we went to school and didn’t know how to make friends, and were bullied, we were deeply wounded.
We know that when we cried at night during nightmares, we really needed some trauma-informed therapy and instead just accumulated more pain.
We know that the years of awkwardness, anxiety and fear around peers, groups, anything social was not a flaw or problem even though everyone around us thought it was.
We know that making the leap into adulthood was really fucking hard and that we did the best we could to thrive.
We know that we had children for the sake of tradition and didn’t know about feminism until well into our parenting career. We didn’t accept childcare because of our rigid values causing us a lot more pain than was likely necessary.
We know now that all the jobs we tried and then burned out on was part of our masking struggle, low self-esteem and fawning trauma response. We know now that working for pay takes a big cut into self-care and managing daily survival tasks.
We know now that routines and predictability are super important for emotional regulation and that moving every few years as a child was damaging to that process.
We know now that we are a high-masking autistic person who thrives in low-demand and low-sensory environments. We have a lot of love to give within this container if we can own and value ourself for who we are.
We can learn to unmask and ask for the things we need. We can learn to meet our own emotional needs and gain skills in calming down a heightened nervous system.
We can begin to care for our childhood wounds and not interpret the present day with the same sense of urgency and deprivation we felt as a child. We have made it this far! We can be there for our child selves. We can care for and love them. They aren’t alone anymore. What a relief.
I’m forty six and just found out I’m autistic. I thought I was ADHD - the inattentive type. I still might be. But after taking hours of tests, paying for some of these, showing my therapist these tests, I am confirmed. It’s easier to say it here than to the people in my life. They haven’t been educated and therefor think I’m a quack. It’s really painful to know more about yourself and how your brain works but not have it acknowledged by the people around you.
It’s scary to unmask later in life but not impossible right?
There is so much power in the radical acceptance of these parts of ourselves. I hope the diagnosis is more comforting than it becomes another box. I know personally that a diagnosis tends to do both at the same time. There is a comforting sense that you have a new piece of self knowledge, and that there are many others like you and there is some research available to help you understand your own brain and how to live a better life inside of it. And then there's the narrative that is prescribed to you and enforced onto you by over pathologizing a human life.
It is very, very hard to write about these things and it is good that you are doing it anyways!
That sounds so difficult. Glad you have answers, sorry the people in your life are not capable of understanding right now. I am surrounded by high masking autistic types and I identify strongly (which is why we’re friends/partners I suppose) and admire all the positive qualities I see in them. I try to be the kind of person to be safe to unmask around. But a lifetime of hiding is hard to let go of all at once.