#86 - Oh, I'm Autistic

cw: referenced emotional abuse of minors, implied self-harm, & generally upsetting levels of honesty

I have never let myself rest.

Because I have never believed that I am enough.

But the truth is, things are weird and life is weird and I am weird.

It turns out that I am not neurotypical and in hindsight that’s been really fucking obvious my entire life.

I need things from people but I don’t know how to ask without being Too Much. I worry about being left because historically that is what happens. But it’s also because those are the dynamics I am most comfortable in. I will always accept crumbs. But other people get really uncomfortable with me being on the floor.

And also like, I introduce this suuuuper unhealthy dynamic and I tell people I’m broken and then when they treat me accordingly it doesn’t work out all that well for either of us! I think relationships are actually about reciprocity. But it took me a long time to understand that the way people learn that and the times they learn it when their brain is still developing, a verrrrry different thing was happening for me. There wasn’t unconditional love where there should have been. I have always had to earn love by playing pretend.

Everything is fine, we’re fine, nothing wrong behind these closed doors no siree.

“I want to be a Bolger kid.” Was our parent’s favorite refrain. A way to put us in our places. We had money, so what were we complaining about? We got to go on vacations, so what could possibly be wrong? Sure we were moving again, but isn’t that fun and kind of glamorous to be raised internationally??

The last vacation we took as a family was to Euro Disney. The cheating scandal had just broke. My mom called my dad an “adult Pinocchio” offhandedly while we were in the gift store. I bought a stuffed Crush turtle. Finding Nemo had just come out and while I loved the movie, it always left me feeling melancholy. But turtles are cute and I was in sixth grade, so. Anyway, the next morning my father had a full breakdown and kept referencing what my mom had said the day before. We watched in horror as the man we had never seen cry, sobbed.

Wept into his hands.

I squeezed the turtle and tried to pretend that it wasn’t happening.

We still went to the park later that day. We were really very good at putting on the front.

I uh, didn’t find much comfort in Disney after that.

My parent’s divorce took years. On the day it was finalized, my dad moved in with his girlfriend—soon-to-be fiancé. A year after that, right before my senior year of high school, my mother decided she wanted to move to Florida (she would say it was for flight school reasons but she was actually following an ex-boyfriend who had recently gotten re-employed down there). My dad’s new wife was finishing a college course and didn’t want me in the house because I would be a distraction.

On the day my mom left she didn’t say goodbye. I woke up to two friends in my room who figured they should be there in case the morning was hard.

I think it was the first time I had ever received care without having to ask for it.

My birthday was two weeks later. My therapist took me out to dinner and told me that it was kind of unprofessional of her to do so, but she needed me to know that I had an adult in my life who cared. She had told her husband that morning when he asked about the plan that she was the only adult in my life who did not have expectations of me.

I didn’t talk to my father again until he threatened to withhold my college fund.

I went to college and was so miserable there that I ended up fast-tracking myself to graduate a semester early.

The first time I remember being happy, just happy, was the summer between my Sophomore and Junior years. I moved to Bushwick to live with that same friend who was there the morning my mom left. He introduced me to his friends without hesitation or shame. By the end of the summer, three of us had tattoos to commemorate our bond because when you’re 19 you’re going to be Young Forever.

I just wanted to get back to the city as fast as possible, but I had to go back to college. I met my future girlfriend and I worked at a busy Mexican restaurant and I smoked enough weed to numb out all day every day.

I graduated. But by that time a con man had come in like a wrecking ball and obliterated my and all my friend’s plans for our future in New York.

I ended up moving to Portland and falling in love with the person from college. I was unaware of how little I understood about love at the time. I thought it was just about Not Yelling at each other.

We managed to Not Yell for seven years.

I became so small in the relationship because I knew she was embarrassed of/by me. I even had her confirm that one night and felt my heart fissure. I knew I should have broken it off in that moment, but we were moving to New York in a few months and I could cope until then, right? It’s what I was used to. People don’t often actually love me, they tolerate me because my crippling self-doubt and lack of self-esteem are offputting and my existence makes them feel like a bad person because it demonstrates how unsympathetic they actually are sometimes.

(I asked her, begged her even, to not cheat on me. She told me she did right after she announced our breakup to me. It was the most callous way she could have delivered the news. It’s comic in how uncaring she was with my heart.) (And my life has been defined by my ability to laugh through the tears. It has to be funny, otherwise, it’s just true.)

It’s uh, so fun.

In the past year, I’ve come to terms with the fact that a lot of my unexplained reactions and behaviors are the result of my undiagnosed autism.

I mask, I mask so much and I don’t actually know how to stop. I just know that I have to because I can’t continue to live inauthentically. It’s unsustainable. And it’s not even working so like, time to throw out the system!

I have to learn who I am again. (It feels like and again and again but I’ve never actually tried from the ground up I’ve just been stacking perilous personality choices atop one another and frantically trying to run around balancing it all from below.) And I know I can do it, I know I can actually do anything I put my mind to. I am bull-headed and wildly tenacious. I reparented myself through an unfathomable amount of bullshit. I was raised by two negligent alcoholics with (several) undiagnosed mental illnesses and we moved constantly so no school system ever quite caught just how much my siblings and I were suffering our way through the world. And we made it work. It even seemed glamorous and fun sometimes.

But it was hell.

Hell in a nice enough house though.

And by the time all the moving stopped, I was the scapegoat in a deeply alcoholic family system. For years after moving out I couldn’t properly clean because I had been screamed at one too many times about how messy I was as a child. I have no gauge for “good enough” because everything was meant to be kept in catalog-status perfection. My mother wanted her life to look like a Ralph Lauren ad. She got extra upset with me because those ads do not contain fat kids. And society blamed my parents for my weight, so they trotted out the two thin siblings and we talked about my brother’s super fast metabolism any chance we got.

Golf games only have four people, and I was left at home when they played. I think my parents felt so much relief. It wasn’t playing pretend at that point, it was fulfilling their fantasy. For just a few hours, they got to have a normal family.

(And if that sounds extreme, don’t worry, it was confirmed by my mother that she does, in fact, love me less than her other kids. She said it in front of all of us when I was on a college winter break. It was super cool, especially when later she would threaten to harm herself when I mentioned that it was the reason I didn’t have much of an active desire to work on repairing our relationship.)

The whole family always pretending. Keeping up appearances. (Masking.) It wasn’t just the Connecticut Culture that kept us in line and desperate to prove that there was money and status and all of these other aggressively upper-middle-class shenanigans we were forced into.

There wasn’t a lot of love, there was a lot of yelling.

But there also was money (kind of, not as much as I perceived as a child) and so I developed a weird relationship to my parent’s bank accounts. And they were giving, but it came at such a high personal cost. But it was what I had to prove there was any sort of affection, so I took it for what it was and wasn’t. I know that money doesn’t make up for what they did, but it would be incredibly ungrateful to ignore the reality and comfort the money allowed. (I would have given it up, given it all up, for a stable childhood in one home. But that wasn’t an option. So. Money it was.)

(I was with someone for years who had extremely generous parents and was flabbergasted to find that both of them were happy to give as much as they could because they actually just wanted their kid to be as comfortable as possible because they loved them and not because transactional relationships allowed them to wield guilt as a controlling method! Truly shocking!! Didn’t know that was an option!)

Understanding that I am autistic has helped reframe my life, my needs, and my understanding of self. I’m in physical pain when I listen to noise music. It wasn’t just a preference. I am suffering from sensory overload when I sweat. I’m not overreacting, I am experiencing a different level of feeling and sensory sensitivity than other people. It’s kind of like how I thought everyone was in as much pain as I was when they are spicy food and just liked the pain. It turns out I have tongue fissures that make me more reactive to spice. And I am also Irish. I come from a country where butter is considered a flavor. (And to be fair Irish dairy products >>>>>)

(My family used to make fun of me when I was a kid because I would cry at restaurants whenever anything served on a sizzling hot plate was served—like fajitas being brought to another table. It felt like my brain was crashing in on itself, like it had been overtaken by radio fuzz. It was an “inside joke” for years. But I was in real pain, it was just that no one took it seriously. My aversion to fireworks, cracked knuckles, offbeat tempos, it’s all actually explained by autism! And the relief that comes with that is as immense as the grief that I suffered as long as I did because my pain was something to be mocked.)

It’s a lot to have going on, but I’m really tired of letting the past run my present. I really want it to inform my choices, but I also really want to trust myself and believe that I am worthy of love not just because of the things I’m willing to do, say, and put up with. But just because I’m me.

I want to know that my actions are sincere. Not because I don’t trust them to be right now, but because there’s a limit to sincerity when there is a parrot squawking “what if they leave, what if they leave?” when I’m making a decision to do…anything. The hard truth is, people left anyway. The parrot did not protect me. It may have actually pushed people away faster because reverse manifestation is just as powerful.

Prevention is just another method of control. Anxiety about something that may happen is really just what I call “let’s run the pretend scenario for the nth time to make sure we can control the spin no matter how the ball makes it over the net”. Eating disorders? Control babeyyyy! (And a heavy dose of Cultural Standards rotting our brains and punishing mostly women for daring to exist in bodies that are not constantly attuned to Being The Most Attractive They Could Possibly Be.)

I’m not an empath, I was just emotionally abused as a kid and now I’ve got this monkey’s paw curse of hyper-vigilance where I can and do spot the tiny minute changes in people. I intake every slight grimace and fidget and turn-of-phrase. The difference between a text sent while happy vs annoyed. I hate it. It’s not fair to me—or to them!! And often I think I know everything when I only have 10% of the information. But the truth is I am disastrously good at reading people and it’s off-putting. The hardest part has been understanding that people often don’t investigate their own reactions to things, they just kind of experience them. Meanwhile, I’m over here begging for report cards so that I can make sure to never cause A Reaction again.

Reactions make messes. Messes make people yell.

Messes make people leave.

This is all too vulnerable and yet only scratching the surface.

But I think in my heart I am a good person who is trying her best.

And that’s enough.

I am not purposefully callous with other people, I want what’s best for everyone, I really do believe that suffering can be alleviated—even temporarily—and whenever we can do that for each other we should.

I’ve been running so fast to win a race that the spectators were never going to care about the results of. They made their minds up about me already, so who was I trying to impress?

Compliments slipped right through me. Like there was a missing bottom to the container they were meant to fill. I couldn’t capture them because I had never fully formed my ability to meaningfully intake good things about myself. (and the straw was too long and the axe was too blunt and I didn’t know how to sharpen it because the water I would need to wet the stone in order to grind it couldn’t be carried because there was a hole in the bucket dear liza!!)

And it’s weird to share, but I don’t know man I think we’re all just out here trying our best and I’m like decent at articulating all of the bullshit constantly swirling around in my head so maybe just maybe it’s worth bearing this one last intimate glance into the shreds of my soul because I’m going to restitch the tattered tapestry that I did not destroy in the first place. And I’m going to be happy and kind to myself when I do it because the other options suck! They’re lame. They’re not going to mend shit.

I am what I am.

I am who I am.

I can’t change the past, I can’t change my brain, but I can learn to let it be enough. To let myself actually enjoy life instead of echoing the critiques of every miserable person who has projected their unhappiness onto me. Scapegoat no longer babe!! I just can’t do it anymore. I can’t keep beating myself up. I’m too good at it and I’m worried I’m going to accidentally KO myself.

In my journals, I’m not allowed to be mean to myself. So I had to invent a new dialect to speak to myself in. I had to get comfortable with being kind. Because the world had been quite mean to me, and I often reflected that back. I thought that’s just how we were meant to be. But it never fit, it never really felt natural. But it was the only language I spoke.

So I had to create a new one. Verb tenses and all.

Someone once said my substack was earnest and it blew me away to realize that was true. Because in real life I am uhhh snarky and callous and willing to make jokes on jokes in order to get people laughing because if they’re laughing I’m valuable and irreplaceable right??

But writing has always been my ultimate form of expression, so thank god my ninth-grade English teacher asked us to write a single poem about snow and I did a good job and slapped the identity of Writer on my forehead at 14 years old. It stuck. And it saved me over and over and over again. Things make sense in paragraphs. I’m not spinning in circles, even if I’m writing in spirals and have to keep shrinking the text to make sure it all gets out there.

Focusing on joy. Recalibrating for life rather than imagined scenarios. Allowing things to maybe actually go really well!! Not assuming that people are just waiting for me to fuck up so that they can justify their actions of abandonment!!!

I want to genuinely believe the best in other people and not be so terrified of what potential disaster could lurk if I fuck up. Basically, I want to chill the fuck out.

The good news is, I have a lot of joy in my life that I’ve managed to stumble into and keep. I love my two cats more than I can say. My apartment, despite some structural oddities, is my favorite place I’ve ever lived. It’s mine!! It’s all mine and I get to paint it whatever color and clean the baseboards (or not!!) and I get to decorate and remind myself of the things I love because I hung the thing on the wall. I finally have a wardrobe that doesn’t feel embarrassing and bare bones. I want to go places because I know I’ve actually dressed appropriately for them and I even have some pieces that look, dare I say, cool.

(I got two more pairs of sunglasses last week and the Chloe’s are my favorite pair I have ever owned I love accessories so much I’m so glad that despite most of the industry pretending fat people don’t exist they can’t stop me from buying bags and shoes and jewelry!!)

Maybe it’s all out there now. Maybe I can really truly let it all go. Maybe it’s good that I’ve decided to stop playing pretend and making everything as comfortable as possible for the people who rarely bothered to do that for me.

Sometimes there is no one coming to save you.

Sometimes you just have to save yourself.