Have you ever felt like the only person who didn’t receive a ‘How to Live Life’ handbook? Did you think everyone else understood what was going on except you? I’ve felt like that my whole life.
And it isn’t that I don’t like myself. I love myself. Everything breaks down when I move from my ‘inner world’ to the ‘outer world’. I struggle to understand human interactions. I always feel like I’m different.
And don’t get me wrong, I’m not looking to be ‘happy’, whatever that means. I’m just trying to reduce my suffering. I believe in human flourishing and I’m trying to learn how to address the aspects of my life that reduce that. And to help others learn how to do it, too.
My first foray into healing was seeking the help of counselors, therapists, and coaches. Near uniformly, they told me that everyone feels different. I internalized that to mean, if everyone feels different then we are all the same. More importantly, we are all wrong. I am wrong.
But I already knew I was wrong. Feeling wrong or different was the whole point of me seeking therapy. Being told that I was wrong for feeling different not only didn’t help, it made me feel ashamed. A lot of therapy was like the shift from guilt (something is wrong and I can change it) to shame (something is wrong because I am wrong).
Does that make sense?
I was a weird kid. An odd teenager. And an awkward adult.
The first time I vomited I thought I was dying and I developed emetophobia — the fear of vomiting. It has been crippling.
I had a lot of weird friends growing up. This made me feel superior until I realized that parents lumped weird kids with other weird kids, so what did this say about me?
The first time a girl expressed interest in me I built up a wall so tall no physical interaction could ever happen. Despite my curiosity, I was just too overwhelmed to do anything about it.
My interest in breakdancing and skateboarding got me beat up. My weird clothes induced ridicule.
Eventually, I learned how to mask or act like I knew what I was doing. I had various degrees of success holding jobs, passing tests, driving a car, and even making physical contact with the opposite sex.
I also learned that smoking weed helped. But there was a lot of collateral damage there. Eventually, I discovered alcohol and had similarly polarized results.
Now, more sober and with highly developed coping mechanisms or masks (see Episode 148), no one would ever suspect I was autistic.
And maybe I’m not. Except in the neurodivergent community, I have found clarity. The shift from therapy (there’s something wrong with you, and you need to fix it) to autism (you’re just different, and that’s ok) has been overwhelmingly relieving.
A few months ago, I allowed the idea that I might be autistic — or neurodivergent to some degree — to penetrate my psyche. After taking tons of online tests and always scoring in the ‘likely autistic’ category, I accepted that this might be an explanation for things I had learned about in therapy.
What a difference perspective can make.
To me, autism posits a theory that suggests humans may be neurologically variable. I don’t really care for the DSM definitions, this one makes sense to me. Sure, I may lack psychological training but I have a curious mind and a shit ton of degrees. It makes sense to me that, like most anything related to biology, our ‘neurology’ will vary around a mean to some degree.
What I have learned about biological organisms is that we receive information through our nervous systems. This includes nerve cells, brains, spinal cords, and all the connections within this system. Humans have five subsystems that allow us to receive information from our environments. These include the senses of sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. Environmental stimuli are received through these senses and processed through our ‘nervous systems’. That this processing would vary from person to person is nothing new and makes perfect sense.
This, I think, is neurodivergence in a nutshell.
The problem, then, is not autism. The problem is the perspective that people ‘should’ be the same when this makes very little biological sense. Sure, the range of variation can be very narrow (adult human heights don’t vary all that much along a measure of length), but can also be very broad (our capacity for playing musical instruments can vary from expert to not-at-all). The problem is our expectation that we should all be the same.
Before I started thinking about neurodivergence and autism, I recorded a couple of episodes about this. Individual humans are unique by design, yet we try to pretend we are not. I call this the Evolution Paradox. Similarly, I made the argument that because our DNA drives this individuality, we must express our uniqueness, rather than suppress it culturally.
Though I recorded those episodes long before I took the autism self-assessments, the merging of the ideas with neurodivergence is a perfect fit.
Long before I thought I might be autistic I was writing and podcasting about the same topics.
All of this to say, while I think therapy has been incredibly helpful to me intellectually, the idea that there might not be anything wrong with me feels much more accurate. I feel like everything is starting to make sense. Many of the neuroses (like people-pleasing) are easier to understand, I no longer feel ‘broken’, and I am even more curious about how I, and other people, can learn to navigate the world with a higher degree of human flourishing.
My future work, currently under the moniker “Knowledge + Experience = Wisdom” and available as a podcast, YouTube videos, my blog, and on Medium will take an autistic approach to understanding this in greater detail. My work is essentially the same but will be informed by a neurodivergent acceptance perspective. I hope you will join me.
Streaming podcast:
https://www.buzzsprout.com/530563/14136008
YouTube: