Mon, 26 Sep 2022
Two Goals and a Coincidence
Well, here we are. Three months ago, I broke. I fell completely to pieces. It was inevitable. I was and have been on a collision course with Autistic burnout my entire life. It was quite literally bound to happen sooner or later. In May, the wheels were set irrevocably in motion, and in June, it all came crashing down.
It seemed sudden. A particularly unique set of otherwise unrelated factors aligned and created the conditions for a perfect storm. Don't be fooled by the seeming suddenness of it all, however. This summer was the unfortunate and unavoidable culmination of a lifetime of unaddressed—and previously unknown—issues.
At the outset of the summer, I wanted to die. I put up several roadblocks to prevent me from making that happen. I didn't trust myself; I didn’t trust my mind. I'm still not thrilled at the prospect of waking up tomorrow, but I'm less constantly on edge that I'll regrettably rush the process.
Today, I return to work after a medical leave of absence. When I embarked on leave, I had two goals before me, as well as one lucky coincidence.
The first goal was simple but not easy: stem the bleeding. The anxiety, the depression, and the feeling I was losing my mind roiled on a recursive loop for those first few weeks. Fortunately, I was able to spend time with friends and family. I engaged in life-giving activities such as reading and writing and running. Time away from work also allowed me the temporal space to recover from the most visceral and crippling effects of my burnout. I am in a much better conceptual place now, but I'm still only at the starting line of a race I finally know I'm running.
My second goal was significantly less simple, and much, much harder: find a therapist. A few distinct elements made this challenging (outside the obvious difficulties presented by any attempt to navigate the US healthcare "system").
The primary struggle was relatively straightforward. I had suspected I was Autistic for a year and a half, but I didn't know for sure. Knowing the answer to this question would be important because my choice of therapist would differ greatly depending on the nature of my neurotype. Being Autistic would also significantly impact what I focused on in therapy. Two disparate trajectories appeared necessary to me, but which path I went down depended almost entirely on an answer to the Autism question.
Which brings me to the coincidence. I'd been searching for a diagnostician capable of working with Autistic adults to assess whether I was, in fact, on the Spectrum. It just so happened that the doctor I found had her earliest available openings at the beginning of my leave of absence. This was a lucky break, to put it in terms of a grotesque understatement.
Working with this doctor, and confirming my suspicions regarding my place on the Spectrum, afforded me a level of self-understanding I have only ever dreamed of prior to this summer. I now know why I am the way I am. And I know much of what contributes to either my mental and emotional duress or wellbeing. This is all unequivocally good news!
On the other hand, I now have to unpack nearly thirty years of internalized ableism. I've only just barely scratched the surface of the ways in which I have been forced to adapt to survive. To their credit, those coping strategies got me this far alive, and even with some degree of success and, most importantly, the ability to access some of the support I needed in a moment of crisis.
The problem is I now understand how profoundly unsustainable and deleterious those coping mechanisms are, and that's a Pandora's box I cannot close. I've eaten from the tree of knowledge. I have seen the truth. I can no longer go back to a world of ignorance, even if I wanted to.
This is also unequivocally good...in the long-term. In the near-term, it means that things I used to just muscle through without realizing they were damaging me will be impossible to muscle through; this because I’ve learned both that they bother me and why they bother me in the way—and to the degree—that they do. I can't unring this bell, as it were.
And here, on my first day back at work in three months, that is a scary proposition. Autistic burnout was not a concept I knew about even just a month ago, but that is what happened to me. What's more, I still have not recovered. I don't expect to recover for several months to come. My future used to be ambiguously scary for unknown reasons. Now my future is equally as scary, but for reasons I am only just beginning to fully grasp and appreciate.
The next few weeks are going to tell me a lot about my immediate future, but I've already learned a lot about possible long-term futures. I've got direction now. I know what I want, what I need, and I have at least a modicum of hope that the future might just hold something worthwhile, and maybe, someday, I'll be glad I survived all of this.
In regards to my goals for leave, I accomplished both, at least to the minimum degree necessary. I have stemmed the worst of the bleeding for the moment—though my trust that I won't pop those stitches unexpectedly is tenuous at best. I have also found a therapist (and did so with naught but two weeks to spare!), which I can already tell is going to be a powerful aid and is long overdue.
For what may be the first time, I feel like I might just be able to turn this shit around as long as I can survive the next few months. That's a big ask, so I'm trying not to think in terms of months right now. Honestly, I can't even really think practically in terms of days yet; I have to think in terms of moments. This one. And this one. And now this one. And so on.
The road ahead will be long, it will be fraught, it will be arduous and painful and terrifying. But whereas before I was wandering aimlessly in unrelenting circles through the valley of the shadow of death, I now have a map that might just offer me a way out—and not the way out I thought was inevitable in days gone by, a way out that includes sustained existence.
I've answered key questions this summer, and without these answers I couldn't possibly have moved forward in any meaningful way. The daunting aspect is that I just concluded the introduction and am now beginning chapter one. The intro was fucking long and tedious and I genuinely don't know how I got through it.
But here, on the first page of chapter one, I'm thinking that maybe this book might be worth reading after all. Here's hoping.