I keep reminding myself that I embraced my being autistic only three months ago. While I’m doing fairly OK, I’m still going through a lot.

I used to mask a lot, and still do, although I’m working on it. Much of the masking I’ve done is/was entwined with coping and self-care strategies. I have a standing set of tools in this regard (most of which were beneficial, but not all of them were necessarily palliative as much as improvised). For example, I’d have (and still have) very strong alexithymic and hyper-empathic responses to something as seemingly innocuous as an emotionally challenging article online, or a friend of a friend who I barely knew passing. 9/11 was pure hell. In order to cope with feeling lucid, but also completely overwhelmed, I’d start improvising self-help strategies that I’d learned over the years from spiritual, human potential and self-work techniques I’ve picked up over the years, so that things wouldn’t possibly lead to anxiety, depression or if things are really tough, disassociation as a result. I definitely catastrophize things, though, and have coping/counter-inner-monologue approaches for that as well.

That all said, I mostly seem ok mental health-wise, relatively speaking. I’ve become really good over the years at flipping “fuck everything” around to “No, things are going to be ok, and even if they’re not, I’m not going to start thinking like that”. I gradually figured out that “I shouldn’t be living with 12 other people in a collective house, or doing street activism and all the stress and sensory overload that comes with it” was a wise call, even if it took having several shutdowns and meltdowns to finally get it. (“I’m just passionate. It’s not OK that I’m like this at times, but who even knows why. Maybe I’m just not cut out for all this.”) My coping mechanisms have coping mechanisms, my techniques have composites. I’m positive that years of spiritual work, human potential work, personal self-help work and therapy have all played a positive role in this.

The issue I’m having now is that the coping strategies I developed were based on a generalized concern on my and other people’s part regarding my emotional well-being, not on my or our informed knowledge around my being autistic. Many of those strategies were in response to catastrophizing, over-analyzing why something went wrong (including things from 25-30 years ago or more), or all my nerves being on fire from having an alexithymic/highly sensitive/hyper-empathic response, but it was just “that strange thing I do sometimes. Maybe it’s intuition or empathy. No idea” to me. Everybody else was either like “I’m concerned about you” or “knock it off”. So I’d do my best to try. My hope was that I’d develop better coping strategies to “fit in”, even if fitting in was more like “fitting into NT or non-autistic neurodiverse subcultures that I’m a part of”. (Yes, there are NT anarcho punks, and yes, they can be as much of a pain in the ass as NTs in general.) Eventually, I realized that my attempts weren’t working, and I moved on.

Now though, it’s like “I’m autistic! I know what’s wrong with me – nothing!” Which is great, but it also means that my coping and self-help strategies (which I had developed over decades), which were rooted in my hopes of fitting into NT society, in one way or another – are destabilized. They still work, they just “work as well as can be expected, given who I am.” It’s not just intellectual, it’s an actual shift in the way I perceive the “problem”. It’s like I’m recovering from a very gentle (and sometimes, not so gentle) form of ABAing myself, my best attempts to be good to myself along the way notwithstanding. Stimming helps, letting myself be autistic without condition or compromise helps.

I’m also struggling around what to do in terms of trying to fit into allistic society (or not). Even before I started this process, I was not looking forward to forcing myself back into the corporate software industry pressure cooker again for the bazillionth time, academia seems like a dead end, and just…wandering would be really nice, but has its risks and limitations. Where I really want to be (and already am) is in the arts, but they’re are in crisis, in terms of their economic viability as a paid, professional career.

So I’m in this in-between place where I know the things I love to do, and have for many years (thank fucking god that I didn’t get conned into giving up on my interests), but the ways to make a go of them were a struggle even before I realized that I’m autistic. Now it just seems like – *deep breath* – a lot of professional circles in the arts weren’t designed for people like me, either, even though a lot of the reason I started pursuing those things is because I’m gifted and autistic. Being autistic is intrinsic to the ways I approach making art (and technology, for that matter), and the work itself. Knowing that the tech industry has become so overrun by NT (or in some cases, autistic) dudebros who seem to think that the industry is a giant male fraternity is hard, but it’s also clear to me that I’ll never fit in with a lot of that. Seeing the same sorts of problems in the arts, where I’m freely expressing myself as an autistic person, creatively, when its the sort of life-long passion that I’d gladly do, regardless of if I’m getting paid or not, if it wasn’t only for frequent expectations to conform to unwritten rules and expectations there as well? That’s especially hard.

Even when the arts, academia or tech are potentially more accommodating to autistics (not unlike how artists, academics and sometimes, developers and designers in general are given more slack sometimes because of being “eccentric”, especially if they’re white, cis and male), the social and professional rules and practices in the arts are still largely designed and controlled by, and for, allistic society. I’ve run into this in one way or another all my life, and it seems mostly unavoidable, unless there’s a fair amount of disclosure and accommodation. Which frankly, makes me sad and angry, especially since (as I now know) “faking it until I make it” as a way to try to fit in, not only doesn’t work, it’s actually self-destructive if you’re autistic, because it’s based on fitting into allistic rules and norms.

I think (as do other autistics) that we need to create our own spaces, otherwise, these sorts of problems will keep coming up for us, and for myself. So, I’m working on making that a reality, but it’s still like…”Wait, I’m a self-actualizing version of someone whose kid got diagnosed with autism, so then the shrinks do a family evaluation, and the parent got ‘hey, you’re autistic as well’ dropped into their lap”. Except I’m both the parent and the child, so to speak. All of which came to a head three months ago. There’s only so much that “hyperfocusing to the rescue, let’s learn everything about autism!” can “fix”, in terms of my coming to terms with all this. Please note that this isn’t a form of internalized self-hatred, though! I love my autistic self. I mean fix in the sense of “ok, how do I change my life, now that I know I’m autistic.”

So, I’ve been taking things slow. If it gets too intense, I slow down, and above all, I’m working hard to keep being good to myself, while I’m also plowing through a large stack of books and films. I’m finding self-advocacy resources, including ones focused on women and people of color. I’m starting to come up with an emotional framework to compliment an intellectual one, and as Mary Catherine Bateson says, “compose my life” once again.

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