There's a really long story and I don't know if I'm ready to share all of it yet. But it goes something like this.
Traumatic experiences robbed me of a safe and healthy time growing up. There may have been isolated bits and pieces of it at a younger age but they began in earnest around age 11-12. Every single day, from the moment I woke up to the moment I fell asleep. At 14 I was a visible delinquent, staying out all night with shady characters, in and out of the principal's office. I didn't care about anything, I wished that my actions would kill me or get me murdered sooner than later so the pain would end. My wake up call came when I nearly got arrested for trespassing an office building after hours. I got a job, I started living on my own (which was technically illegal, but no one knew that because I passed for much older). At 16 I moved across the continent and cut everyone from the past out of my life. That was the only way I could begin healing in earnest.
Eventually I found myself living and working and functioning among regular people. And no one would suspect, just from interacting with me casually, what my background is. They won't see the scars that I'll always carry, both mentally and physically. I stumbled into a high-paying job. People assumed that I actively chose it because I was interested in it, but I wasn't. I just flailed and stumbled around until I found the nearest thing that could pay my bills. I wasn't interested, I didn't even feel the least bit good at it. I started to remember that I had clear goals and interests as a young child, before things started happening to me and I decided that I wasn't going to live until adulthood anyways, much less have any use for interests. My childhood interest was still interesting to me, now that I had enough capacity to give it attention again. I lost track of time reading everything that I could about it. I was passionate about it, and I seemed to be good at it, unlike what I ended up doing for a living.
I was functional, a feat that I thought impossible before. I could perform daily tasks, but I couldn't handle the social aspect of work life (or, of "life" life). People told me that I had to learn to socialize because my trauma caused my development to stagnate a decade behind. So I tried, but I sucked at it. Every time I would try, I would make an embarrassing mess of myself and regret trying. Social skills wasn't like a recipe that you could follow, or a textbook that you could memorize, or one mathematical formula that always yielded a defined result. It was different, and I couldn't figure out what the secret is. To make things so much worse, I realized that I am very easily prone to sensory overload. Loud noise makes me ill. Bright lights make me ill. Crowds make me ill. It's hard to try and figure out how to practice this elusive skill that already doesn't make sense when you're trying to stop yourself from fainting. Headache and lightheadedness was the primary symptom, and people could see it, how I would get frazzled and seem like I'm barely present anymore. It wasn't something that I could practice myself out of. I came across the term "highly sensitive person". It was my first introduction to the concept of neurodiversity - that some people's brains are just wired differently, and that's okay. I went as far as accepting that even without trauma, I would still have struggled with sensory overload.
Everything else went into my elaborate and rigid narrative of causation. The narrative was that the traumatic experiences was to blame for everything. Without the trauma, I would be pursuing exactly what I was passionate about, I wouldn't have social issues, I wouldn't be awkward and clumsy in my body. It was easy to blame everything on the trauma. Doing so offered the promise of being able to "get rid of" what I perceived were personal defects someday. It's broken, I need to fix it. But it definitely existed and was functioning once upon a time. It definitely was, I insisted, except it wasn't.
Since I was 11, I was bounced throughout the mental health system. No one suspected that I might be autistic. It was so much easier to point at my developmental history and say "X caused it all". It was so easy. Why dig deeper when there appeared to be no need to? As an adult who once questioned everything, I independently came to the same conclusion. X was to blame, and that was the end of that.
On the day that I accidentally clicked on a link about Asperger's - something I had heard about but never looked into before - it had been several months since I last felt actively triggered. As I progressed further in healing I would often ask myself, "what would it be like if I was actually the quaint, simple person that other people now saw me as? What if I really did have an uneventful childhood?" That mentality has gotten me into trouble a few times in the past with setting unrealistic expectations, but nonetheless, it was what I operated under at the time I did the initial reading. I simply cut the offending years of my life out as I was reading, and it became clear to me that even prior to those years, I exhibited traits that were characteristic of the spectrum. My mom and grandma used to tell me things, about how they were afraid that I might be autistic (in their limited, stereotypical, "low functioning" understanding of what autism is), how I always acted strangely and couldn't make friends, how I stinked at gym class because I tripped a lot and couldn't run or react as fast as other kids.
It was mind-blowing, and the first thing it did was challenge my existing narrative. The idea of finding a more accurate explanation for my present-day struggles became important, because there's a huge difference between fixing something that got broken and that something just not existing, or existing but designed and functioned and operated very differently than the "fix" that I was trying to target. I started reading and researching and looking into the possibility of a formal diagnosis.
A few nights later I had a bad dream about the past. I woke up feeling retraumatized and disoriented, and I haven't been functional since. I know that things are over now, I know my reaction is irrational, but I can't help it. I'm so drained, and I feel so out of touch with reality, that I can barely get out of bed. I had thought that I was healed enough to start examining the rest of my life more critically, but maybe I wasn't. Maybe I wasn't ready to loosen my hold on my narrative yet. Maybe I've been holding onto it so strongly as a way of protecting myself. I don't really know what's going on. But I don't like the timing of how it happened.
Sorry it's so long. Thanks for reading, if you do.
25 Jun 2015, 1:34 pm
