Let me start out by saying that sometimes you can get the answers that you’ve been searching for most of your life. After spending more than 50 years feeling different from most people that I’ve come across—and after years of therapy—I’ve recently come to the realization that I’m autistic with ADHD.
About a decade ago, my stress and anxiety were constantly increasing when I performed everyday tasks that I could easily do in my 20s, 30s, and a portion of my 40s. I was experiencing life with an internal battery life of about 50 percent (though I never thought mine was ever capable of reaching 100 percent). Working a deadline-oriented job for more than 30 years had taken its toll, or so I thought. For years, I’ve needed an increasing amount of breaks between each work cycle—not just in the week, but in any given day of the week. In my personal life, I would constantly be telling people: NO AGENDAS and NO DEADLINES, please.
For most of my life, I’ve had an abundance of hobbies that bring me joy to counterbalance the anxiety and stresses of everyday life. Some of those are collecting comics, listening to music, photography, or watching a good sci-fi adventure on TV. When these dopamine fixes started to bring me less joy, I knew that something different was happening to me.
It wasn’t until I sat down with my husband to watch a comedy special on Netflix starring Hannah Gadsby (who is autistic) that I even fathomed the idea of being on the spectrum. With every word she spoke, my husband and I stared in awe at the realization that maybe I was just like her. She seemed to speak in vocal patterns similar to mine when I would “info dump” on people, which made others disconnect and pull away from me.
Feeling rejected by people who thought I was “too much” to deal with has always been silently traumatic for me.
In my youth, I developed a variety of masks to hide the parts of myself that most couldn’t handle. Imagine what that does to a person’s psyche when, no matter who you meet, it feels like they will never want to know the real you.
I thought coming out as a gay man was my most major hurdle to get through in life. I came out in 1984, at the height of the AIDS crisis, when being gay was considered worse than almost anything. I remember many members of the LGBTQ community would tell me I was an idiot for coming out and that I was inviting a lifetime of heartache and pain upon myself. At that time, there were more of those who were against us and many fewer of us who were out of the closet. I felt that I couldn’t live my life as a lie, and I wanted so deeply to live my inner truth and to be accepted by a community that I thought was just like me.
Even still, among the LGBTQ community, I felt different. Even though I felt like an outsider, I dedicated a part of my life to furthering the acceptance of LGBTQ for 30 years. During those years, I was either an activist or was working in the LGBTQ press. Over the years, not feeling seen for who I really am in this new community made me feel even more alienated than I felt before.
I was at a loss and felt that I was relegated to being the “lone wolf” with no real community that made me feel embraced; that is, until I discovered I had autism.
After seeking out a good therapist, I landed on one who specialized in autism and ADHD. With a few sessions, I felt that maybe the answers that I had always been seeking were possibly just on the horizon once again (even though I feared that I would be rejected once more). After further research, I soon discovered a joy and fascination of life after witnessing so many autistic individuals on social media who were just like me. Many discussing handicaps that paralleled mine, ranging from time blindness, feeling mentally and physically drained most of the time, oversharing, stimming (I didn’t even know that was a word!), socialization issues, and more.
After seeing that so many parts of my personality were represented by autism/ADHD, I began to ponder: who was the real me? This new journey of self-exploration that I am now working on is like being a child again. After a year and a half of self-discovery, I’ve now disposed of most of my masks except those that protect me from harm (not something one should do without the proper support network).
My only wish on this journey is that I had gotten this diagnosis decades ago, as it would have saved me from so much heartache and pain.
The next time you come across someone who is different from what you’ve experienced in your life, remember that we all are dealing with our own personal traumas and searching for our own inner truths. We all want—no, need—acceptance from each other.