I lost 50 years of my life trying to work out what was wrong with me and how I could fix it. One of the almost universal experiences of autistics is feeling like there is something wrong with us because we don’t seem to ‘get it’ like everyone else. For me, I felt so isolated, at times it felt like I’d been ostracised from society and I had no idea why, worse, everyone acted as though I wasn’t.
How many thousands of dollars did I waste over decades seeking out therapy to understand myself better and try to fix whatever was broken? I don’t know the answer but I wouldn’t mind having that money back. The reason it happened is because there was nothing wrong with me, my brain is simply not wired to live smoothly in this world. Most psychologists and all counsellors are not trained to spot autistic patterns and behaviours, so our reactions to situations are going to look maladjusted. Maybe they’ve started training psych students to spot the signs, I don’t know but I do know I will never see one of them because I don’t need a therapist now and if I did, I absolutely would not go to someone decades younger than myself.
I’m not being ageist here, I did go to someone barely in her 20’s when I was in my 40’s and it didn’t go well. I told her I was going to need someone to commit to me for a long time, possibly years and I had a lot of heavy stuff to cover. She told me we should get it all done in 26 weeks! She had no real life experience to grasp what I was saying and there is no way I’m going to open up to someone like that, what I wanted to discuss would be traumatising and possibly psychologically damaging to someone who just isn’t equipt to deal with it. It turns out all I needed was to be told I physically cannot keep up with the demands of a life geared toward a neurotypical person so it’s completely OK to give up trying. I just needed to simply life, do more meditation and take long rests from activity.
You know the strangest part of all this? I knew what I needed, I just didn’t know I knew. I’d spend hours, days, weeks even months at times, daydreaming about running a meditation retreat along the lines of a monestary, with scheduled silent days of no talking. Having simple daily routines, wearing a kind of uniform similar to what a nun would wear and just being with nature. I wanted so much to be a nun, but I was not religious and I did not believe in god. Also, I didn’t want to have to forego sex for the rest of my life. Looking back now, I realise I didn’t want to be a nun but I wanted the life represented by how nuns lived theirs. I’ve only just realised how much of my life and aesthetic has been modeled around nuns. And I know it’s because I was seeking the inner peace I saw them representing, not because I actually wanted to be one lol.
The problem with psychology is it’s always seeing what’s lacking, problems to be fixed. I know it’s there for people with those problems who do need that help, but society has popularised therapy-speak and made it seem every time someone does X, it’s because of Y psychological problem and should be fixed. The whole of western society has been trained to see everything as a problem only a therapist can fix and not to ask first, is this a problem for pscyhology? Consider this:
Every person alive today over the age of 35 has grown up in a world that had a very narrow view of autism and almost no conception of girls/women being autistic.
People like never before are seeking out autism assessment and walking away with confirmation – and a growing number of them are women. I’ve even watched videos of 27 year old women say they have just been assessed. It’s probably going to take at least another 3 decades before the mental health field has caught up with being able to spot autism in children while quite young, girls AND boys (and nonbinary children) and only then will the true number of autistics be known. I would not be at all surprised to find out almost half the population is autistic and when you add in adhd and other neurodivergent types, the majority of people are actually neurodivergent – it’s just we’ve had to mask for so damn long to fit in.
Fit into what exactly? Fit into a world not designed for us or by us but a perception of how the world was. What if all those people were wrong this whole time? What if 75% of the population was running around masking or even didn’t have to mask because the social rules were far more black and white and well known then? That would make the world a much easier place to live and it’s conceivable that the rigid structure of social interactions and the formality meant they never saw a problem. Even now you won’t be confirmed autistic if it isn’t causing any problems in your life (and why would you seek assessment if you weren’t having issues?).
I have issues. I live in a world not designed for someone like me. My issues are not from there being something wrong with me, just from a mismatch between my brain and the world. That’s it. All I need to do is find ways to navigate this world in a way that is easiest and most in alignment with who I am. There’s nothing to fix because nothing is broken.