A new lens

[wildeabandon]

CN: severe depression, hospitalisation, self-harm, suicide attempts, sexual assault, alcohol abuse, tangential child porn mention. Please exercise care in deciding whether to read beyond the cut.

Well that was interesting. Since getting my diagnosis a few months ago I've been gradually poking at what it means for me to be autistic, and looking at various behaviours and experiences from my past and present through that lens to see if it teaches me anything new about myself. And there've been a few things that made me go 'hmm', but it's all felt fairly minor.

And then this morning I read a piece of excellent fanfic which has very little to do with autism but a lot to do with processing trauma, which set me off ruminating about mine, and in particular the extent to which it related to having undiagnosed neurodiverse conditions. And then tonight I had dinner with Brian (WINODW), whom I didn't know at all well, and spent the better part of three hours bending his ear about the impact on my life of having undiagnosed neurodiverse conditions, and the attempts I've been making over the last few months to start unpicking that impact. So I guess suddenly it doesn't feel so minor after all.

I'm not sure how much people reading this know about my childhood and adolescence. It's not something I'm deliberately secretive about, but I don't really talk about it much because it was so long ago and it's not terribly pleasant to think about. This isn't what I talked to Brian about - that would not have been fair. But I think I do need to talk about it. There has always been a big part of me that feels that my early trauma doesn't really count, because the thing that fucked me up, the thing that everything else stems from sounds so trivial.

The other kids were mean to me, and I didn't have any friends.

That's it.

There was no systematic abuse, no betrayal of trust, no misuse of power from those with authority over me. (On the contrary, my parents were nothing but supportive and loving and brilliant, even though I must have made life very hard for them.)

But I had no friends, and I was so achingly lonely, and I learned, I guess, that the reason that I didn't have any friends and couldn't make friends no matter how hard I tried was because there was something deeply wrong with me. I didn't know what it was, so I couldn't fix it, but it was the only explanation that made sense, because how could the world be so unfair that I would be so alone if I wasn't wrong.

The first time I remember clearly thinking about killing myself was when I was about nine. The first time I actually made a half-hearted attempt was when I was thirteen. The first serious attempt that got me hospitalised was when I was fifteen, just after I'd finished my GCSEs. Over the five years that followed I spent nearly twelve months as an inpatient in psychiatric facilities. This was invariably grim. In the first place I stayed, the summer I turned sixteen, one of the other patients abused me. Once she stubbed cigarettes out on my chest. I can't find the scars any more, but it took a lot of cutting to bury them. In the second place I stayed, this time an adult ward, although I was still only sixteen, I had penetrative sex for the first time with a recovering junkie. It wasn't exactly non-consensual; I was so starved for affection that I initiated it, but it was painful and left me feeling hollow. Another patient, probably in his 50s, used to grope me whenever the nurses weren't around.

Somewhere around the age of fifteen I did start to make friends for the first time; initially online, and then when I moved from school to sixth form college I found the other weirdos. But by then it was too late. The knowledge that I was wrong, broken, worthless and unlovable was bone deep, and so if someone was kind to me then either it was a trick, or it was because they were also wrong and worthless. And so I treated a lot of people terribly, either to test them, to prove to myself by finally managing to push them away that it had been fake all along, or to punish them for being stupid enough to love a worthless thing.

It was also around fifteen that I started drinking excessively. In retrospect, this was probably exacerbated by the ADHD and its associated problems with impulse control, but mostly I drank because it took the edge off the pain and unfortunately by the time I had mostly healed from the depression and the self-hate, the pathways of alcoholism were strong enough to be self-sustaining. The alcohol made my poor treatment of other people much worse, and I did some pretty terrible things; things of which I am rightfully deeply ashamed, no matter how compassionate a lens I look at my former self through.

A whole bunch of other shitty things happened during my late teens and early twenties. There were a couple of pretty toxic relationships, one with a man who raped me whilst we were breaking up. There was an extremely damaging friendship with someone who was broken in ways both similar and different to me. There was the time when my domestic partner was arrested and later convicted on child porn charges, supporting him through his prison time, and trying to help him put his life back together afterwards. There was coming to terms with the fact that the combination of mental health problems and executive dysfunction that I can now attributed to the undiagnosed ADHD and autism meant that I barely managed to pass my degree, and I had to figure out a new life plan that didn't rely on having been academically successful. There were a handful of suicide attempts, and years upon years of self harm that has left my thighs and upper arms and chest more scar tissue than not.

And sure, some of that would probably have happened anyway, and it might still have been pretty hard to deal with, but so much of it grew out of the depression, and so much of that grew out of the desperate loneliness of "the other kids are mean to me and I don't have any friends and that must mean I am broken and wrong and worthless and unlovable".

And then gradually, as I grew older, something started to change. People kept loving me, and kept on being kind to me even when I tried to push them away, and persisted in being so clearly their(your) wonderful selves that I simply couldn't believe that they were as worthless as I knew myself to be. And eventually, little by little, I started to understand that I was no more worthless than them. And as it turns out, no more worthless than the amazing people I am fortunate enough to have in my life is actually pretty great. And so here I am today, loved, and loving and healed and whole.

But I do wonder how different my life would have been, and how much more I could have accomplished, and how much less pain I would have had to endure if thirty years ago we had known that quiet, clever, highly verbal children can have autism and ADHD, and someone had caught me before I learned that I was worthless and deserved to be utterly alone.

Thank you if you've made it this far. I am still fighting the urge to minimise all this to myself. There are, after all, plenty of people who have had far worse things to deal with, and much of the most painful stuff came from inside my own head. And I really am healed now - I can look at it, and none of it hurts except the genuinely bad things I did. But I am starting to give myself permission to acknowledge that even though I've managed to heal, at the time, it really was quite bad. And that even when it came from inside me, it wasn't my fault.

Comments

[atreic]

*hugs* Love you.

[wildeabandon]

Thank you. For now, and for then.

[rosefox]

I read this whole thing.

It was not your fault that other people harmed you, and shut you out, and didn't give you the help you needed.

I'm glad you've found support and healing.

[wildeabandon]

Thank you.

[kaberett]

Social isolation can be and is lethal to social species. There is no "it's not that bad" about it.

[wildeabandon]

Thank you. It is very validating to have someone else say that.

[kaberett]

Your response really is not weird or unusual or further evidence of failings on your part. It's *some of how isolation kills us*. This is... just what brains going wrong for these reasons *do*. <3

[wildeabandon]

You are wise. It's one of those things where if I saw it described as happening to someone else I'm fairly sure it would be obvious and I would ache with sympathy. But because it's me, I must be making a fuss about nothing, right...

[cosmolinguist]

I have spent a few days trying to leave a comment on this post but kab basically said it here.

It happened to me too. It's horrible and debilitating. Yes it isn't the worst that can happen but that doesn't make it any better.

[wildeabandon]

Thank you for the validation. I'm sorry you had similar experiences.

[zz]

not too long; did read.

[wildeabandon]

*blinks* I had no idea you were still reading this.

But you were there. You saw it. You were the first seed Sven. You were where the healing began.

[kht]

I'm glad that you're still here <3

[wildeabandon]

Thank you. So am I :)

[emperor]

*hugs*
I read this, and am delighted you are still here and that life is so much better for you these days.

[wildeabandon]

Thank you - for reading, for commenting, and for the significant part you played in making my life so much better these days.

[naath]

Not too long, did read (did not read fic, am virtuously not reading fic at work). I am sorry it was all so shit, I hope having diagnosed issues rather than undiagnosed issues helps make sense of things, but really it was shit because some people are shit. Life gets better maybe?

[wildeabandon]

Thank you. I think that having the diagnoses is helping, and will continue to do so.

[safetythird]

So many hugs lovely, I'm so glad you're still here. x

[wildeabandon]

Thank you. So am I :)

[ewt]

Hello, I read this.

That kind of loneliness can be really, really horrible. I did deal with childhood abuse from a young age, but one of the very worst aspects of it was the feeling that nobody would help me, which led to the belief that I simply wasn't worth helping. I don't think abuse has to be present for that feeling to be incredibly damaging if it persists for any length of time. I am sorry it wasn't picked up sooner, I am sorry that more was not done to counter it.

Also, it's okay to acknowledge all the experiences (happy or sad) that make you who you are, but also to mourn for what you might have accomplished and who you might have been if you had had access to diagnosis, help and support sooner.

[wildeabandon]

Thank you for the validation. I'm sorry you experienced the same feeling. It sucks :/

[hilarita]

Uh, yeah, it's quite a bit of fic, isn't it? & like, trauma happens, even if none of the people involved intended it to be traumatic (including yourself). I'm glad you're here. You are here, and this is now.

[wildeabandon]

It really was outstanding, and I'm not sure whether without that external stimulus to poke at it I would have been as willing to look so unflinchingly at my past through the lens of the new diagnosis and reflect on it. So thank you very much for sharing it.

[shreena]

I was aware of some of this but I am astonished by some of it because I have always considered you one of the most socially capable and just generally lovely and easy to be with people of my acquaintance. Awful sentence structure sorry... am sleep deprived!

[wildeabandon]

That is a really heartening thing to hear, thank you.

I think perhaps it's because of, rather than in spite of the autism that you find me easy to be with. Because I have had to learn how-to-people from the ground up, I suspect that by now I'm actually better than a lot of allistics at socialising with people who have slightly atypical preferences for social interaction, because I don't have such a strong default mode.

[ludy]

You are wonderful - i'm so sorry that this happened to you. I recognise a lot of it ...
I'm sorry that i don't have more brain to say (write) anything more coherent and thoughtful right now but because of health stuff/meds i can't right now.
But i do want to say how impressed i am at how hard you've worked to get yourself to the so much better place you are in now

[wildeabandon]

Thank you. I'm sorry that much of it is familiar.

[damerell]

For my part, I'm glad you're still around, sort of thing.

[wildeabandon]

Thank you :)

[highlyeccentric]

*offers a non-specific gesture of solidarity*

Yeah. I get that. I have had Some Shit (not nearly as impressive a catalogue of Some Shit as you, by the looks of it), but the base thing is that I was weird and kids were mean and I had no friends. Although oddly I think the clinching factor in my recent diagnosis was that I could quite confidently say, and with my parents' backing, I didn't particularly *care* at the time that I had no friends, only that I wished people would leave me alone. So I didn't get fully up to speed with 'adopt a variety of behaviours in attempt to conform, become vulnerable to manipulation' until pre-teen years, and thus tick a couple of boxes for male-typical diagnostics (not enough of them to have been picked up as a child, but some).

[wildeabandon]

Thank you for the validation and the solidarity. I'm sorry you had to deal with similar shit.

[halojedha]

"adopt a variety of behaviours in attempt to conform, become vulnerable to manipulation"

*Something clangs into place in my brain*

...oh shit

[smhwpf]

*hugs* Having no friends as a teenager - or at any age, but perhaps particularly then - is in no way minor, it is soul-destroying. (I've never been there, but my own experience of social isolation in Stockholm, where I had good friends at a distance but not locally, was bad enough). So glad that life and the grace of God have taken you to a so much better place, and good also to have a lens for better understanding what you went through as a teen.

[wildeabandon]

Thank you. It is incredibly validating to hear other people saying that it was a big deal.

[jack]

Many many *hugs*. I'm glad you can think about it a bit more directly.

[wildeabandon]

Thank you.

[halojedha]

I read this. There's almost too much to say. Sending you love.

Also that therapy fic really was excellent, wasn't it?

[wildeabandon]

Thank you. I will probably keep on noodling on here as things come up, and would definitely be up for more in depth conversations in person at some point.

It really was incredible. I had tears streaming down my face on the train for so much of it.

[doseybat]

Hooray for eventually finding the sort of fellow weirdo who help make it all better.

[wildeabandon]

Hooray indeed, thank you :)

[barakta]

I vaguely knew about your history and have long considered you someone who managed to "pull themselves/get pulled" back from some pretty bad mad etc.

I agree with others that information is power, and if you had known what you know now, things would have been very different. It is hard to be angry sometimes when there was no malice or ill intent, just lack of awareness, knowledge and understanding.

I am glad you are finding the ways to explore your diagnosis and I encourage you to be as kind to yourself as I know you would be to anyone else... I often say this to disabled students too, imagine you are your friend's friend, but to yourself.

[wildeabandon]

Thank you for the kind thoughts. I do try to treat myself as I would a friend, and most of the time I succeed.

[hairyears]

This is horribly, frighteningly familiar in its earlier stages - but not in the middle of mine, which has a monochrome tone familiar to undiagnosed depressive - and beautifully familiar in the current volume, with the discovery of friendship and lasting love.

I have held back on commenting on this: it's not a topic I would address so close on the heels of your wedding and your honeymoon, as there is very liytle that I can say that would in any way improve your life.



But... Yes, you are right to be open about this.

We have both been astonishingly fortunate in the friends that have found us: but, among them and amongst the wider circle of our acquaintances, I'm pretty sure that there are people who need to know that they, too, can complete their own narrative of isolation, reconnection and redemption.