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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.
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.
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Date: 2019-11-19 06:08 pm (UTC)From: