An Unlikely Journey

I was once a part of a users group where people grew quite close over time, many of them. Among the longtime regulars was a woman named T. who was pretty well-respected in our little community. She was a large woman, and though this group had plenty examples of crappy human misbehavior, body shaming wasn’t one of them. Still, when she announced one day that she’d gone to the hospital with stomach pains and come home with a baby we were all a little flabbergasted.

How the fuck do you go through three trimesters of pregnancy and not even know?

It was hard to imagine, but there was the baby just the same. (I bet she’s been a great mom, too.)

Sometimes, things happen that are … just fucking weird. He’s the weirdest thing that happened to me:

As a kid, my parents were embarrassed by my behavior. I was smart. Finished my second grade math book in a week and a half, then sat in the back of the classroom staring at the wall for the rest of the year during math time. But I didn’t socialize well. I acted out. I was too sensitive. My dad wanted a little man and I put my hands over my hears when people lit fireworks.

It wasn’t a good time. My mother, particularly, blamed me for my imperfections to such an extent that when I was bullied at a gymnastics class by a boy twice my size, she sided with the bully when I didn’t fight back.

I never fought back. I just didn’t understand what to do. When people threw punches at me, I just stood there and took them. It was more than a handful, but less than a dozen, so don’t think I went through my childhood getting the crap kicked out of me on a daily basis, but my easy-to-rile nature and my inability to act in certain situations made me a frequent target. Including, you know, by my own mom, but lots of people suck and lots of people had it a whole lot worse.

At any rate, my mother dragged me to psychologists. “What’s wrong with him? Something’s definitely wrong with him.”

And there was. I hated any amount of loud or sudden noise. As I was a competitive swimmer, being too afraid to get on the starting blocks was problematic, and some form of child cuckery that diminished my father’s manhood. I was adopted, and my folks were always happy to point it out. (My mother is currently “married” to her first cousin, so now I’m happy to point it out.)

What was wrong with me? just … everything. Noises as above caused a phobia of dogs that lasts to this day (and fortunately does not extend to friendly dogs or, specifically, my dog). An inability to correctly judge social interactions to the extent that I once had a very friendly exchange with two crack dealers on my way home from work (I worked at a bar) who were apparently intending to roll me for tips, but ended up walking me to the bus stop because they thought I was just too … innocent .. to mug. It hasn’t all been bad.

But it has been confusing, because teams and teams of psychologist over the years have been like “fuck if we know. See a psychiatrist, maybe?” Psychiatrists are just drug dealers, in case you didn’t know. That’s literally all clinical psychiatry is: assessing symptoms and then pushing various drug cocktails until the symptoms go away. It’s pretty much a shtick. In case you wondered by people avoid treatment.

I didn’t. I went when instructed. Because I was trying to fit my answers into the questions asked (I’ll explain that in a minute), I’ve been diagnosed as bi-polar, clinically depressed, schizoaffective, and then – just because they changed from DSM 4 to 5, schizophrenic and OCD. The funny thing is, aside from the bi-polar disorder (which they threw Lithium at), the treatments for all the rest were exactly the same pills.

Idiots.

But psychiatrists couldn’t ever settle on a diagnosis because I didn’t fit any of the molds. Schizophrenia was closest, because I would seek psychiatric help at times of great distress, and my distress is often built around an inability to determine what people mean by what they say and how they say it at extremely crucial moments. Also, I have to understand the rules. There aren’t any rules to life, of course, but things have to bee within some pretty strict boundaries for me to cope well. To psychiatrists, this came across like I was having paranoid delusions (thinking people were talking about me behind my back), and that’s how I came to think of it, too. At those moments, I wasn’t really present enough to disagree with people trying to understand and help me, even if they were doing a poor job of it.

These same psychiatrists were actually pretty emotionally damaging. They would say things like “You have a strange presentation.” Which is psych speak for “we either don’t know what’s wrong with you or we think you’re faking.” Because I wasn’t actually psychotic, you see. I was extremely EXTREMELY distressed because I was having reactions to a neurological disorder I’d had all my life and that nobody had managed to correctly identify until recently.

I have autism.

I had all the signs as a child, but I’m 55 years old (and still have 31 inch waist, you nasty online bishes who wouldn’t show your rl pictures for all the money in China)(<— lashing out occasionally is my virtual stimming. People have been awful to me over the years. Sometimes, it just feels good.) Autism didn’t become a common diagnosis until 1980, which was after my stint on the child psych couch.

Everyone missed it. All the psychologists and psychiatrists over the years. Everyone I’ve ever known, including my own parents. Including myself!

It’s been slowly coming to me over the past couple of months, as I looked into the symptoms of autism after watching Hannah Gadsby’s excellent comedy special, “Douglas”. Every time I’d read about autism in the past, it had been something explained as happening to children that is always described in the most extreme cases, and in adults it’s always been “Asperger’s”, which I’ve seen used both accurately and as an excuse.

When I finally looked into the symptoms of autism in children, I suffered from two of the most common not even slightly, and most of the rest are pegged at max.

I guess people talk about moments of clarity. Unsurprisingly, I don’t really know what they mean by that when they say it, because it seems like buzzword bingo talk to me. But if that’s what one is, I had it a few weeks back when I realized I didn’t have a mental illness at all, but a neurological disorder.

Since then, my life has been flashing in front of my eyes. I keep thinking of all the shitty personal interactions I’ve had over the years for which I now had some sort of explanation. For my part of it, at least.

To quote Dickens, “It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.” It’s great to finally have a firm grasp of what the hell is going on in my head. But again, I’m 55. It feels like it’s all too late. I mean, I’m not circling the drain or anything, but as my friend Tom often said, I can see the sink from here.

I can’t fix the past. I need to grieve the life I could have had if I’d known, but then I need to move on. Part of moving on is just getting the hell over it and living my best life. This means no longer being the victim of my own head, or anyone else’s.

I’m appalled by the casual cruelty that infests Second Life. People are just rat bastards, and proud of it. It’s like Twitter with dicks… and penises. But not all of them, and not all the time. I know that my own neurodivergence (I hated this word two weeks ago, now I live by it) causes me to add to that rat bastardry all too often, so the first fight I’m waging to live my best life is with myself.

True to my autistic nature, I’m setting some firm boundaries for interacting with people in Second Life. I’ve explained things in my profile, but if you understand anything about Autism, you’ll get the gist: I might take what you say the wrong way, or just not understand you entirely. I might mistake any amount of sarcasm for cruelty even if none is intended, or I might completely miss intended cruelty as a compliment. Some people just rub me the wrong way, because I can’t determine which side of the mensch-rat bastard spectrum they favor, so I just block them. They don’t talk to me anyway, so they won’t notice. And I won’t have to walk around Second Life thinking “What the fuck was that supposed to mean?”

I don’t want this to be my life, but it has been all my life already. At least now I know it.

I’ve decided to no longer try and make stuff or do stuff in Second Life to the extent I once wanted. I have a decent piece of land. Part of it is for my house, and part of it is going to be the new “The Laughing Weasel”, which will now and forever be my safe space. I mean, no one has to wear helmets or foam padding or anything, but a pair of warm mittens would be nice.

That’s where I’m at. I’m sorry if it’s not a good place for me to be for you or your needs, but it’s not changing anytime soon. If you want me, you know where to find me. Or you will, once I get it built.