Letting the past go

I doubt I’ve ever done a better or more useful thing than get my autism diagnosis. But going through the process of adaptation to the new situation was painful. As an autistic person, I was particularly distrustful of change, and I have always feared loss extremely. So how to accept a loss, even in the cause of reaching something that turned out to be better?

An important part of redeeming and moving on from the past was being able to give up that non-disabled identity and move on to who I really was. But that meant learning to accept that I wasn’t the strong, capable person who didn’t need any help that I’d seen myself as for a long time. I had got used to not being particularly likeable (the whole autistic communication/being weird) thing but I’d thought that I was at least independent, self-reliant and (hitherto) indestructible. Giving myself permission not to be was absolutely vital – because you can go on being indestructible only for so long and then you may suddenly completely collapse and become helpless. That has happened to a number of friends of mine through autistic burnout, but it can happen to anyone. You think you can take anything the world throws at you right up until you can’t. You absorb every blow right up until you shatter.

I can rationalise the need to allow myself reasonable adjustments, down time and so forth by thinking about how to get the maximum value out of myself for an organisation or people I support. Serving others might mean putting their interests first and yours last, but if you don’t look after yourself to a minimum extent you’ll soon not be able to do anything at all. In the most basic case, if you don’t stop looking after others long enough to eat, drink and sleep, you will soon have no physical strength to do anything.

It can be a very difficult thing to admit your own weakness (glimpse of the obvious here, but bear with). I have friends who struggle with admitting weakness so much that they can only see two ways of being: indestructible or helpless. Such friends can either do and overcome anything, or (when weakness sets in) become completely helpless and unable to do anything. It’s a very autistic-absolutist kind of thinking to refuse to admit any situation where you have partial control: to have some but not complete mastery of others or yourself.

Coming to accept your identity as someone disabled means going through that thought process of recognising that being all-powerful and all-logical is not going to work. A task might take eight hours to do, and as an all-powerful and all-logical person your instinct would be to set about it and do it in eight hours. Accepting your weakness would mean realising that you had to stop every (say) hour and rest. It’s really hard to do that – my instinct is to do the eight hours and then crash or (more likely) do six hours and then crash and find myself unable to go back to something I’d failed to complete.

It’s easy to say you’re going to give up your old pre-diagnosis identity and embrace your autistic self, but if that means cutting yourself some slack, you may find it really hard to do. Please keep trying!