I'm in my mid thirties and only now am I coming to terms with my neurodivergence. I'm one of the lucky people to have access to health care and the time to educate myself on the topics of neurodiversity and mental health.
And with all of that, I have only recently started to take notice of how my childhood experience affected my perception of people and how the world works.
I won't go into intense details for several reasons, but long-story short - my parents were deeply unwell and in forcing me to hide and overlook their mental health, I currently have to spend time trying to sort out what I now find acceptable, healthy, and loving.
Being on the spectrum and lacking the resources to navigate an allistic world was hard enough. I had to make an approximation of normal without having consistent practice with it.
I feel sad that I'm in my thirties and still seek out the approval of people I don't know. Especially when those people exist in spaces where it's not safe for them to know me, like online, or at bigoted in-person spaces.
I don't feel like I got a chance to make human mistakes and now that I'm on my own for the first time in my life, I lack the tools and connections to safely unlearn unhealthy behaviors and learn new healthy behaviors.
I know I'm not the only one, and I'm glad that this comm is around to meet and troubleshoot solutions.
Sometimes I feel like I don't understand a joke in a post and I'm afraid to lose the game of chicken, becoming the first person to ask if a person was serious.
Sometimes I'll check my comments for up votes to make sure I'm not being cruel to someone without knowing.
I was convinced I was cruel and carrying that belief has made me so vulnerable to manipulation. I've had to create a mask that convinces people that I'm in on the joke. That I know better and any mistake I make could conceivably be intentional. I can't feel vulnerable and I look at people as a collection of warnings and threats instead of human beings who might treat me like I'm human too. I have an exit plan on the off chance somebody sees through my mask, because that was the most dangerous thing in my childhood.
Already feeling out of touch with my body, I had to exist outside of myself to make sure that I didn't present any image that reflected poorly on my parents. Precious bandwidth dedicated to something I don't really even care about. My family was shitty and they should feel shitty, but I have my attention focused outward on how others see me. Because that's what they policed. I didn't get to pay attention to my inner world, the outer world, or the real ways the two interacted.
My heart goes out to any kid that's experienced trauma, but this is the way I experienced it - as part of a community underserved by an allistic society that prioritizes the aesthetics of a nuclear family.
But knowing all this, I can feel some comfort in the fact that I found a community here where I can share my experiences and contribute to a world that values and people like me.
Welcome to neurodivergence. The sensory issues and weird thought patterns and social difficulties are all part of the package. The trauma always comes with it, as a special bonus!
It really sucks, sometimes. I feel you. I'm constantly worried about being inadvertently mean to people, or that I'm being awkward somehow without knowing it, revealing some bizarre aspect of my identity that I didn't know was off-puttingly weird, etc. and at the same time compelled to find some way to be unique while also not standing out too much. So I can identify with a lot of what you're posting here.
I've been putting off an effortpost about Unmasking Autism by Dr. Devon Price, because I've been so overwhelmed myself. But seeing wtypstanaccount do a book club for The Will to Change has me thinking of setting up something like that, but here in this comm. I'd need some time to prepare it, would definitely need to give it another read and assemble some materials Dr. Price offers on his site (I think?) but there's a lot that is relevant to your experiences here. Give it a read if you haven't.
I'm just glad it wasn't just in my head. Like yeah it sucks being misunderstood, but I'm starting to understand myself and my neurodiversity.
And I hear you on wanting to be unique without standing out too much. It's like I want to be human and treated like I'm human, and that takes so many social cues.
Listening to bell hooks has been such a healing influence in my life and that's the thread that got me started. I just finished All About Love and it's amazing.
I'd love to read your post about Dr Price's work. I'll definitely check out his work on my own too. Thanks!
So a while back I attended the training which Heather Morgan developed and facilitated that forms the basis for the values exercises in Devon Price's book.
While my trauma-addled brain wasn't functioning at full capacity at the time, I might be able to provide assistance if the book club idea gets off the ground, especially in relation to those exercises (although my capacity is limited due to being really burnt out at the moment so I'm not going to overcommit and underdeliver.)
The values based exercises in the book themselves are sort of like a snapshot or a taster of what Heather Morgan has developed which is a sort of deep work that an autism coach would typically provide over a number of sessions one-on-one.
Note that I am not an autism coach but I have worked in roles which utilised coaching methods and I've worked in the mental health sector, although I am not in a place where I would feel comfortable with working as an autism coach for a variety of reasons. If the book club did get running and people were interested in doing an extended version of the values exercises through one-on-one consultations to enrich their personal development that they've gotten from reading the book, I would consider offering to do this to a limited number of people from Hexbear if there was demand.
Obviously I'd do it voluntarily and I wouldn't be doing this for personal benefit (I'm not seeking to establish myself as an autism coach or to build up a client base and I'm not going to use it as a sales tactic to lure potential marks or anything like that) and, given that I haven't been engaged in putting the training into practice, I'm gonna be honest that you're straight-up getting what you pay for lol. (If you want to get the full autism coach experience from a person who has completed Heather Morgan's training then you'll have to go somewhere else but shit ain't gonna be cheap, judging by the calibre [should I say class character?] of the other participants and the cost of the training itself; the group I did my training with was very [petit-]bougie and they were all on the lowest end of the support needs scale. I absolutely did not fit into that crowd, but maybe that's for the best...)
If this does eventuate obviously I'd be more than happy to be vetted by a trusted member of the community like a mod or something similar so that they can vouch for me in order to protect the community members, and I'd honestly prefer it that way. In fact now that I mention it, it'd probably be ideal to have an accountability loop with a mod acting as a third party to check in and ensure the safety of anyone who participates in this with me.
Anyway, just throwing the idea out there.
+1 to the Unmasking Autism book club
I just started it myself