Emotional Regulation
TFW you learned to mask INSTEAD of learning emotional regulation, so when you learn to unmask as an adult you've still got a child's grasp of navigating emotional landscapes.
— myk is more of a question than a comment (@mykola) January 20, 2021
This spoke to me so much this morning. I wrote, "Man, that really sums up my last year, or at least the difference between last January and this January. And here we are."
Last January, I experienced a period of autistic burnout that caught me off-guard, mostly because up until it happened, I had been flying pretty high. It scared me, how quickly things changed. It seemed like overnight I went from feeling capable and confident to being an emotional wreck.
I wanted to be able to fight burnout because I couldn’t fight depression. I couldn’t fight depression because there was no reason for it. It was just something that happened to me, and the only thing I could do was take medication and try not to be depressed, which was a lousy way to think about it, because every time I got depressed, I felt like I had failed.
Once I reframed it as autistic burnout, though, the game changed, because now I had a reason, a root, a cause. My “depression” came from the stress of trying to mask my autistic tendencies, while navigating through a world that wasn't made for me. Now that I knew what was going on, I could do something about it. I could find ways to accommodate myself, make an autistic space for myself, and try to minimize the burnout.
But that meant unmasking my autistic self, discovering my autistic self, and it was a bumpy process. I actually tried to write about this at the end of the year, as I was reflecting back on 2020, and found it too painful, too cringe-worthy to revisit. But it's accurate to say that I had a child's grasp of navigating emotions; it would also be accurate to say that there were points over the past year where I acted like a toddler. I felt like a toddler. I was angry that I was being challenged, I was sad that I wasn't understood. I was learning to navigate my emotions the way a toddler does. Painfully.
Fortunately, I'm not a toddler, and I was able to emotionally grow faster than a toddler does. I didn't have to start from scratch like a toddler would, but could apply years of experience to figure out what I needed to unlearn and what I needed to relearn. And I'm really lucky that I had a strong, supportive partner who was willing to work through all this with me, even when it was hard and bad. I didn't do it all by myself. I had help.
The end result is that a year later, I'm in a much better, much more stable place. I'm happy, and my partner is happy. I'm getting along so much better with my boys. I often used a metaphor in my writing and journaling where I would describe everyone else as sitting around a campfire, while I'm further back, watching them from the darkness. I initially felt that I needed to find and preserve that distance, that space of my own, in order to relieve the pressure of trying to fit in. But that was wrong. I needed to learn how to bring that space of my own into the light, and sit down at the campfire with everyone else, to be a part of my world and not merely an observer of it.