Shadow Boxing

One of my goals for this year has been to write more on my blog. While I'm a longtime blogger with an archive of thousands of posts stretching back to the turn of the millennium, I've always had problems with voice and with audience when writing original content for my blogs. And while writing is something that is important to me, something that I do daily, very little of what I write ends up on the blog.
I see the blog as a place to share something with the rest of the Internet, and when I can't produce my own content, I like to cross-post other people's work. For me, this goes back to what a weblog actually was. The early web was wild and untamed, and we would spend hours surfing its pages, looking for cool and new things. This was before Google changed us from a directory paradigm to a search paradigm, so finding new and cool content took some work. By making lists of what we'd found and sharing them, we were helping to promote these cool new things.

I feel like I've gone over this before, but that's ok. Part of what I'm playing with right now is voice and audience, and I feel like this is the voice I want to use for what I'm trying to say. Things have changed, and I want to talk about it, but first I feel like I need to set the stage.

I've never really used a blog as a journal or a public diary. I'm actually a shy, private person, and I guess I was honestly scared to share my personal life. And then that fear got magnified with the advent of social media. At one point, I could write on my blog and be reasonably sure that none of my friends and family would ever see it. That's not the case anymore, and even though I've largely withdrawn from social media, it's still not the case.

I could, if I wanted, create a pseudo-identity online. I could change the names and rearrange all their faces all under a different persona. But I've been online with this handle for a quarter of a century, and I don't feel like giving it up. I was here first. I shouldn't have to hide now that everyone else showed up.

But something happened to me recently that I want to talk about. I have been talking about it, but just with myself. I think I want to talk about it out loud, and share it. I just want you to know that in itself is a big deal. I don't usually do this.

Two summers ago, my son was formally diagnosed with autism, but looking back, the signs were there long before. He was five when he was diagnosed. When he was three, we had concerns, but were given reasons that weren't autism. By the end of pre-school, the school district had some concerns, but stopped short of autism.

We first thought it was Sensory Processing Disorder, but as he started to develop, there were behavioral issues outside of the processing issues. The summer after pre-school, we had him formally evaluated and got an autism diagnosis.

But what I wanted to talk about comes before that, about a year before that, when I first started reading about Sensory Processing Disorder. But it goes back much further than that, back to my earliest memories. As I began learning about my son's condition, I began to learn about myself.

I've always been an odd duck. As a child, I had trouble modulating my voice, either talking too loudly for a situation or too softly to be heard. I had a rich inner life with imaginary friends and pets. It wasn't until my son mentioned having a vehicle as an imaginary friend that I remembered that I had something similar, a Spitfire from World War II whose name I have forgotten.

But at some point in grade school, I started feeling like I was different, and things got harder the older I got. In my teens, I started getting depressed, but it was the late 80s and it seemed like everyone was depressed. My twenties were riddled with major depressions. I dropped out of most of the colleges in my area over the course of ten years. I could barely keep a minimum wage job, and usually lived in a filthy apartment strewn with junk.

Things got better in my thirties. I met someone and we built a life together. I was able to hold down better and better jobs, working my way into retail management. I went to a community college and got a degree, and then used that degree to get a job where I didn't have to interact with the public, and things got a lot better.

So when my son started having problems, I wasn't feeling like a mess, or like I was different than everyone else. I was feeling successful, competent; well, as successful and competent as the father of a three-year-old and an infant can feel when they're working full-time on opposite shifts from their partner who also has to work to keep this whole operation afloat. I had gone from an extremely disorganized person who once got arrested because he had neglected to open his mail to someone juggling work and housework and his wife and his kids and still self-teaching himself how to code to find a better job. And for the most part, the balls weren't dropping.

But as I learned more about sensory processing disorder and autism, I began to see more and more things that rang true for myself. I have executive dysfunction. Well into my thirties, I lived with a sink full of dirty dishes and dirty laundry covering my floor. Today I get the laundry and dishes done promptly. I open my mail. I am reasonably on top of things.

The only reason why I am on top of things is because I have built an elaborate to-do system over the years that keeps me focused on what I need to be doing, and reminds me of the things that I'd probably forget. Some people have to-do lists; I have a system spanning several lists and calendars.

Even so, it's a struggle. I actually wrote a good chunk of this on my phone one-handed while I was braising some tenderloin patties for our dinner tonight. I mean, there's a lot of standing and thinking with the tongs in hand, waiting to flip. Might as well be writing, you know?

As I kept reading about different autistic symptoms that felt eerily familiar, I started to suspect that I was autistic myself. I decided to seek a professional diagnosis. And after several weeks of meeting with me, a psychologist confirmed my theory: I am autistic.

On one hand, it's not a surprise. Like when we got our son's diagnosis, when you look back the writing has been there on the wall the whole time. You've always known you walked to the beat of different drummer; now you've gotten confirmation from an outside source.

But on the other hand, it feels like it changes everything. I've spent my entire life thinking I was like everyone else, just not as good. Of course I could complete college if I worked hard enough; therefore the problem is with me, that I'm a lazy slacker who'd rather play video games than do the stuff he needs to do. The problem was a moral failing on my part. If I only tried harder, then I'd succeed.

And this stretches into everything, not just those clear cut cases like graduating from college. Interpersonal relationships have always been hard for me, and I've always sublimated it as proving that I was just a jerk, an asshole. It's why I became a shy, private person, someone who is uncomfortable sharing himself with the world around him. And I thought it was my fault, and by fault I mean something that I could have corrected if I were a better person.

This unnecessary framing of my shortcomings as moral failings has caused me a lot of pain. Nobody can put me down better than I can put myself down. No one beats me up better than me. And the anxiety of trying to navigate this world where I seem destined to fail (and remember, I'm failing because I didn't try hard enough, because I wasn't good enough) just wears at me constantly, leading me to drink alcohol daily just to relax. I recently read a long piece about "autistic burnout," and damn but it doesn't describe my twenties, prolonged depressions fueled by anxiety and an inability to fit in.

So this is what I've been thinking about, a lot, for the last two weeks. After all these years, I finally have my tiger by the tail, and it feels amazing, exhilarating. Instead of grappling in the dark with a problem I can't see, I'm shadow-boxing with myself, trying to approach my problems with this new-found insight.

I watched this stand-up special the other night. It was mind-blowing. And then the next morning I went to talk to my wife about it, and she was like, "Yeah, I know, I've been talking to you about this," and I honestly have no memory of her talking about it, but I didn't know the comedian's name or anything, and so I had nothing to hang what she was talking about onto, so I didn't hold onto it.

But now that I know that I'm autistic, I didn't beat myself up about not paying attention. I mean, I felt bad for not paying attention to what my wife was telling me, but I was able to give myself a break. Instead of beating myself up for not being good enough, for some sort of imagined moral failing, instead of feeling attacked by my wife for not paying attention to her, when it's really me attacking me for not paying attention, I just smiled and said, "I don't remember this," which is true, and then we continued talking about it, and that's awesome, that's amazing. That's the first positive thing about my autism that's happened since the diagnosis, and I'm hoping that there will be more.