Connection

Connection

 

The biggest thing about receiving the autism diagnosis is that I felt like I had been people-pleasing my entire life. At first, I blamed everyone else. I cut off most people that I hardly knew and only added because they were acquaintances, and I felt sorry for them. Then I trimmed even more of the friends I hadn’t talked to in forever and those who hadn’t talked to me in quite a long time even after I went radio silent for weeks. I focused so much on the outside to avoid the gaping hole on the inside.

With this new void of friends, I started making new ones in Facebook groups of autistic people and at a group I had to pay for exclusively for autistic and autistic (with ADHD) people. I thought I had finally found who I was searching for. But I started filling in the same gaps that I had done when I was people-pleasing neurotypicals. I would ask when something was wrong and then try to help the person like a therapist would process the person’s feelings, see what they thought about it, and maybe see what different perspectives could be had of a situation to give them new insight.

I hadn’t changed. I just found deeper connections with people and filled the same gap using the same skill set. And I was called out on it by three people in the same week. The first hardly registered. The second I spent two late nights trying to help him vent his feelings over his ex and move past them, then he blamed me for the physical toll of the lack of sleep and the mental toll of the therapy. Then someone else blamed me of I can’t even tell you what because he used such lengthy sentences and such heady knowledge that my burned out brain fried the several times I tried to read it. Basically, I think, he was blaming me for baiting him into emotionally regulating me through wild sentences that I threw at him and I had to stop. He even blamed me for trying to hit on him even though he clearly wasn’t gay.

It made it clear to me that I don’t know how to talk to people… especially men. Even though I was accused of wild things, I found snippets of truth in almost everything they said. I do try to find sad people and become their therapist. It does make me feel better and useful… productive to society. In all honesty, I feel like that is the one thing that I am good at is helping people through bad times, except when it’s my husband, in person, I have no idea what to do. So no, I’m useless when it comes right down to when it really matters.

When I am emotionally dysregulated, which seems to happen more and more with overstimulation and burnout and meltdowns, I try to reach out to my friends online to see if they can help, but most of the time they are too busy sleeping or at their jobs or living life. I have to have a panic attack, stim for what feels like hours and even then feel like it’s not enough, or drink alcohol and listen to music to assuage the feeling that SOMETHING IS WRONG AND WILL NEVER BE RIGHT AGAIN.

The main thing I am trying to get at is that I have lost connection with myself. I’ve been trying to hide it behind this tough exterior of no more people-pleasing, but I finally realized I never really had my own identity or personality, or it’s been shielded and melded with plastic for so long it’s hard to tell what’s real anymore. So I have to figure out what’s me. I have no idea how to do that, which is what therapy and spirituality and meditation are for. I would love to get comments from people, but that’s exactly the problem is getting input from people and melding that into my personality. I have to discover who I am on my own.

God help me.