Coming into my own as an autistic adult
By: Simon Monaghan
Tags: Autism, Autistic, Asperger, Awakening, Autism Acceptance

I’m 52 years of age. I definitely don’t feel it. I don’t know what I feel most of the time. Connecting with my emotions is something new for me — I’ve been blind to my emotions for most of my life. However, I have had a recent awakening.

I received my diagnosis of Asperger’s Syndrome pretty much around the same time as my 48th birthday. I sat on it for about 3.5 years, until around half-way through 2020. Between November 2016 and June/July 2020 I didn’t have the bandwidth to be able to process anything outside of managing my daily existence. I was always on the edge of exhaustion and frequently ill. I didn’t know why and I didn’t know how to deal with it. I was coping, as I had been for my entire life up to that point. Coping with my desicions, coping with my relationships, coping with parenthood, coping with anxiety, depression and an inability to just get on with things, coping with my job. That’s a one-word description of my life — coping. A stressed-out empty shell of a person with no insight, no self-reflection, little self-awareness, bouncing from one event to the next, mostly panicked, usually out of control and constantly, constantly exhausted.

Things have changed. How do I know? I can sit down to write this piece. I’m a member of the Medium community. I have an account on here! I have the bandwidth to be able to do this, and even more than that, the presence of mind — the awareness, the consciousness, the focus and the in-the-moment-ness—to know that I have something to say, and to know that I can do it! I can write! I can publish on to the internet to share with others as others have shared with me. Along the way I can express my gratitude that this platform exists because the pieces that I have read on here have opened doors I didn’t know existed.

The evolution of my concious self-awareness from first beginnings to this moment has been totally joyful. Sometimes I could burst with happiness! It just comes over me! Sometimes I laugh out loud spontaneously at the feelings of joy I have from just being alive, on this planet, in this time, right here, right now, today. I know that to some people this will seem to be an insincere, contrived, gushing, gauche even, sentiment to be expressed by a 52-year old man, however it’s completely genuine because I recognise that the joy I feel is simply relief from the misery of the past. Taking a walk in the park today is a pleasure-filled gift compared to the ‘forcing myself to take a walk in the godforsaken local park with all those awful people just so I can get some exercise’ mindset of a few short months ago. And I realise that feeling the need to justify writing about my spontaneous joy to un-known strangers who may never read this piece indicates work still to be done, and that’s ok!!

Referring back to the beginning of the piece where I talk about identifying emotions, well, that’s two I can easily identify: joy and gratitude. There are many others to be explored. Disassociation or disconnectedness may be a trait of autism and it may be entirely personal — I intend to find out!

That’s not the only work that needs to be done. I’m starting to learn about austism in ways I hadn’t before. I’m activelty engaging with the global autism community in the smallest of ways (via YouTube and the fantastic support staff at a local agency), however that represents a huge leap for me. I’ve been able to open a small chink of light in the curtain of darkness that surrounds me and little by little, as much as I can cope with at any one time, I’m going to pull that curtain back. Eventually I’m going to tear it down and throw it away. This is what I mean by the title of this piece. I’ve taken the first steps on the journey to come into my own as an autistic person in this world. There’s so much to talk about, to write about, to learn and explore.

Thanks for reading!

Love & peace to all.