On Too Much Therapy

I’d like to try to live, not just survive

I am leaving therapy. Both OT and Talk. I’ve reached the end of feasible financials going towards this constant pursuit of getting better. Pursuing regulation. Maybe I’m taking a break right at the predictable point of a breakthrough when it’s the hardest. But I’ve been in therapy for a year and a half straight working on suspecting, testing, confirming then trying to process my Autism. I’m tired. Haven’t I done enough?

I never got to a point in past therapy, where I turned a corner. I always felt I was falling down a well with no bottom. Until I found people informed about ASD and Occupational Therapy—well, with accurate approaches, I did turn. Then the endless narrow well became a chasm.

JAyyyyyyyyyyyyy…….

Therapy was finally working. I got to pain points I didn’t know existed. The iron door within me opened to everything I tried to connect before.

I had a friend once who was an ER Dr. I asked them why they didn’t go to therapy.

Zoe, they said, I’ll go when I retire. Because once I start talking, I will never be able to work in the ER again. My career will be over.

That moment is seared in my brain.

Something about their rationale resonated with me.

This past month has unearthed things I’ve never seen or felt before. I kept waiting to melt back into what felt average, but it never arrived. I can’t return to the person I was before I knew, or felt, the significant distress that living undiagnosed has been for me. Don’t take this as implication I think my life would have been amazing had I known earlier-it wouldn’t have been-it just would have been different.

I am rounding the corner in March of having my assessment. In that span I have lived years. Or maybe rather, re-lived years that I compartmentalized. Hid, literally, as I melted down in private decade after decade, tried to keep going after failure and perpetual failure, unrewardingly following my “talents” that everyone loves to discuss but having nothing to show for them.

Peoples perceptions of me are in direct opposition to my lived experience and what I have materially. I am 39 and am still making the same wage I did when I was 26. This is what it’s like to be Autistic for me. Decades of work and nothing to show for it, vacant stability no matter how much I crave structure. No safety. Years of watching others grow and change while I stay stuck. Hoping the next thing I try will work. It never does. It always, always, bends reality and pulls the rug of hope out from under me. Time and time again.

I have felt abject failure the entire course of my life in everything save one thing:

Jiu Jitsu.

I am so god damn tired of trying to talk. Do you know it takes as much from me as a hard training session? If not more? Training is replenishing, talking is laborious. The next few years are crucial to me honing my skills to Black Belt.

I look back on videos I watched this time last year to try to parse out whether I myself had Autism and what that may mean. I can’t believe how trite they all seem. The same talking points scattered with comments about how “seen” people feel. It is inverted for me. I have never felt more invisible now that I actually know more about myself. I have never felt more isolated. So much so, I can’t even find the words to describe my experiences right now. In therapy all I was doing was heaving, melting down, dissociating.

I feel my brain peeling apart, unable to stop the intrusive memories that impale me like they’d been sitting in wait since I was a kid. I feel locked in this barrage of trauma and am unable to take the steps to try to see what my future is tomorrow, in six months, in ten years.

I have to start to be part of the world again with my whole self even if it’s not figured out. To not feel like I’m suffocating in the bathroom before the work I do have, because my mind is trapped somewhere else, lost in the sea of all this internal disruption.

I cry for the woman screaming into the phone trying to get her best friend to understand her back in 2021. I cry for the little girl who knew she was always left behind, then gaslit about it. I scream like an animal thinking of my decades of self hatred that, really, was internalized ableism.

The idea of stepping into an office to talk fills with me with vitriol. As I left my therapists office yesterday, a line flashed through my head:

This all took place on the week of my 8th year anniversary of training. Maybe that means something, I don’t know. I cannot do continuous therapy and train. It takes from the same wells, drawn from the same battery. And I’ve talked long enough.

I told my therapist that I couldn’t come back for a while. They paused then spoke:

‘Well. In the meantime, you have Jiu Jitsu.’

Yes. We have each other.