When I was 18, I experienced a traumatic event. But I wouldn’t know it for what it was until 20 years later when the impact of my Autism diagnosis provided me, for the first time, a compassionate view of my youth.
I lived a life filled to the brim with self hatred, loathing and suicidal ideation, in general. Everything was my fault. I was never good enough. The things people liked about me from afar is what got too intense close up. Being dismissed and rejected ad nauseam since my earliest memories, I was (am?) a vulnerable target whose ease of suggestibility led me into so many dangerous situations that I drifted in and out of, unaware but not without harm. Not sensing danger is very common but is not limited to the physical world.
Figure 1: A section from my DTC application my assessor filled out. This rocked me harder than the report itself.
For two decades I have blamed and gaslit myself specifically for this event. I cant forget the contempt on my past therapist’s face as I blankly described the events, in hopes not to sound over dramatic.
The truth is what happened is not a normative event in a youth’s life. It is not the worst, but it’s not the best. My past therapist said I belittled my experiences of impact, but that’s not just because awful things kept coming. I think I simply learned it from my parents. There is nurture with my nature.
Everyone involved at the time, failed me tremendously. The people-adults-who I believed were my friends, betrayed, shamed and shunned me. I recall years later, a friend’s sister mentioned I and the event was still being talked about. By grown people I had trusted at such a vulnerable age. Nevermind the autism- it just made everything worse. Our brain is a beautiful thing, helping us dissociate from things we cant bear. I cannot recall what was reported to me. I just remember the street we were walking on, what the sky looked like and the sickness in my chest as my head felt bubbly-a distinct prodrome to the “blanking out” I have often had in life when I am in overwhelming situations. In absentia, they still shamed a kid.
The bottom line is it is not a teenager’s responsibility to establish boundaries or control a narrative with adults: that is their responsibility, their duty, their job. It is possible-nay, easy-to do with neutral to little impact as possible. Shitty for me, I picked the short straw out of a hand of fucked up scenarios that could have easily been avoided. See? Even now, my analogies veer to self-blame. I didn’t pick any of this. It unfolded and it WAS NOT MY JOB to stop it.
For years I have imagined how I could tell this story publicly as a tool of catharsis. Vendetta maybe, for all involved. But this was all in my head. In reality, I cannot deal with the details. I don’t spare the full story out of respect of privacy-I do it for self preservation. I don’t think I could mentally handle everyone knowing because I’ve kept this to my chest for so long. I’m working to get out of it, not push me further in.
My new psychologist is helping me come to terms with how this event probably settled into PTSD for me, but I still have not been able to bring myself to discuss it with them. This week, a trigger came through and despite having wrestled with these before, over and over, I think I have had enough. I am tired of having these panic phases-these looping episodes I cannot regulate, leaving me stranded in intrusive memories and a forgetful state in my present life for days. All I want now is it not to be in the room with me anymore. I don’t want to feel like it happened yesterday.
Figure 2: The greatest scene that encapsulates the feeling I had realizing trauma and late diagnosis
I have always loved metaphors. Now that I am understanding myself so much better, it makes me think if it’s actually about not being able to access my own feelings and thoughts immediately-and how it is easier to liken them to something to provide an explanation. One more poetic than my raw data experience could present.
My entire experience of getting diagnosed as an adult is the movie Interstellar. I could break down the entire movie into simile of my life. And the ‘mountains are waves’ is the perfect analogy for the moment of understanding something that you went through, is actually trauma.
In excavating my life, I found how truly wounded and scared I was when this event occurred. Intense shame, humiliation, embarrassment and confusion nesting in recesses of my brain, rooting themselves to inform and colour the years that followed. But these were not emotions I could connect to or name for two decades.
I didn’t know how, I could not verbalize how.
My past therapist remarked I talk about events-not feelings. So how are you going to feel when 7,300 days pass and you just realize now, what it is you felt. Panic. Panic is the cloud ceiling over everything that rains down. These feelings aren’t of a 38 year old. I am still 18. In a conversation with an EMDR specialist last week, I broke down “for no reason” when they mentioned having to integrate the parts of ourselves. Maybe that’s what they were talking about.
I am now thinking that the most powerful act I can do is to tell myself that Now is not Then. To say to myself I am safe now, infers there was a time I wasn’t. I wasn’t kidnapped, I wasn’t physically assaulted. It was a socially based, inappropriate event that was buried as I kept contact with someone I should not have. Again, I. I struggle with convincing myself this wasn’t my responsibility.
An apology from all of them would change nothing. Accountability from all of them would change nothing. But my acceptance of self, even retroactively, that I was a well-meaning autistic kid that feared life and all its uncertainty, will in time, swallow the darkness whole.