I've talked a lot about my mental health struggles with pretty well anyone who could be bothered to listen, but I've never really written about them in any purposeful, meaningful, or public way. I've often turned to my journal in times of extreme distress, trying to scratch the madness out of my mind onto paper, usually to no avail. What I ended up with was a long and painful record of my lowest, most vulnerable moments. Eventually I stopped because I was afraid if anyone ever came across them and read the whole tome I would be bundled off to an asylum and never heard from again.
I originally started this blog (oh, so many lifetimes ago) in an attempt to turn my writing into a positive way forward from those incredibly dark places. In so doing, I glossed over the agonising struggles leading me to that point and completely abandoned the blog altogether during the years in which it could have soothed traumatic wounds and drained the poison from within me. I realised recently, upon receiving the highest compliment that my writing had helped someone else in their moment of need, that I actually have a lot of value to offer those in the trenches with the Black Dog.
I have gained incredible perspective on my mental health challenges in the past year, moving from a head space wherein the only thing keeping me from stepping in front of a bus was my children's dependence on me, to a place where I'm allowing myself to dream and create and open up to curiosity and possibility. I've taken active steps to put self care at the top of my priority list, let go of toxic things holding me back, ask for help, say 'no' to that which I don't really need, and conserve my spoons as much as possible. Discovering my Autistic identity has played a central role in this metamorphosis.
I have an impulsive urge to start all stories at the beginning, but I think this one is better told asynchronously. Let's begin at the bottom…
I'm in a mental ward with my five-month old baby. She's my second child, so the guilt of leaving my 3.5-year old behind weighs mightily but Anxiety is crushing every fibre of my being. I'm afraid of harming myself or my children, so I've come here of my own volition. I knew I was at high risk for developing PND again, so I sought help and built up my safety nets before my little one arrived, but it wasn't enough to fight the tide. Sleepless months, a colicky/tongue-tied/perpetual motion baby, an uncomfortable visit, election of the orange idiot, and an unrelenting fear that my new job would bring an early end to breastfeeding piled upon me and has now dropped me to my knees. The psychiatrist is pushing hard for SSRIs. I'm pushing back with the futility of kelp against the tide and crying desperately on the phone with the kind man with the answers before swallowing my first pill. I can't get my baby to sleep so the nurses push me out into the long, narrow hallway and tell me they'll watch her while she screams. I scream too. I'm incoherent, spitting mad, seeing red, screeching down the hallway past the doors of all the other sleeping babies and mothers that this isn't why I came here, I'm not here for them to "train" my baby to sleep, but they won't listen so I try to punch my hand through a solid brick wall.
The SSRIs kick in and make me think every previous anxiety attack was a gentle joke. I cannot pull myself out of the foetal position except to meet my baby's most intense needs. The walls are closing in on me; the air is crushing the life out of me; I cannot breathe. I want to die more than anything. If the kind man on the phone hadn't prepared me for this and the place wasn't designed to eliminate any possibility for self harm, I wouldn't make it through the night. But just to add insult to injury, I contract gastro while this is going on and have to be quarantined. I'm given two choices: send my exclusively breastfed baby home for my husband to sort out along with our other child and give up any hope of continuing to breastfeed her while I am transferred to the regular hospital unit, or go home. I hate this place so much, but the regular hospital ward is my worst nightmare. I call my husband and implore him to pick me up as soon as possible. My dearest friend drives an hour to watch our daughter while he comes to collect me and our baby. Due to my rapid and unexpected discharge, I have no further access to the prescribing psychiatrist and have to manage my meds on my own.
The following months blur, but I'm managing better. Meanwhile, my husband pulls away and we inhabit two separate worlds: Mine wholly centred around the joyfully beguiling little soul rapidly fermenting in our baby; His revolving around an overwhelming workload and our older daughter. My headspace improves with the medication and job satisfaction, while he recedes deeper into his own pit of depression, resentment, and rejection. Our family effectively splits in two.
I begin to find joy again through my work and friends, go off the meds, but by our little one's first birthday my marriage is toxic house of cards and salted wounds. We're so busy and exhausted all the time we have little energy to even fight, but when we do it frightens our daughter. Her behaviour, which has always challenged us, becomes increasingly difficult and we can't agree on how to deal with it. We escape into our own fantasy worlds and cannot meet in the real world at all. Threats of divorce are thrown around with increasing frequency. Then in waltzes a soothsayer.
It starts innocently enough, as most things do, with a flippant remark online to an old acquaintance about the definition of a "happy marriage". I suddenly find the trust, humour, shared interests, and common ground so completely lacking at home streaming through my screen. As my partner becomes ever more dismissive and uninterested, my new "friend" is quick to fill the gaps. To my mind, the case is closed by my husband's demand for a divorce on our dinner date. I stalk off without him and then we scream at each other from across the street. It's ugly. We try to keep up appearances for the sake of our kids and family at Christmas, but the rift is deep.
Over the next few months my anxiety skyrockets as I empty my bucket into my online "relationship". My husband and I separate. I try unsuccessfully to find full-time employment, getting nowhere with two jobs for which I'm incredibly well qualified. I'm gutted and feel my tenuous grip on things slipping. I go to my doctor begging for help to manage the anxiety that physically rips me apart at night and keeps me perpetually on edge during the day. I go back on the SSRIs and into therapy.
My husband starts counselling and taking antidepressants in parallel. Somehow in the shit storm of our separation, we discover our confounding neurodivergence and the pennies begin to drop. I'm an Aspie; he has ADHD; neither one of us is actually an asshole.
I realise he's been hurting for a long time. It's so outside of my nature to be able to give him what he needs or recognise how much he has sacrificed for so many years to try to meet mine. With help from more emotionally intelligent arbiters, we start to remove the distortion of our own lenses and reinterpret each other. He lays himself out to fight for what matters most to him: his family.
All this chaos, all this pain could have been avoided had I been identified as an Aspie earlier in life. There are so many episodes like this (although none quite so awful) throughout my life, all of which I contend would have been ameliorated, if not altogether skipped, had I known, had my family known, had my friends known. I know our struggles make us who we are, but I'm so scarred from this lifetime of brutal internal battles, I feel I hardly have the strength left to enjoy the life I have left.
The Delphic maxim resonates for every human today as it did in the ancient world, but sometimes we don't have an opportunity to truly know ourselves until we are on the brink of loosing everything we love. I have met so many late-diagnosed Spectrumites who were never able to fully grasp their true self through decades of mental health issues, relationship breakdowns, personal crises, and suicide attempts because their Self was buried and maligned from a lifetime of trying to be the square peg in a world of round holes. So I add my voice to the crescendoing chorus of adult Autistics calling for better diagnosis, especially of girls on the spectrum, and acceptance of our differences to improve life-long mental health outcomes for everyone on the spectrum and those who love them.
