Disjointed Heart

I really struggle with the disconnect between how I feel, how I think I feel, and how I think I should feel. This is especially true for nebulous feelings of affection and love, which I'm beginning to realise I experience quite differently than the average bear. 

People often ask me how I can stand to be away from my children and husband so much, but the truth is, it doesn't really bother me. When I'm away, my thoughts aren't with them; there's no pining, no longing, no wishing I were home. When the question is put to me, I mumble awkwardly and try to shift the conversation to how much I love my work and the deep satisfaction it provides. I choke down the guilty feelings and try to scrub away the self-slapped labels of bad mother and bad wife.

The fact is, I sometimes forget all about dearly beloved friends and family for weeks or months, only to have a sudden pang of yearning for them hit me from out of nowhere. My mind can get so caught up in the fantasy worlds in my head or those on the printed page, the real world all but ceases to exist, and along with it, the flesh and blood people I should be loving. I would, more often than not, prefer to be left alone to deeply explore the worlds and relationships of my own design rather than try to navigate the treacherous waters of the ones I inhabit.

This whirlpool of thoughts coalesced into a few verses as I tried to will myself to sleep last night. I was suffocating as my husband's unspoken question, "did you miss me while I was gone?" sucked all the oxygen out of the room, so I sketched out my silent response. However, it's broader than just that one interaction, it can apply to many. Some about which I've written previously, others I haven't. I didn't think it was particularly good, but some writer friends thought differently. So I will preserve it here.

I SO LATE

You leave
But I don't miss you
Although I know I should

You leave 

But I don’t miss you

Although you wish I would

You leave 

But I don’t miss you

I breathe when you are gone

You leave 

But I don’t miss you

I fear you’ve cast me wrong

You leave 

But I don’t miss you

Always begging me to hold

You leave 

But I don’t miss you

Shadowed secrets never told

You leave 

But I don’t miss you

I know that I should try

You leave 

But I don’t miss you

After years I wonder why

You leave 

But I don’t miss you

It always ends this way

You leave 

But I don’t miss you

Now the only choice is stay 

Saying I'm Sorry (*Again*): Part III (Ant)

Cover of: I love you, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I love you, by Kevin Farran

I love you, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I love you. It's a beautiful book title and an apt summary of all my more intimate relationships. If we remove the second comma, my entire love life suddenly falls neatly into one of these two categories. Either I'm apologising to those I love because my love is simply never enough or I'm deeply sorry to someone for ever loving them in the first place. I suppose many of us are often sorry for loving someone when it goes wrong and wish with all our souls we could go back to intercede at some fateful moment past, but for me, the guilt comes for the havoc my loving seems to wreak on others. I feel I'm a tornado in a trailer park: unleashing calamities upon the most vulnerable, innocent and unsuspecting victims of all.

In Part I & II of this series, I explored two formative relationships gone awry because their unresolved questions refuse to release my mind from purgatory. I classify these two intersections under the "I'm sorry I love you" heading. I believe my affections were more burdensome to the recipients than they were worth and generated chaos where there was calm. But now I want to explore a relationship of the "I love you, I'm sorry" variety.

Before I do, however, I need to lapse into a brief interlude to discuss the twined beauty and beast of neurodiverse relationships. As always, I must emphasise that my experience is certainly not universal, but these paired traits I am about to discuss are incredibly common among those on the Autism spectrum. We seem to be given to express most things in extremes, in this case oscillating wildly from unwavering loyalty to suddenly and unapologetically severing ties. It certainly sounds paradoxical and I imagine is the emotional equivalent of a swift kick to the head. 

Loyalty is an oft cited positive Autistic trait. It is a wonderful thing not to be fickle, to be willing to lay down your life or sanity for a cause, an institution, or a friend, but it can also be extraordinarily costly, personally, emotionally, mentally, and physically. Autistics are very vulnerable to manipulative people who learn to use this trait (often conveniently coupled with naïvety) to their advantage. While I haven't discussed this particular topic with many Autistic men, the female identifying portion of the population would resoundingly prefer support and coaching on safety skills in this arena over being "trained" to conform to NT social norms. However, when that loyalty is appropriately bestowed upon a deserving recipient, it is a grand and noble thing.

The flip side of this coin is as insidious on its face and protective in the long run as loyalty is the other way around. While not a diagnostic criteria for ASD, a tendency to abruptly sever ties with little or no explanation is a common question on Autism screening tests. It is often chalked up to black and white thinking, and this is the only explanation that makes it make any sense to me. Otherwise, I have no idea why a switch suddenly flips in my head, telling me to walk away from someone I had deep affections for a moment before and never look back. Even when it hurts so unbearably much I'd rather be hit by a train, only forced proximity and outside intervention can unfurl the clenched fist of rejection once I've made up my mind. It's a pattern I've repeated far more times than I care to remember. I feel deeply sorry in retrospect for every time I've done it, but I had my reasons, they were logical, and I had to stick to them regardless of the consequences. I know this doesn't mean shit to the people I hurt.

I can only see in hindsight that I mattered enough to someone for my hasty departure to cause them suffering. It was only ever after I made up my mind to tarry no longer that their affections became clear enough to register. This has been a brutal source of confusion and misery throughout my life, but I now finally understand from whence this idiosyncrasy springs. I suppose this is why I now feel an ever more intense impulse to go out and say I'm sorry to everyone I ever did this to. Now I can explain it. Now that I understand the thing, I feel like my apology has more weight, is more sincere free from entanglement within my own self confusion. But I'm almost certain no one else gives a flying leap at a rolling donut.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, this unrelenting need to apologise for these transgressions haunts my dreams. While I find myself occasionally wending through my unwaking world to seek forgiveness from some of the minor players in my life, there is one refrain that dominates: seeking absolution from Ant. I beg for it in my dreams because I cannot grant it to myself in the light of day.

My dreams are always intense. Wild and fantastical worlds, complete with colour, sound, and even smells light up my nights and sometimes leave me feeling exhausted when I awake. I don't know whether it's sad, ironic, or just an early red flag I missed that one of the first presents Ant gave me was a dream journal. I thought it was a wonderful present initially, but when he added that I no longer needed to regale him with my nightly adventures as I could enter them in it instead, I was deflated. He was the first and last person to whom I ever tried to fully describe the magical realms of my dream world. So, it is certainly with more than a hint of irony that I now chase him through the hallways of my mind, endlessly trying to explain my actions and beg to resume our friendship.

I want to explain why I couldn't stand having face-to-face conversations to talk about our relationship problems, especially not when he insisted I make so much eye contact. I want to explain why I was so "embarrassingly" over the top at parties and incapable of making respectable small talk. I want to explain why I would invariably blow up and become a raging mess after every social occasion, why I just wanted to stay in bed sometimes even when the sun was shining, why I wanted to be alone with him and not out interacting with others so much of the time it drove him crazy.

I wish I could tell him that I didn't know I was worthy of love and therefore I didn't think I really mattered to him at all. I wish I could tell him that his insistence we share a tightly coupled schedule that allowed me no breathing room when I was completely overwhelmed by people and responsibilities fuelled the deepest burning resentment I'd ever experienced. I wish I could tell him that my suicidal ideation and adulterous fantasies were born out of an overwhelming and very real need for solitude. 

Through the lens of Autism, I can see all these stumbling blocks, inconsequential things to most people, but insurmountable obstacles to me. I am now able to look back and see how the mask I was forced to wear, a mask I'd only just started to don in the year before we met and welded into place with the guidance, tutelage and admonishments of those who "loved me most" during those years we were together, was slowly, silently strangling me. I had to get out to save my life.

I didn't leave because I stopped loving. I didn't leave because I wanted to be with someone else. I didn't leave because I needed something more convenient. I only left a little because I really wanted a cat… I left because I didn't know what I needed and even if I had, I sure as hell didn't know how to ask for it.

So, even though I've said I'm sorry before, and you've professed to forgive me even though it seemed disingenuous, here it is again, flung out into the ether because I don't want to disrupt your life again. As much as it would buoy my heart to count you among my friends in the world again, I sense that is not your wish at all. To you, the past is the past, what's done is done. I wish my brain could work that way too.

Saying I'm Sorry: Part II (Der Komiker)

The arc of some stories is much longer than others. Some people burst into our world like Halley's Comet, lighting up our sky for a brief but eternally memorable moment once in a lifetime, whereas others pass slowly through the month of our existence like a waxing moon, their nearly imperceptible pull only making itself known just before it slips away forever. One such moon rose my first day of high school.

I don't remember precisely the first words der Komiker said to me, but I can almost guarantee they made me laugh. I do remember the layout of the room and the complete bafflement of most of the students when the Frau launched straight into our first German lesson with "ich heiße Frau Schneider, wie heißt du?", but didn't recognise at the time that my immediate comprehension of her words and pantomime said more about my linguistic skills than the inferred stupidity of my classmates. Much to my delight and our teacher's chagrin, der Komiker sat next to me in our science class and kept me laughing for the rest of the year.

If some kindly person had thought to hand my 14-year-old self a checklist of what to look for as the foundation of a healthy relationship, I might have realised as quickly as I'd understood the Frau that der Komiker was ideal boyfriend material. I always felt relaxed and happy around him, I found everything he did and said fascinating, but I only associated attraction and passion for someone with unrequited yearning, so I failed to recognise the gem I'd stumbled upon. It took me nearly three full years to realise the depths of my feelings for him.

Three years is a long time in the life of a teen. Three years is also a very long time to think someone is your best friend even though you rarely see them outside of school, except for the occasional encounter on your way to or from school, or a shared extracurricular activity. This, to my mind, is one of the greatest travesties of not having my social-emotional challenges recognised decades earlier: I have no idea what it means to actually make a friend.

To my way of thinking, a friend was anyone with whom I could share a pleasant and comfortable conversation, a few laughs, maybe an inside joke or two, on more than one occasion. A best friend was someone who kept coming back over the years and had a shared interest or two. Der Komiker was one of the few who ticked both boxes in those tumultuous high school years.

The summer before our Senior year, I took up a new martial art he'd been studying for many years and it struck me that I really wanted to extend the reach of our friendship. I still had no notion of spending much time with my peers outside of school or coordinated activities, as my time was highly over subscribed with work, study, practice, and extracurricular activities. I thought that sharing a locker would cement our friendship and perhaps facilitate its growth into something more.

The year started out normally enough, I was still dating an older guy from the other side of the state and hadn't fully hatched my long-term locker scheme. I also wasn't around school much anymore, as I was taking the bulk of my classes at the university. As someone for whom flying solo is the norm, it  never dawned on me at the time that this might have been socially isolating for my friend to have a perpetually absentee locker mate. But I don't know what caused the schism.

Schism by Panagiotis Kountouras

Shortly after I broke up with my boyfriend at Thanksgiving, der Komiker lit up on my radar like never before. Maybe I'd finally learned enough about crappy relationships to start cluing into better ones, or maybe he clocked me properly over the head during one of our sparring matches, or perhaps the wind just shifted the right way, but suddenly the moon was shining so brightly I could no longer ignore it. I'm sure my behaviour toward him changed because I wanted the nature of our relationship to change, but I had no idea how to go about it. What I was unaware of, was all the other friendships he'd fostered in lieu of a real one with me. The more I tried to draw him into a state of exclusivity with me, the more strongly I repelled him into their fold.

I don't know if there was one particularly egregious faux pas or just a whole series of muddled social niceties, misunderstandings, and over estimations of our loyalties to one another that tipped the balance, but he eventually cut me off completely. Not only did he stop using our shared locker altogether, but he ceased acknowledging my existence. Instead of a friendly 'hello', I was met only with contemptuous looks from his companions as I passed their tight little knot of friends. He was the last link I had to any kind of social life within my high school and he made it explicitly clear that I was not wanted. I cannot even begin to put words to the degree of pain caused by this ostracisation. When I think back on it, I experience a sense of disconnection with my body the likes of which I can only relate to hovering near-death. It is not pleasant.

We graduated and went our separate ways without saying goodbye or even the most cursory reparations. I was heart broken. I'd lost my best friend and I didn't think he even cared.

Then something truly horrendous happened. Death puts all things into stark perspective and the sudden and unexpected death of someone who dramatically changed so many young lives leaves people reeling and reconsidering all kinds of things. It was death that reconnected us, if only tangentially, just momentarily, only just enough to see a crack of light in the shroud of confusion over what happened between us. I have never wished so desperately to attend a memorial service and never regretted so deeply not insisting on doing so. But my mother went in place of her children who were both so moulded by the man a vast community gathered to grieve that day, and der Komiker sought her out, "bounded, not walked, across the gym to get to me!" to ask her how I was. She gave him my newly minted email address and he wrote to me.

I had to ask what happened. I had to tell him how much I missed him and how much it hurt that he rejected me. He was deeply sorry, but he wouldn't explain what happened. He brushed it off as a "stupid misunderstanding". If I knew then how horribly that incomplete explanation would haunt me for the rest of my days, I would have begged for more information because I am fundamentally unable to "just let it go."

We had one brief encounter a little over a year later. I transferred to his university for a multitude of reasons and was walking across campus during a quiet period between terms. I can still hear the widely spaced slaps of his enormous feet bounding not walking up behind me in an attempted sneak attack and see him flying through the air as I spun around to catch him in the act. Once again, he'd made me laugh. We only talked briefly and I never saw him again.

On the surface, one could easily argue that nothing ever happened between us, that it was all in my head. Certainly I'd agree that the less platonic feelings were entirely one-sided and I have no problem owning that, but our friendship seemed so very real to me, there was an undeniable falling out, and he showed in the aftermath that he did value my friendship too. But I cannot make sense of what happened. There is such an agonising sense of loss that accompanies every thought of him, even if it is just for the friend I thought I had.

I cannot help but wonder if things would have been different if my neurological differences had been recognised, accepted, and supported back then. How I might have received more instruction on how to make friends and navigate relationships of all kinds. How I might have had the courage to say, "I do not understand why you're doing/saying that, can you please explain," instead of slinking back into my corner of self doubt and loathing assuming I was simply an unloveable soul. This is why I want things to be different for my daughter, I do not want her lost in this sea of confusion that continues to drown her for 20, 30, 40, ?? years. I want her to seek resolution and answers in the moment instead of letting them bang around in her head until she wants to tear them out by any means possible.

I think this is an important component of Autism awareness/acceptance and the mental health risks that accompany neurological differences. Seemingly small or innocuous things that other people can "just get over" can spiral the Autistic/ND brain into a whirlpool of anxiety and depression, suicidal ideation, or worse. It seems like such a small ask to support the ND community with guidance to gaining closure and NTs to recognising how desperately important it is for us to have this whenever possible. Sometimes the littlest things can make the biggest difference.

Saying I'm Sorry: Part I (Master T)

Beautiful watercolour by kiwitachan

I've written previously about how my ASD diagnosis opened a whole new world of self understanding floating in the alphabet soup of personal experiences I never previously recognised as "things". In the year that has passed since the possibility I could be neurodivergent was first floated, I've had the eye-opening experience of connecting with Autistics and other ND folks from around the world. This has provided ample opportunity to discuss commonalities and differences in how we experience the world. While we are all individuals ("I'm not!" one for the Life of Brian fans…), there are some shared experiences that resonate strongly with nearly all Autistics I've had the pleasure of interacting with. One of these is the overwhelming need for closure that tends to trigger endlessly looping thoughts, clinically described as perseveration.

I imagine that all people have niggling thoughts they simply cannot lay to rest from time to time, but many Autistics report having multitudes of thoughts that continue to echo through the vast hallways of their brains endlessly. It is not uncommon for such thoughts to rip us out of a dead sleep and keep us awake for days, interrupt normal daily activities, or sap the joy from our lives. It can be something as simple as a conversation 25 years ago that didn't go the way we expected, or an entire relationship left in shambles that we would give anything to at least understand, if not repair. In an earlier post, I touched on my own desperate desire to rectify past bungled relationships and felt it was time to move on and let those go, but alas, my brain is like a rusted vice grip, so I will endeavour to write my side of the stories in an attempt to lay my ghosts to rest.

Jewish Headstone by Nikodem Nijaki (wikimedia commons)

There is a picture of me horsing around with my first real boyfriend, snapped by my mom one happy afternoon, that clearly depicts my whole-hearted adoration of him. We're on the couch in my living room, playfully punching each other, I'm wearing a ridiculous hat, and we're both laughing through our pretend acts of aggression. I do not need to look at this photo to remember all the details because it is so clearly emblazoned on my brain as one of the few times in four years of high school I was truly happy.

Master T was a year younger than me and at least a foot taller. Even before he got sick, he was a dangerously skinny kid with the proudest Roman nose and a razor sharp sense of humour, which he could instantly turn against any unwitting adversary at the slightest provocation. To me he was a god.

We met through a high school theatre production, he working back stage while I lapped up the limelight. In the years to come, his prowess on the stage would far surpass mine, but that first season, he seemed content to control the curtains and make cutting remarks at the expense of all the actors. I wanted nothing more than for him to like me, but that desire just made me spout the most insipid utterances when I could think of anything to say at all. Somehow, more by sheer will than any degree of finesse, I got him alone and professed my overpowering attraction to him. This led to a delightful make-out session and us 'going out together', which mostly amounted to him occasionally coming to my house for more kissing.

He never invited me to his house and quickly thwarted any suggestion that we go there. He never included me in anything to do with his friends and would nearly always leave me hanging to meet up with them. I wanted him so badly, but as the weeks went on, he became increasingly distracted and intent on drinking with his friends any time alcohol presented itself. My mind raced through these discrete and incomplete pieces of evidence to conclude that 1) I really didn't mean much to him at all, and 2) he was developing a substance abuse problem at the ripe old age of 15. The first conclusion broke my heart, the second was simply terrifying. I'd grown up on a steady diet of stories about a family friend a few years my senior who was a brilliant and beautiful girl being dragged down by her dead-beat, drug addicted boyfriend. These stories fuelled my rapidly spiralling fears that this was the path I had unwittingly stumbled upon and if I didn't change course quickly, I would be "ruined" as she was (N.B. she ended up becoming a doctor).

I resolutely did not want to break up with Master T, the thought of it crushed me. I wanted to talk to him about his drinking, but I lacked the skills to broach such a delicate topic with anyone, especially someone who left me tongue tied and capable of slicing me to ribbons with an unparalleled caustic tongue. I was also of the mind that no one, especially not him, could actually care about me. I honestly believed it would not bother him one scrap if I simply vaporised and let him be. So, I just stopped talking to him and couldn't even bring myself to look at him in passing because it hurt so much. Twenty five years have passed, and the simple act of writing this brings tears to my eyes and an unbearable tightness in my chest. I can still see him coming toward me from the Senior wing as I approached it and just walking right past.

No one knew it at the time, but Master T was incredibly sick. He knew he was in excruciating pain, but he didn't tell anyone, choosing instead to self medicate with whatever alcohol his friends could get their hands on. My inability to deal with confusing and conflicting signals meant I walked away from someone who made my heart sing when he needed more support than ever. This thought still gnaws away at the corners of my brain far more often than I appreciate. Not long after I left him in a lurch, he was admitted to a distinguished hospital with the most advanced case of his disease they'd ever witnessed in someone his age. He required intensive treatment and was partly disabled from the extensive damage. While I know the disease and its effects are in no way my fault, I have never been able to forgive myself for walking away at that critical time in his life, for my inability to sit with someone else's pain rather than run away from the overwhelming effect it has on me.

A year later, another stage production underway, we were foisted together again. Tensions were high, but my feelings for Master T had only intensified. Now it was his turn to drive and as we sat in a darkened parking lot he wanted answers. Answers I didn't have. Answers for something it would take me decades to completely decipher. I was nearly 30 before I discovered my inability to perceive love and affection from others and on the brink of 40 before I understood the interplay between my neurology and environment that generated that devastating flaw.

We got back together during the production run and I was over the moon at this second chance. I wanted to do it better. I wanted so badly to right the wrongs, but he was only in it for retribution. With cold calculation, he threw back the dish I'd unintentionally served and had his revenge. I can still feel my breath wrenched from my body as he delivered the blow, he didn't want to see me anymore. I can see the grass around me wavering as I made my way unsteadily back across the open field where the new high school now stands. The ache was so palpable and pervasive; it would have hurt less if he'd physically beat me.

The only benefit to holding on so clearly to these painful details is using them as raw materials to weave into something new and beautiful. I'm nearly finished writing a novel in which my main character shares many of my challenges, but is more self aware and better supported. Still, she is not immune to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and the scene in which her boyfriend breaks up with her is based directly on this moment of acute agony in my own anthology of pain.

I thought that writing a friendly post-script to our story could stop the perseverating on my grievous error, but I was wrong. While it did bring me great joy to reconnect with Master T online in recent years, and even more so to talk in person, it did not resolve the final chord still hanging in my mind. Our interactions and conversation steered clear of the past, navigating only the safe waters of the present. I thought this would be enough, to feel absolved in a smile and a snarky joke, but without the chance to ever say "I'm sorry I hurt you, and I forgive you for hurting me" the thoughts play on endless repeat, wearing holes in the carpet of my mind.

It's a complicated thing, the past. It's made even more complicated by the way my brain holds so fiercely to things others can lay to rest. I assume Master T never looses a wink of sleep over this briefest moment of our shared ancient history, but for me it's an interminable wobbly tooth that I cannot excise.

Battles in My Mind (Part II): Depression, Anxiety, PND, and All That Jazz…

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.

You can't always get what you need, but sometimes you get what you said you wanted…

Recently someone said all he ever wanted was to be loved back by a girl in the same way he loved her. On the face of it, it's a sadly sweet sentiment, but examining it more closely it's perplexing.

First, there exists the premise that two people's feelings for each other can be perfectly mirrored by the other. Perhaps it is possible for the complex sine waves of their emotions to intersect or overlap periodically, but to stay in perfect harmony indefinitely defies logic or human capacity. So, maybe this isn't exactly what he meant. Maybe he just wanted to know that her feelings for him were as intense and overwhelming and utterly confusing for her as his feelings for her were for him. Fair enough.

But here's the thing, hers were. She told him so repeatedly and in no uncertain terms. But he wanted so much more than just to be loved back. Nothing she gave him was ever enough. Her time, her affection, her trust, her sanity, and nearly her life, but somehow he was still left lamenting that she didn't love him enough. She nearly sacrificed everything for him, but then he had the audacity to throw it back in her face, accuse her of terrible unkindness, and claim he never actually loved her anyway.

This behaviour seems rather psychotic, or at the very least completely and utterly irrational. But what is love if not irrationality manifest? Like a swarm of bees no longer content within the overly crowded confines of the hive, it buzzes about directionless, homeless, awaiting its queen. If she fails to appear, it dies.

The agony we experience when we wish to share another's experience but are unable is visceral. Thinking we are alone, feeling utterly isolated and unable to connect becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy as our tiny tendrils of attachment whither and recoil back into the dark recesses of our delicate souls. We feel forlorn and forget that others continue to hold us in their minds and hearts even when they are not with us or actively engaged. Strength comes from the constant inner mantras of self-love that does not hang on external stanchions.

Echoes of love left behind through blurred boundaries

I'm not particularly good at boundaries. I struggle with the nuance between 'acquaintance' and 'friend'; even using the German Bekannte never really helped me define these shades of grey. Hence, I've been badly burned many times by opening myself up completely and unreservedly to people I thought were Friends, who didn't have quite the same affinity for me. Wearing my heart on my sleeve has won me some true blue friends, but it has also left me open to derision and stabs in the back. I now realise this challenge is strongly tied to my inability to correctly read people and social situations.

I've been contemplating this issue in the context of Dunbar's number, which quantifies the number of meaningful relationship a person can maintain. (See: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-greatest-number-of-friends-a-person-can-have ) Listening to Dr. Dunbar explain his theory and the evidence to support it, I found myself both baffled and intrigued. The first time I heard an interview with him, it was prior to identifying myself as an Aspien and I thought it was simply outrageous to claim this to be a universal limiting truth as it felt so far removed from my own experience. Re-listening to the interview post Aspie-awakening, I had a completely different take on his ideas through the Autistic lens.

Dunbar posits (with a good deal of historical and social data to back him up) that humans have always been limited to about 150 people in their social network. This requires more specific defining in today's world of vast online social networks: these are people with whom one can maintain "stable interpersonal relationships" and is limited by the size of the neocortex. Now, I'm not a cognitive scientist, but it seems logical to draw the conclusion that if the neocortex is directly involved in one's ability to maintain stable interpersonal relationships, then this is somewhere we might look to find significant differences between NT and ND individuals.

In his interview with Dr Dunbar on the NPR Podcast, TED Radio Hour, Guy Raz describes this network of ~150 people as a series of widening circles with ever diminishing intensity. Each wider circle contains more people with whom we (ostensibly) are able to maintain a certain level of friendship. At the outer reaches of this circle, we reach a thinning edge where we pass from people we truly know and can trust in the present to all the others who are known to us in a lesser capacity or too far in the past to still be worthwhile. Dunbar explains that this limit exists because of the space those in the inner-most circles occupy in our brains.

I contemplated this "brain space" paradigm in light of my own experience. My first reaction was that I most certainly have more than 150 people within what I would consider to be a "stable interpersonal relationship", with whom I could pick up wherever we left off however many months/years/decades ago. I placed that number far closer to 400 and wondered why this might be so. Then it slowly dawned on me that maybe this is where my Autistic brain starts to get things "wrong" socially.

I believe that I most likely have a very skewed notion of what constitutes a close relationship and I must admit that I find it nearly impossible to contemplate that people I have not seen in many years may have moved on and changed. I started to recognise that the somewhat shocked/maybe irked, "um, hi, what do you want?" response of "close friends" I hadn't seen or been in contact with for many years might well be a function of the lack of reciprocity in holding others in my head and heart. I have never really been able to understand how someone I felt so close to in the past could just move on when there had been no falling out of any sort.

I discussed this all with my husband and his take was that I indeed have very few people within those first few realms of "close friends". He suggested that what I interpret as a strong friendship really just boils down to people putting up with my quirks and allowing me to bounce back into their life whenever I have a mind to do so. So, perhaps I simply spread out my neocortex space very thinly to an enormous network of people because I have absolutely no idea how to actually form strong, resilient friendships. This is both sad and kind of a special skill (in a weird, slightly antisocial way) because I often think of myself as a "node" connecting many different people I know only tangentially with other people they deeply connect with.

Another blurry boundary for me is the surface between other's emotional bubbles and my own. If people's emotions were objects in a painting, my world would look like Monet's Water Lilies. I tend to experience other's emotions as my own, which is odd at best and horribly confusing and upsetting at worst. The notion that Aspies don't have feelings or lack empathy is patently false. If anything, we may have unbuffered receptors of the emotional world around us, which can be completely overwhelming if not kept in check or blocked out completely. Walking around like the emotional equivalent of an open gaping wound often leads to an involuntary emotional system shut-down (hello, appearing emotionless!) or a meltdown (cue looking mentally unstable!) when it's all just too much.

This unfortunate combination of poor boundary conditions is the basis for the most painful series of human interactions in my life, the ramifications of which continually reverberate through both my conscious and unconscious mind. It creates a situation that makes it almost impossible for me to maintain my Self when I feel genuinely close to someone. I slide rapidly into the character they need/want me to be. I dissociate like salt in water, my atoms forgetting the crucial bonds within my whole.

My pattern is to lurch along in this disassociated state for a while before some crisis alerts me that I'm at risk of irrevocable loss. In a panicked act of self-preservation, I dump the baby out with the bath water and flee. I shut down all feelings of love, friendship, kinship, closeness, togetherness, etc. that were shared between us and steel myself with the hardened belief that it was a one-way farce all along and that the other person will be better off/happier without me. Some time later, I discover that I caused the other person immense pain and I feel confused and ashamed. I want to mend the friendship and apologise deeply and sincerely, but I'm convinced that all trust is obliterated, that there is no redemption for me in their eyes.

My dreams are haunted by endless echos of apologies to those I've hurt with my perceived callousness. I chase old loves and friends through abandoned hallways, across oceans, down ski slopes and unfathomable other worlds calling out pleas for forgiveness, assuring them I still love them, always will, because loss of love isn't why I left. I left because I felt too much. I couldn't handle so much feeling. I didn't know what to do with it all. It stole my tongue and left me deaf and dumb. My dreams are the only place the words will ever come out because my rational mind knows that by now time has pushed me beyond the edge of their neocortex into a footnote of friendships past.

Some might say I just want closure or to apologise to make myself feel better, but I truly wish I could go back and wipe away the hurt I inflicted, explain that none of it was intentional, put that little piece of my heart in a box and give it back to the person to whom it belongs and ask that they carry me as I do them. As I come into accepting my authentic autistic self, there's an overwhelming urge to go back to those old lost loves and friends and offer up my "disability" as an explanation for the pain I caused, but I think that would just do more damage than good. The only way is forward.