I thought I'd break my posting duck and post in here.
I started therapy a year ago and have been on a voyage of personal discovery ever since.
Two months into the therapy, my therapist (a clinical psychologist) said, "it is clear that you are a neurodivergent person trying to navigate a neurotypical world."
I was taken aback, as neurodivergence is and was not something I'd ever considered — neither about myself nor in life in general.
Since then, the notion has been dipping in and out of my consciousness. Some days, when I think about the possibility — which looks likely, the more I learn — the more it makes sense. I look back on 41 years of life and think, "so *that's* why I behaved like that/felt like that" and it's as if a detective finding the culprit in an ongoing case of depression, anxiety, need for autonomy, rejection dysphoria, lack of eye contact, aversion from this and attraction to that. It's fascinating.
Especially interesting to me this week and last is the general sense of ... I don't know how to phrase it, as the concept is vague even in notion — a sense of unease that has permeated my entire life.
It is especially bad about structure and institutions (school, workplaces) but permeates beyond that. Like I am subject to forces, pressures, that are just ... out there. I don't mean in an X-Files sense: I just mean I've always felt, most of the time, albeit with occasional rays of sunshine, under a cloud or a ceiling, or pushed along subtly somehow against my innate will.
Again, I don't have the words to put to it, as I don't yet have the thoughts to put to it — but hopefully with time that will come as it will take shape in my mind. (But if anyone here has already done the workings-out and I can copy their work, so much the better!)
I'm due an ASD assessment within the next 4 months.
It is galling and satisfying to appreciate the unknown fear felt throughout life is because I perceive the world in ways substantially different from those around me — a world shaped by neurotypical homo sapiens, doing as our species has en masse evolved to do, into which my thoughts and behaviours don't comfortably slot.
I am starting to think now that I feel fear a lot of the time because of inherent discomfort with regards to uncertainty, which no amount of therapy or medication or self-talk will ever root out. Also perhaps because of environments, or lights and sounds, or the imposition of schedules, or even what and how people say the things to me they do — things that the neurotypical perceive as just fine, but to me are abrupt or rude or upsetting.
(And that's not even to get into masking and social settings and the pondering that my outward personality — possibly my inward one, too, as I've come to know it — has been fabricated to fit into whatever milieu I happen to be have been inhabiting at that stage of life. Perhaps all of my interests in, say, sport or food, have been developed to "get along" in a social setting, and in fact have no inherent value or meaning to the real me at all. It's really quite hard to unpick.)
