I’m doing this for me. And that feels really good. I’ve always loved writing. I’ve always appreciated that I had the ability to take the jumbled mess that was in my head and make it make sense when it was outside of my head. But for a long time, I wrote to prove something to other people—to prove something to people who didn’t need anything proven to them. I wrote not to make sense of the chaos in my brain, but rather to justify the chaos in my brain. I wrote to put my pain on display, as if to say, “I can do this with my pain, and therefore I am worth something.”
I didn’t learn from my pain when I wrote about it in the past. I soaked in my pain. I let it fester and become my identity. My identity was to be the broken person who was trying so desperately to be fixed. I was someone who tried. I was someone who openly apologized for who they were. I was always working on something—trying to fix something that I felt was inherently flawed within me.
Not anymore. This is just for me. I want to keep track of the lessons I learn and the gifts that are bestowed upon me as I continue to embrace my Autism Spectrum Disorder diagnosis. It has changed my life for the better, and I want a place to document all the “better.”
Even though this is for me, I’m dedicating it to all the people who loved me before I could love myself. I wouldn’t be doing this now if it weren’t for their love for me.
This little couplet formed in my head when I was thinking about what to write in my first post:
“God bless the ones who loved me through the pain,
When I felt I couldn’t be myself without a heavy dose of shame.”