unmasked

Is anyone still reading this failed experiment?

So here’s what happened – I essentially had a mental breakdown. Well, “having” is a better word. I feel some respite and relief in this particular moment but it is very touch and go.

Here are the highlights:

• Something happened, part of a pattern in which people I believed I was very close to decide I’m intolerable / rude / insensitive / a bad friend or person, feel that way secretly, then share it with me under circumstances that devastate me existentially.

• I was too strung out to weather this blow. I am still unable to weather it or even deal with it beyond redirecting myself away from it.

• In fact, I immediately started preparing to flee Atlanta for a few months because I knew that if I stayed in that environment my life would be at risk. When I have the suicidal feelings I cannot get them to go away, and I cannot get myself to not act on them… I can only redirect them to a less permanent escape. (Note: The reasons I have told people I moved out of Atlanta are true, they are just not the whole story.)

• I quit my synagogue job. I wound down my in-house secondment (the term was up anyway). I told all my law firm colleagues that I was going to live from New York for a few months to try to determine if this fee-sharing model was going to work for me.

• I decided to get a neurospychiatric assessment; I had wondered about autism occasionally but had largely been dismissive of it for various reasons, various things I didn’t think fit. But I was desperate enough at that moment to throw myself over to experts.

• It came back with an autism diagnosis.

(Note: part of me thought it would come back confirming whatever I asked them to evaluate, because people who pay for neuropsychiatric evaluations are expecting that, right? Kind of like when you ask your doctor about reasonable accommodations? But part of me … really didn’t, after I took the test, and after I asked my dad to be the “informant” and he did it, but said he didn’t feel qualified to do it and also that I didn’t read to him as autistic.

I think I figured the test would confirm ADHD (which I was diagnosed with at around 30), and maybe rule out autism? I don’t know what I was expecting. All I can say is that when they gave me the debrief and said that my evaluation confirmed autism but not ADHD (the initial eval said that my exec function deficits were part of the autism), I felt sort of like I felt after the first time Trump was elected. Yeah, I went into that election thinking it was going to happen when most other people didn’t! but still wasn’t prepared emotionally for it to be true.

Then again… as I learn about autism more… it’s cracking me up to look at two paragraphs of me struggling to describe my own emotions (an autistic trait).)

• Now I’m in New York trying to (1) make sense of all of this (2) turn it into some kind of a boot camp experience where I can go back to my family a functional person who suffers less (3) also get my splinteered career back on track.

The past several weeks have been some of the most challenging of my life, and honestly this past year has been challenging but I at least believed I knew who I was and had gotten past the worst of my existential crises. I made the right call to get the F out of Atlanta, I’ve been dealing with having gotten this diagnosis and the diagnosis not resonating / clicking fully with me. I met with a therapist who specializes in adult neurodivergence today, though, and for the first time I felt like maybe it’s starting to click, maybe this is what’s been going on the whole time. I finally feel (am allowing myself to feel?) a tiny bit of that relief and validation that “late diagnosed” autistic individuals talk about. The therapist I met with today gave me hope that maybe there is an explanation… an understanding what is going on with me that I have never felt before.

Anyway. That’s what happened to the 5 am club. I suppose it turned into a “join Equinox and get a personal trainer plus a LOT of therapists in hopes that I can tolerate one of them” club. And luckily the therapist I met today seems promising.

I want to write about all this, but maybe not here… because this blog is still called “5amclub” and that feels stupid? And because this doesn’t allow for comment posting, so I am probably going to go back to blogger. I already wrote one blogger post but it is just SO absurd I don’t want to share it with anyone. Maybe I’ll keep writing on top of that one and then eventually post the whole thing. I don’t know. Or maybe I’ll just keep writing here.