Awareness to Acceptance
I feel there is a powerful eye opening journey when you discover you are neurodivergent. A journey that I will freely admit I am most definitely still on and actually endeavour to push the boundaries.
My realisation that I was autistic gave me a heightened awareness of self.
This heightened awareness of self, is a massive part of your training as a psychotherapist or counsellor. For me, it was an incredibly intense four-year study into myself and how I relate to others, then how others relate to me. Throw in a realisation of being neurodivergent into that study of self, is like seeing your whole life through new lenses. You can certainly see clearer, things absolutely make sense, but trying to walk anywhere is a stability nightmare at first. It’s fragile and quite scary.
This clearer awareness showed me all the areas where I had beaten myself up for behaving, feeling or communicating a certain way. Where I felt other, different, weird, not included, shunned, and shamed. All these areas were subtle, the build up of them was massive and had cocooned me in a shroud of tough, jaggedy, and sometimes painful material. Now, with this awareness and the continued research focused mind, with the help of other autistic educators and advocates, I started to feel different. I started to not carry out that self-shaming that I had picked up from others. I started to embrace who I really was and most importantly what I really needed.
I very quickly realised that my need to be seen as ‘normal’ was of absolute detriment to my mental and physical health. It always had been. I had tried to maintain a social group, I had tried to hold down a job that felt like it was killing me, and I tried to conform to the expected normality in all parts of my life. But time and time again, I ended up burnt out. I had to take months of work, or I just left jobs because I couldn’t even get out of bed. I would mask and drink huge amounts of alcohol just to have a conversation with people. So many things to ‘fit in’ and ‘keep up’.
Awareness and this clarity of self is one step. The biggest step is acceptance. I found I was increasingly aware of my true authentic self but to accept it felt like a huge hurdle. Small steps..
It’s 5pm. I have had a sensory overload all day and now I am cooking 3 different meals for the family with all very specific cooking requests! My children are playing 2 different games, very loudly. I have trucks crashing into my feet. The oven fan feels like it is drilling into my soul. The tele is playing an awful tune and blaring out a contrasting conversation over my children’s noise. I woke up to my tolerance sink already being half full - it is now flooding the house! I can feel it all. I am now super aware of it all and I am super aware of why I feel the way I do as the anger and anxiety reach boiling point.
What I didn’t do in the past, was accept those feelings and accept that this was me and accept that I needed help. I was still striving to be ‘normal’. To ‘cope’. I still had that shroud of spiky material piercing my skin - controlling me. That shroud was not my own, but had been put there by others, by society, by the ‘normalisation constructs’.
Now, more often than not I do listen to and accept the authentic me. I definitely don’t tune into that all the time. As I said, I am on a forever learning journey. I now wear my headphones blasting Muse or Led Zeppelin into my skull from 5pm - 6pm to drown out some of the contrasting noises. My husband now knows, that by 5pm, I will have likely reached my sensory tolerance and he needs to monitor the chaos of the kitchen truck smash. I also try my best to take a break from everything, even just for 10 minutes, to close my eyes/stim/regulate.
It is these little acceptances that start to make the difference. Not just in making me get through the evening without having a meltdown, but it is an acceptance of who I authentically am. That it is perfectly ok to need and to ask for help. That I am ok to need that. That I am ok.
You (and me.. ) are worth accepting!
“Normality” is experienced as a continuous energy drain, as all the many things that demand conscious attention, which actively need to be pushed and held in place to fit under the bell curve – ultimately a futile endeavour. Rather sooner than later, you crash and burn, under circumstances that are considered “normal” within the religion of the bell curve”.
(Jorn Bettin, 2023 - https://neuroclastic.com/life-without-the-false-god-of-normality/#the-neurodiversity-movement-is-a-human-rights-struggle)
