'Has anyone ever told you that you are autistic?'

An interesting thing happened to me a few weeks ago. I found out I’m autistic.

Out of school for so long I can barely remember it, married for 21 years, and decades into a journalism career, I learn this.

I was seeing a therapist. She was my third one in a couple of months.

The first one spoke at length in the first session about her own life and fundamentalist Christianity, then gave me 19 CBT worksheets to fill out. I fired her before the second session.

I saw the second therapist for four sessions. We seemed to be getting along pretty well, and he even made me laugh when he talked so fast his dentures popped out. But then he suggested I reframe my lifelong people-pleasing and compliance as autonomy. He said when someone was walking all over me, I should tell myself that I could walk away, but was choosing to stay out of strength, consideration, or even “sacrifice” (his word). That didn't feel right to me, so I fired him, too.

The online therapy system then matched me to a third professional.

About five minutes into the first session, she said: “Has anyone ever told you that you are autistic?” She recognized it right away. First, because she’s a therapist and is trained to look for these things. But more importantly, because she’s autistic, too.

I can’t say it was a complete surprise that something was a little different about me.

I always thought it was a quirky, introverted personality. But autism is not what I expected.

Soon it started making sense:

• The feeling that I speak a different language, like my brain has to listen to a sentence one word at a time and then put it back together. Having to understand all the bits and pieces of a problem before I can see what it’s about.
• Never feeling like an insider with other guys. At worst, I’m “the priest” they'll apologize to for cursing or farting. At best, I’m “the mascot,” valued but shielded from the rough and tumble of being a full peer.
• The tone in my speaking that somehow makes people think my decisions are rough drafts. Pauses when I’m trying to get my thoughts into words. The sullen look people say I wear when I’m processing what they’ve said. Being told I’m too direct, and then by the same people that I’m too indirect. Looking up, down or sideways when I talk because that's the only way I can get the words out. Having to turn off the TV to talk on the phone or turn down the car radio to drive through an intersection.
• And then there's the other side of it. Being the human dictionary, encyclopedia and word expert in the newsroom – answering questions so fast that people ask me instead of looking things up. Knowing instantly when grammar or spelling is wrong but not being able to explain why. And my superpower: looking at a wall, door or just about anything else and being able to find the exact center without even thinking about it.

A NEW DIMENSION

While a lot more things make sense now, the past month has been rough for me.

I started going to a therapist because of a gnawing feeling that I wasn’t grown up yet, even though I’ve functionally been an adult for decades. A sense that people didn’t treat me like a grown-ass man but someone to be guided, sheltered and even constrained for my own good.

I thought it was probably part of the trauma that I went through as a boy – being a hero-child in a dysfunctional family with an abusive alcoholic mother. Trauma that isolated me in my formative years, so I never got the socialization from peers that’s so important for individuation.

And that’s surely part of the story.

But the autism adds a whole new dimension.

It helps explain why people interpreted my differences as reasons to shelter me, guide me, and treat my decisions as provisional.

It seems that just about everyone around me has always known there was something different about me. Maybe they didn’t know it was autism, but they knew it was something.

But I never knew what I was up against.

And after a while, I constrained my autonomy myself, lowered my expectations, lived inside a closed ecosystem. I didn’t know I was doing that. I thought that was just the way everyone lived.

Then I started looking at my life. Really looking at it and comparing it to other men my age. And I realized something was terribly wrong.

And that’s why I started seeing a therapist.

This blog is about breaking free from that small world and finally living as the man I've been all along.

I have a substantial life behind me – many years lost to compliance and appeasement.

But I also have a life ahead of me, and I want to know what I can do with it.

I intend to find out.

Unprotected, unshielded and facing the world on my own, with the dignity of taking risks.

The results may vary. But they are mine.

That seems like a pretty good place to begin.