How to build a delicate ship
And then dismantle it
My external status has changed. It’s no longer mother of delightfully difficult neurodivergent children, a beautiful team spinning on a kaleidoscope of autism, ADHD, dyslexia, dyspraxia and a collective tendency to shout ‘Pig!’ at random intervals. (Note: I do not find that adorable).
It’s autistic ADHD mother of such abundance, such infuriating stroppy and wilful bandits (Oh! How I love them! Oh! How I struggle so much with them!)
My internal status: Well, it looks somewhat different peering out from a shifted perspective on my difficulties (gifts!), depression (sensitivity!), over-thinking (intuition!), noise-intolerance (surfer of silence!), selective mutism (but she can write!), meltdowns (she needs certain conditions to function optimally and they involve almost no outer stimulation, and good luck with that, mother of children who sporadically shout Pig! that she is), bluntness (but she must tell the truth at all times!) and minimal-to-zero executive function (read: all previous posts relating to the theme ‘How does life actually work?’).
My brain hurts. It’s on the verge of breaking free but I won’t quite let it yet. I don’t know why. Perhaps there is a holding period post-diagnosis.
I am looking out at the world with the same brain I’ve always had, so limited in some ways, so wildly absorbent, vital and (is there an adjective to describe a stallion that is straining to gallop fiercely through endless beautiful mountains and valleys?) bursting to spillage point with unexpressed emotion.
With an unexpressed life.
I am a sludgy drain, choking on the lifelong debris of trying to stuff my square and jaggedy self into a perfect round hole. But I’ve managed partly: I live in that hole, I just had to cut off a few limbs to fit in there. These limbs are strewn about me, discarded far back into the past, dismembered parts futilely holding onto the decisions I have made about how to live.
I know - I know - I can get these discarded parts back.
Nobody I’ve told about my autism diagnosis has been very interested at all. Family, especially. Is that good? Is that bad? I think: There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so, as Hamlet, that tortured young man who accompanied me through the best of my worst teenage years, said.
It is a such a deep and profound relief to drop the story of mental illness I have been carrying around all of my life. It is an indescribable comfort to know that I am not defective, that I am not stupid, I did not miss the lesson on how the fuck things work when the bearded man was booming out his heavenly lecture on how to perform effectively on earth.
It is permission - finally - to love myself. It is freedom. It is acceptance.
Why do labels matter?
Why is it necessary that I write here that I am autistic, that I have ADHD?
Well, imagine an internal scale. On one side sits the rage, sorrows, disappointments, regrets and embarrassment of not being able to ‘do’ life according to the rules I perceive: rules that are always changing anyway. You would, until recently enough, have found me almost unable to breathe under this side of the scale, struggling to get up. The bottom of the scale had me pinned down. It felt insurmountable.
On the other side of the scale, sits earnest and reputable psychologists, the weighty glut of reliable information on neurodivergence, neurologists, pyschiatrists and finally, diagnosis. For me, these have brought the scale back to neutral.
That is akin to a rebirth.
I have managed to crawl out from underneath of my own self-imposed labels of shit and I have begun to walk. I have begun to run. And I will begin to fly.
In time, in life, in love - in the indecipherable journey of the fragile soul - such piffling things as a scale fade away into nothing more than another signpost to continue on the road.
Now, though, I can travel without the extra weight.
The ship is not delicate. The ship is just built differently.