Autism

Ouch.

On the plus side, I'm sitting here in middle age after spending several years putting constant daily effort into reverse engineering the instruction manual for this weird AuDHD scratch-and-dent brain I found myself with, and I have a son in elementary school who acts EXACTLY like me.

It gives me a unique satisfaction and adds a dimension to my relationship with him, being the one person on earth who has any understanding of his day to day issues and preferences. I hope to make it an "it ends with us" situation for all the related mental anguish as well as the loud angry conservative environments my wife and I grew up in.

When I was growing up I had to hide all that or my school and parents would force me to go to therapy and then put me on a random new medication every month.

I was terrified I was going to get institutionalized if I didn't act as normal as I was capable of. I had multiple friends go through this. One of my friends almost killed himself while being forced to try a new antipsychotic for four weeks.

I hope kids these days feel a lot less pressure than my generation did about all that stuff.

All the coping and socializing I did that inevitably lead me to poor choices and behaviors that I couldn’t tell where wrong or cringey at the time and now I’m stuck with pretty much only those memories of all the fun times i was having back then?

Probably still wouldn’t take it back but fuuuccckkk

I ended up with adult "friends" who were putting up just as big a front as me, probably also autistic in many cases really, but very far from any sort of acceptance of that. But I believed that everyone was like this, others were just better at it than me, so I never questioned a lot of things.

Once I reached paragraph 2 and began to act on that, well, they have scattered to the winds. Though to be fair, I did move an hour away from everyone I have known, though for me it's just pragmatic; I want to avoid the food riots (or possible Troubles, if the Usians go ahead and invade us; it will go as well for them as it did for the British in Ireland).

I wear a slightly pinching ear cuff that reminds me to stop pretending, personally

more like i was forced to hide all my mental issues by my abusive mother so i could adhere to her (extremely high) standards of social acceptance

The me of my teens would be more likely to hide in a cabin in the woods than I would

I was never able to do that unfortunately

Fuck.