When I was in the depths of trying to understand myself and what I was going through, trying to come to terms with having lived a life knowing so little about myself, I told one of my grandchildren offhandedly, “People will tell you that pain helps make you stronger... don’t believe them.”
Looking back now, I realize how wrong I was.
I think I knew better at the time, but I was probably at the lowest point in my life. I was coming to terms with the fact that I had spent a significant portion of my life deferring to others, letting them make decisions because I didn’t trust myself.
I was taught as a child to ignore everything about myself, and that comes at a steep cost. My parents couldn’t see or understand the pain and discomfort I felt. Because they couldn’t understand it, they unintentionally taught me that what I was feeling wasn’t real, or at the very least didn’t matter.
I think they took the somewhat common tactic of “let them cry it out.” What I learned from that was that my distress wasn’t important and that I shouldn’t trust what I was feeling. I learned to defer to other people instead. That left me vulnerable to manipulation throughout much of my life because I came to assume that other people probably understood what I needed better than I did.
I was realizing that everything I thought I liked was in question because so many of my choices had been made based on what I thought others wanted or needed. If they thought something was good, it probably was.
I trusted people whom I shouldn’t have, and while I was in these depths, some of the people I considered close friends basically reiterated what my parents had taught me.
They told me that autism was just a label and that I should simply ignore it. What I was experiencing wasn’t important or real. I just needed professional help.
Despite my firm conviction that I was autistic, and despite my trying to explain how it had affected my life, they didn’t think it was important. When I finally decided to try to address my lifelong anxiety and, after talking to my doctor, was prescribed Xanax, they told me I didn’t need that and how dangerous it was.
Eventually, they took me to dinner to have an “intervention.”
At this dinner, they told me that I needed professional help. By the end of the dinner, I had agreed to find a therapist.
A short time later, I forwarded a video of someone explaining how autistic people can be diagnosed with conditions such as depression, anxiety, BPD, bipolar disorder, and others without the underlying autism being recognized. Autistic people can certainly experience these conditions independently as well, but when autism goes unrecognized, treating accompanying symptoms without understanding the autistic person underneath them can miss an important part of what is happening.
I had experienced something similar myself when I had initially tried to talk to a therapist years earlier about ADHD.
My “friend” told me that they didn’t think I had any idea what I was talking about.
At this point, I had spent years digging into autism and trying to understand how it had affected me, and I was quite sure I knew what I was talking about.
This gave me the strength to push back.
I told them I was going to take a break and work on myself. I didn’t have the bandwidth to maintain that friendship and also heal the way I needed to, but I told them to let me know if they needed my help and I’d see what I could do.
At this point they doubled down and told me I needed them and didn’t know what I was doing. They continued by saying that now they were the real victim because they were going to have to deal with the loss of their best friend.
I have to say, I’m thankful that they did that.
I told them I was done. They wouldn’t hear from me again.
I had known this person and their family for many years and had almost always gone along with what they said. I deferred to them, thinking they had my best interests at heart, and because I had never learned to trust myself, I allowed them to dictate things.
Cutting these people out of my life was, in retrospect, one of the key things that allowed me to move forward and finally take ownership of my life.
They had been my primary social outlet, so this left me particularly isolated, but it also gave me space to find myself and continue to gain understanding.
I was taught many times over the course of my life that I needed to solve things myself, and it is still the only way I truly feel comfortable. Intellectually, I know that’s not necessarily healthy, but it’s what I know and what I can count on. It may take a bit longer, but I usually end up with a deeper understanding.
I’m also much less inclined now to outsource my decisions, or my understanding of myself, to people who don’t know me as well as I know myself.
What is often described as autistic burnout had become a major part of what I was experiencing, and it seemed particularly intense as I began coming to terms with being autistic so late in life.
As I started acknowledging things I had ignored or suppressed for years, I also began experiencing what autistic people sometimes describe as “skill regression,” where things that once seemed relatively easy suddenly become much harder.
I was fortunate to be working in a position that allowed me the flexibility to set my own schedule with limited direct oversight, and that helped. But I soon realized I was at a breaking point and needed dedicated time to focus on myself and heal.
I started looking for options and considered applying for disability, but that didn’t seem possible. I didn’t have anything physically wrong with me and I was able to work. Surely they would deny me.
My 401(k) seemed like the only option, and since I had just turned 55, I could withdraw from it without the usual early-withdrawal penalty.
I soon scheduled my “retirement.”
I knew the money likely wouldn’t last forever, but it would give me room to breathe.
I was making the most consequential financial decision of my life, but it was my decision.
I wasn’t outsourcing it.
Now I understand the value of pain.
It’s not that it makes you stronger, but that it can finally break the mask you were never meant to wear.
For autistic people, pain often surfaces where we’ve been forced to hide ourselves the most. If you give it space, not to fix you, but to hear what it’s been trying to say, it can guide you back to parts of yourself you had to abandon just to survive.
That’s how it begins to make you whole again.
About the Author
The author is a late-recognized AuDHD writer, retired technology operations leader, systems thinker, father and grandfather living on the California coast. After decades spent solving technical and organizational problems for others, he now writes about systems that are harder to see: masking, self-trust, family memory, and the ways people are shaped by the explanations others construct about them. His work combines personal narrative with analytical inquiry, trying to distinguish what is known from what is inferred without pretending that uncertainty makes lived experience unreal.
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