The Dark Passenger

 In the series Dexter, the main character had a name for the dark impulses that drove him to kill. (Incidentally, Michael C. Hall and I share the same birthdate. He's probably only hours older than me.)

Sometimes when the universe creates coincidences like that it is important to listen. And what, you may ask, could I possibly learn from a TV serial killer antihero? 

Dexter is constantly haunted by his "dark passenger" and goes to great lengths to hide its influence to appear normal to the world. This is the same mission of so many autistic people. I watched Dexter before I had any idea about my own secret and I found the character so interesting for the routines and rituals he performed to maintain control. But it was the characterization of the dark passenger that fascinated me most. 

Seeing the world from his perspective was familiar to me. He worked hard to appear "normal" but often he seemed niave or just a little strange. But he was very much in control of his world when alone.

To me, autism often feels like there is some switch or inner glitch that just needs to be exorcised to be "normal". But it can never be removed because it is about a brain with fundamentally different wiring. 

In my case, stress makes me loose the ability to speak. I depend on routine to maintain mental balance. Unexpected changes take time to switch gears and can manifest as confusion or disorientation. I have encyclopedic knowledge of certain television shows, paranormal subjects and a few "-ologies". I have an insatiable fascination with charts and maps, astronomy, geology, giant robots and spaceships but the humans who use them are usually an afterthought. I am easily embarrassed and feel shame at the drop of a hat. 

I find it hard to maintain friendships because the ettiquette involved escapes my comprehension. I can be easily annoyed by repetitive sounds like telephones and sometimes have a short fuse when an obvious solution is dismissed. 

I also regularly can recall and relive times when I made a mistake or hurt somebody's feelings or just acted weird because I didn't know that I was not acting socially acceptable. 

To be honest, most social conventions escape me. I follow them for because it is expected, but they seem unnecessary and sometimes counter productive. It is gratifying when I get them right. Most of the time, though, I remain quiet and observant and I never go first unless I am confident of what I am doing. 

A New Paradigm

I had assumed PTSD was what was holding me back from accomplishing what I wanted. Most of the symptoms are also found in other conditions. Autism, ADHD, and others can have a similar effect. Interestingly, depression seems to be caused by everything. 

Years earlier, while seeking out possible causes for my mood, I found a site that had various tests to take online with results tallied in realtime. 

In my desperation I took a few, including the autism exam. I don't remember the results but I remember it reporting I had some traits. 

I have had personal contact with autistic individuals and I couldn't see any commonality. Occasionally, as a kid I wondered about what we used to call Aspergers Syndrome. Small personality traits sometimes showed parallels but I attributed it to converging i symptoms.  

I still labored under the idea that autism was something others had. Until I watched a TED talk given by Jessica McCabe. What she described hit me like a shockwave. I could relate to almost everything she described feeling. 

As I expanded my research one thing stood out to me. So many people with Autism described feeling like an ALIEN on earth. I felt like I was an observer and everything was foreign to me. I had always felt this way. I would write stories about characters who came from other planets and even drew a comic strip with that same premise.

When I was old enough to drive I would search for quiet rural locations to sit and secretly hope the mothership would come back for me. I went through various scenarios5 how I could have been switched at birth or even harboring an alien entity. 

Because this world made no sense and I couldn't see how I was a part of it.

The revelation I might be autistic lit a desire to learn for certain. I went online and found as many aitism screening tests as I could. England and Australia seem the most aware of their autistic citizens and had sections on their healthcare websites desicated to education and testing. The U.S. didn't have as many resources but there were national advocacy groups. 

In all I must have taken a dozen tests, variations, and sometimes multiple times. All came back with the same conclusion....

(Yes. One of my own screen cap results.)

On the one hand, it was a bit of a shock. Some part of me wondered, based on what I had seen on television. But, that was TV. Real life is much different....

Right?

Acceptance or Rejection

Faced with the evidence of possible Autism. I decided to take a while to research before I came to any conclusions. 

As usual, my first stop was the library. It helped that I was working at one at the time. I found and checked out books by Temple Grandin, one of the most famous autistic persons with a successful career. 

Her books were enlightening. As I mentioned in a earlier post I had misconceptions about the abilities of people with autism. I knew of her from a book layout I had done for a publishing company years earlier. 

What I didn't realize was how little her autism really affected the way she lived her life. If anything, it was the people around her and their preconceptions that made her life difficult. But she navigated her way around them and proved her differences and focus made her just as valuable as any member of their team.

Her inventions made the beef industry more humane and ensured that the animals were not harmed or unnecessarily stressed. And her insights learned from her autism are what enabled her to see a better way.

This was the beginning of a journey of revelation and new understanding. I began to see stories of people who, had they not told anyone, would never have been suspected of being autistic. 

I watched an episode of a favorite science channel on YouTube where the host simply sat and described what it was like to be autistic and have a career on camera. 

Another video by a filmmaker explained the challenges of meeting new people when all he wanted to do was run. 

There were also videos by people who learned late in life that they were autistic and never knew. Many described how difficult their lives were before and what adjustments made a difference. For them, the diagnosis explained years of confusion and alienation.

There is a surprising. Buy Occasionally, a YouTuber would make a, "You Know You're Autistic When...." or a "Top 20 Traits"  video and I could sit and tick off the ways I matched what they described. What surprised me most were the people who, if they had never said anything, would not seem autistic at all.

That is one of the challenges of "low needs" autism. It presents outwardly like anybody but the internal world is so much more chaotic. Many people can mask the symptoms enough to function in the regular world but it takes a heavy toll over time. Especially for those who don't realize they are masking.

At first, I didn't think I was masking at all, and that made me think I couldn't possibly be autistic. But as I learned more and saw the ways I mask, I began to understand better.

The revelation hit me one day after I had spent 3 years generally researching and I finally accepted the thought. For a few weeks I went around discovering all the little internal and external tells. I began to look back at my life and childhood and could point out specific events and times when I should have been clear.

Then, with the realization came the grief for living for so long not knowing and being lost and confused by the rest of the world. I was angry for the lost time and profoundly sad. My akward interactons and strange behaviors suddenly came into glaring focus.

It is a common miscomception that autistic people lack emotion or compassion. That is not true. On more that one occasion I have been accused, by family no less, of being too sensitive. I once lost a favorite stuffed animal at a swapmeet. It made me sad to think about it sometimes and that emotion was used as an example of my "weakness".

My compassion keeps me from getting too involved in issues because I become to emotionally affected. I once considered Native American studies for a minor but found myself more and more depressed by the history of the native tribes after European contact. By the time I finished my first class I was distraught and extremely angry.

Sometimes songs or movies get me. I once cried because a baby giant monster was reunited with it's even larger parents. I was blubbering so much nobody could understand what was wrong with me.

        The offending scene from Gappa: the Triphibian Monster. (Sniff sniff).

With the sadness there was also a profound sense of peace. I had finally found my answer. Before, my life was like assembling a puzzle with vanishingly small pieces without any idea what the final picture was supposed to look like. 

I had finally found the beat up and scratched box with the completed picture. Now it was up to me to put it all together.

Experience and Discovery

 To recap, I recently came to the revelation I may be autistic. What complicates it is that I am over 50 and all these years I have compensated.... to a point. 

You can only tread water for so long before you tire and start drowning. (And I can't swim, either.) Another way of looking at it is that a glass of water might be easy enough to hold but constantly hold it at arms length and that glass eventually becomes impossibly heavy for a tired limb. 

I was able to work through the depression most of the time, but maintaining that constant level of alert stretched my psyche to breaking.  

I had been maintaining a moderate level of functional and plowed through the times I couldn't. There were a few times the depression got bad enough where I couldn't talk to anybody. Working with the public was a special kind of torture.

Once it got bad enough that I started planning how to end it all with as little fuss as possible. I had a plan but no timeline. Fortunately/unfortunately, it was hard to find the motivation to do anything. 

The thing that pulled me out of it long enough to see a little light was my wife. She came to me one day and asked if I still wanted us to be together. The question was surprising and shocking and it snapped me out enough to realize I needed help. 

In my head, I fought hard to keep the world out but in the process I was hurting those closest to me. I had no choice but to try and find a way to make it better. 

Depression is a selfish condition. It shrinks your world and distills it down to the emotional and physical pain. It alters your perception of reality until you can't see anything else. 

Compared to others, I always felt my depression was less severe. I could still function and do the bare basics to live. A few others I have known, who had depression, didn't survive it.

Depression can also alter your behavior in surprising ways. To some, outwardly I might have seemed aloof or arrogant.  Not wanting to talk to anyone and avoiding social events sometimes makes others think you are angry or antisocial. Internally, I was struggling with fear and self doubt. I was still able to function but most days it was just enough to get the necessities done. 

Finding help can be a problem. The few places that existed were already full or was not covered by my insurance. There was no such thing as mental health apps then, so I needed to find a physician. Help came from a mental health clinic in the form of SSRIs (Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors) plural. The psychiatrist prescribed two antidepressants and an anti-anxiety pill.

I had taken antidepressants before in college and the fact I had two at the same time was disconcerting. 

Gradually I felt better. My interactions with people remained uncomfortable but I could function much better. There were still issues that, I would later learn, were beyond my control.

Though I was feeling better, I still struggled. Things I wanted to do still felt impossible to me. I couldn't understand why small things were such a struggle but I could give so much effort to a job I was less and less happy with.

For a short time I saw a therapist to probe what I couldn't understand. I still felt like I was getting in my own way and while the sessions were productive, I still wasn't rooting out the core issue. I knew something wasn't right and I had doubts it was completely PTSD like I had been told.

Like with so many things, the answer came to me completely by surprise....

Something New Every Day

 It started with a TED Talk about a woman who dealt with anxiety and how she discovered she was autistic. During her talk she spoke about feelings and perceptions I could completely relate to. My curiousity led me to other YouTubers with similarly familiar testimonies. But what made me sit up and take notice was when one person said they felt like an alien and just wanted to go home.

My interest was awakened so I did what I usually do and looked on Google for more information. I limited myself to reputable sites like Mayo Clinic, Royal British Health and another government based system in Australia. 

Then I found the self tests used for diagnostic screening. I must hve taken a dozen different ones and some multiple times. Every one said the same thing. My responses indicated some autistic traits and I might benefit from talking to a medical professional.

It was becomg impossible to ignore the truth. I just might be able to count myself among the millions of people with late diagnosis autism. It certainly explained a great many things about my life up to then.

First I had to dispell the mistaken notions about what autism looks like. Working at a  library I had seen plenty of autistic kids and many had trouble with social interaction and became easily overwhelmed in noisy amd busy environments. But I'm past 50 years old. How could I have made it this far without knowing?

When I took a serious look at my life and what I could point to as autistic traits, It became more and more evident that the akwardness and discomfort I constantly felt were clear indicators. 

I have always felt a bit out of sync with the rest of the world. Now I have a hint why. I just wish I had known sooner. Maybe I could have learned strategies to make life a little easier. At the very least I would have been able to point to neurodiversity as a reason for why I saw things the way I did. It also might have helped with the years of depression, medications, and false diagnoses. 

One psychiatrist labeled me with PTSD and I agreed to a point. A therapist I spoke with seemed to think that the mental road block was something I could will away with awareness of my abilities and positie reinforcement. None of it fit rght until I applied the Autism diiscovery. 

NEXT: What sealed it for me.