I’m in my mid thirties and only now am I coming to terms with my neurodivergence. I’m one of the lucky people to have access to health care and the time to educate myself on the topics of neurodiversity and mental health.

And with all of that, I have only recently started to take notice of how my childhood experience affected my perception of people and how the world works.

I won’t go into intense details for several reasons, but long-story short - my parents were deeply unwell and in forcing me to hide and overlook their mental health, I currently have to spend time trying to sort out what I now find acceptable, healthy, and loving.

Being on the spectrum and lacking the resources to navigate an allistic world was hard enough. I had to make an approximation of normal without having consistent practice with it.

I feel sad that I’m in my thirties and still seek out the approval of people I don’t know. Especially when those people exist in spaces where it’s not safe for them to know me, like online, or at bigoted in-person spaces.

I don’t feel like I got a chance to make human mistakes and now that I’m on my own for the first time in my life, I lack the tools and connections to safely unlearn unhealthy behaviors and learn new healthy behaviors.

I know I’m not the only one, and I’m glad that this comm is around to meet and troubleshoot solutions.

Sometimes I feel like I don’t understand a joke in a post and I’m afraid to lose the game of chicken, becoming the first person to ask if a person was serious.

Sometimes I’ll check my comments for up votes to make sure I’m not being cruel to someone without knowing.

I was convinced I was cruel and carrying that belief has made me so vulnerable to manipulation. I’ve had to create a mask that convinces people that I’m in on the joke. That I know better and any mistake I make could conceivably be intentional. I can’t feel vulnerable and I look at people as a collection of warnings and threats instead of human beings who might treat me like I’m human too. I have an exit plan on the off chance somebody sees through my mask, because that was the most dangerous thing in my childhood.

Already feeling out of touch with my body, I had to exist outside of myself to make sure that I didn’t present any image that reflected poorly on my parents. Precious bandwidth dedicated to something I don’t really even care about. My family was shitty and they should feel shitty, but I have my attention focused outward on how others see me. Because that’s what they policed. I didn’t get to pay attention to my inner world, the outer world, or the real ways the two interacted.

My heart goes out to any kid that’s experienced trauma, but this is the way I experienced it - as part of a community underserved by an allistic society that prioritizes the aesthetics of a nuclear family.

But knowing all this, I can feel some comfort in the fact that I found a community here where I can share my experiences and contribute to a world that values and people like me.