Walking Away From Intergenerational Trauma

A possible - probable - excerpt from my upcoming memoir.

It’s been a year since I’ve spoken to either of my parents. 

It was in the midst of understanding myself, for the first time, as an autistic person. I had very recently, at 37.5 years old, received my official diagnosis, and my entire world changed. I was finally able to put a great deal of myself into context - context that was sorely needed for my self-esteem, self-love, happiness, belonging, ease, comfort and sense of direction. If you’ve read my other writing, (or if you’ve gone through this yourself) you’ll know just how intense and unyielding this process of learning you’re neurodivergent after an entire life of believing you’re a broken neurotypical is. It is extremely relieving, but there is also an immense amount of grieving. I could spend a lot of time exploring the intersections between relief and grief, and I will someday - but not now. 

It explained so much - why I struggled with the things I did as a child, teenager and younger adult, my learning disabilities (and simultaneously my gifts, as I am considered a twice exceptional autist, meaning learning disabilities and ‘genius-level’ gifts), my extreme social strain and chameleonic nature in social circles, my ability to mask but the persistent exhaustion behind it that overflowed sometimes in the form of meltdowns (that of course I didn’t know were meltdowns - I just felt I was losing control of myself, and others didn’t understand them either). My extreme sensitivity to certain sounds, lights, textures, smells, tastes - my very ‘samefood’ diet. My hyper-focus and encyclopedic-level knowledge on certain subjects (as a child: dinosaurs, the freight ships I used to see out my bedroom window, hockey teams, 90s and early 2000s bands, then later, Lord of the Rings lore, etc). My struggles with holding down ‘regular’ jobs and how unbelievably anxious I would get in every single situation that would require me to remember how to be social, sell a product and / or deal with money. How, no matter how many jobs I tried or how much I attempted to make it work, I just couldn’t do it. How, over time, it felt that I was broken beyond repair. Over the course of my life people had given up on me. And it started with my parents.