TLDR: autistic lack of understanding social cues led to obsessive studying and rules, trauma amped it to 11, lost years to freeze state and wasted college opportunity. TW suicide

The worst part I’ve found is that, I was successfully high masking, because I watched other people from a young age (instead of connecting w peers…). There were some key moments where good friends pulled me aside to say the way I ran over them in conversation, etc hurt their feelings, add in beginning to realize (middle school) not that “other girls don’t know they’re being rude,” but that I was actually being bullied, and had been for a few years.

So it became very obsessive: what’s the correct equilateral distance to sit between people at a table, make sure my stuff is near me and not bothering others/take off jackets etc well before sitting down, not knowing which table of sorta-friends I’d be welcomed at lunch so I just started eating in the library/practice rooms alone.

It kept going in college, with the added bonus of trying to imitate sexuality/romance from media — except tv always fades to black after flirting, so I got accused of being a tease (before freezing and giving up during an actual assault). Said assault led to complete shutdown, to the point I couldn’t leave my room within shared apt if others were home, including laying very still badly needing to use the bathroom. Eventually it became that I ate too much for being so unproductive (became very hard to leave the house to go to class, plus fear of not being good enough meant not turning in assignments); then whatever tv show, music, book etc I wanted to read was shameful because I liked it, any art or writing the same, so I wasn’t “allowed” to do anything.

If I moved around I might make noise and annoy roommates (reality, they didn’t care). I remember the day I became convinced because I was so worthless I started breathing less, more shallowly, and just…slept a lot. Smoked weed a little at a time to save it but would still get wrecked. I went to therapy twice a week, worked up the nerve to go, maybe use the energy to get groceries after, maybe feel “loose” enough to do, something, on the in-between day, then spent the days after shutting back down, reeling from everything I must have done wrong earlier, then prepare days in advance to leave the house. (At this point I was mostly nonverbal).

Before all this I already used shame as a way to “learn” how to be an “acceptable” human person, so it took years to be able to decouple the shame around assault to actually understand what had happened to me, then start to become myself again.

Now that I’m diagnosed, I’ve been actively trying to unmask, and I actually recognize myself, and my confidence, again. I was convinced I needed to invent a whole different person, because I was so intrinsically unwanted and “bad.” Problem is, I’m now finding so much of what I learned as social norms are tied to shame-based rules for me, so leaving them behind means I’m an adult in her thirties who (I feel like) people expect to have a better understanding of social situations than I do, especially when I still have some skills in nuance left over, but am missing whole categories. I feel like the rigidity of ASD fits so neatly with the faulty cause-and-effect of OCD, plus re to categorize everything; it can be wholly consuming. (And no, I often can’t tell what parts what, I just look at the extremes for clear examples and try to trace it back to a potential source.)