Debugging the Spectrum

One of my favorite movies is Goodfellas.

In one of the final scenes of the film, Henry Hill testifies against the Mob. He describes his excessive, materialistic life before he was arrested.

Then he looks at the camera and says “Now it’s all over”.

Although I’ve never been in the Mafia, I recently had my “It’s all over” moment. 

First, a bit of background.

I’m a male in my late 30s living in a Midwest city in the US. Today, I work in the tech industry. On the surface, I don’t have a bad life. I’m married to a wife of many years who I love, and we have pets that we adore. We have a decent household income.  We have a decent house with a reasonable mortgage.   By traditional metrics, we are doing well.

Yet it didn’t feel that way. Something has felt “wrong” for a  long time.  I am analytical and tentative to a fault. It took me over a decade to find peace in admitting that I hate the traditional Western career. I do not share the values of modern corporate society.  I spent years afraid of letting down others around me by not being able to meet their material needs, but instead I was isolated, exhausted, and letting down the very people who I had catastrophized about letting down.

Although I studied an artistic field in college, I pursued a non artistic career out of school. I  did this for a number of factors, all being logistical. I’m unsure what the right choice was then, but the end result, years later, was an increasingly empty existence.

My only way to cope with the pressure of feeling like I had no option but to keep pushing forward in this career was either unhealthy stimulants or emotional blunting to the extent I felt nothing. This was severely impacting my relationships. I was losing the ability to even experience anything other than an endless drive to pursue the next thing.

I had used the “superpower” of neurodivergence (more on that shortly) – hyperfocus and the ability to go deeply into a field of study  – to achieve a pretty decent level of career accomplishment.

The only problem was, I didn’t care. The couple of times I have traveled abroad, people with far less were far happier.

As with anything, there have been ups and downs.

The ups:

• COVID WFH: you mean I don’t have to be visible and ready at a moment’s notice to have a verbal conversation? SIGN ME UP
• My work: I legitimately enjoy the work I do.

But the downs:

• You’ll only be doing that meaningful work if it suits the employer. No matter how much they speak of professional development, your role is a cog in a machine. If that machine needs you to do way (or less) more than your role suggests, that’s what you’ll be doing.
• As I said, I’m neurodivergent. I love good conversation, but I hate small talk, especially when I can sense that the other person doesn’t care any more than I do. The amount of energy that those sorts of exchanges have drained out of me is immeasurable.
• I’ve lost so much energy from shutting down to cope with stress and from expending every ounce before 5 PM that I’ve been unable to enjoy hobbies or leisure even when I’m doing them. I’m always either recovering or thinking about the next goal.
• Despite a strong relationship with my wife, I was there for her in the logistical sense – I would even make any accommodation I needed to for defined, objective needs. But I really didn’t know what a functional relationship dynamic looks like.
• This has left me a hollowed out human – or  humanoid at least – objectively successful but unable to get anything positive out of my existence. Coincidentally, I see this in a lot of world leaders. They’ve reached every “peak” they could have imagined and they’ve “won”, yet they are obviously miserable.
• I kept myself so vigilantly on alert all the time to “be a good adult” and never mess up any detail that I was starting to lose cognitive abilities. I was forgetting things. I was frequently getting tension headaches and other signs of severe stress.

About the neurodivergence – I had all the typical early life experiences of autistic adults. I never quite understood conversation timing. As a kid, sometimes I’d get lucky and “succeed” in conversation, but I often wouldn’t. I’ve always had attention issues. I often feel “trapped in my mind”, especially when fatigued, as if I’m interacting with others through an intermediate layer of information processing. I recently was told by two qualified professionals that I’m almost certainly autistic. That initiated a new journey of self discovery beginning about a year ago.  There was also a massive amount of PTSD I was hanging onto unaware.

About six months into this journey, I was dealing with a lot before a major illness made me question and re-evaluate a lot of things. During my convalescence, I saw for the first time how miserable I had been, and how miserable my peers were. I really, truly faced, for the first time, all the ways that living for societal expectations and not for myself was destroying my life and my wife’s.

I had to make a change.

It’s easy to make important decisions in moments of duress. For this reason, my “change” has 100 percent been internal.  Rather than quitting my job today and declaring the new me to the world, I am starting from the inside .

We are conditioned to immediately find the right job to “fix” our burnout. Sometimes that’s wise. But my career does and should not define me, and it’s going to be a secondary focus.

What I am focusing on is undoing years of neglecting myself and those around me. My focus is:

• Learning to be unashamedly human
• Learning to be a better spouse by being emotionally present
• Learning to appreciate the moment
• Learning to navigate the world with a brain that works a little bit differently
• ….Learning about trains? a joke

As far as career, I have no line in the sand date after which I’m out. What I do know is that this is not the long term path for me.  I also know how cold and broken Western society has become, and I no longer have to wrestle with my conscience when others try to gaslight me into prioritizing loyalty to a company over myself or my loved ones. I do not have a career death wish, but I will no longer be complicit. When I see something, I will say something. If that causes consequences, so be it.  We’re all going to die, and we’re all going to have regrets. Basic needs matter, and I recognize the economic privilege of living in the Western world despite its flaws, but it’s pretty safe to say that no one regrets not spending more time with their “office family” when they’re on their death bed.  Knowing you contributed to someone’s mistreatment, however…that lingers.

Between my autistic traits and my profession, I like analogies. I will use a tech analogy.

I am debugging.  Right now, the code is rough, but I at least have some logs working.  I know now some of the time what’s wrong. Now, it’s time to use all that data.  This was never about “arriving”.  It was about filling my years on this earth with fulfillment for myself and love toward others while having fulfilling experiences along the way. If you don’t figure that part out, eventually…you will implode. Put it off and push forward, and you will still implode…just later and much more dramatically. 

So this blog is a place to get my thoughts out while I figure out who I am.  I’ll try to post regularly, but in the spirit of focusing on the process and not the outcome, I’m not going to follow a schedule.  Posts may vary, but topics will include late diagnosed adult autism, navigating modern professional life, and PTSD. I will reference personal experiences, but I will keep details generic enough to protect my privacy.

I made this a blog in case it can be helpful to anyone else.

If I was able to generate income writing content while hopefully helping people, that’s amazing, but I’m realistic, and this is first and foremost a therapeutic outlet and nothing else.

So, welcome to anyone who has read this far!