Turns Out I Might Be Autistic After 52 Years

I missed the signs for most of my life

It wasn’t the size of the line that bothered me.

I am a patient person and bring a book with me almost everywhere I go, so it wasn’t the eight-person line that rankled my nerves.

It was the people in line.

They were the world’s chattiest people.

They blabbed on and on about their 99-year-old father or elderly mother to people they didn’t know before they got in line.

Blab, blab, blab. They kept blabbing.

I wanted them to shut up because they kept spewing words with no break between them.

I resented that I couldn’t hear myself think as my thoughts turned into a fog, and it was at that moment I realized something that’s taken me 52 years to come to discover about myself.

I may be autistic.

A new lens to look through

Yes, it took standing in a line while shopping for my mom and many other signs in the past few years to realize that I may be autistic.

I’ve always viewed myself as an introvert.

That’s why I feel exhausted after being around people. I feel like blood has been drained from my body at the end of my day as a high school English teacher. My head throbs.

I have an emotional hangover for an hour or two after work, and I need solitude just to let my brain to return back to its normal state.

This is why I enjoyed teaching “remotely” so much during the pandemic because I didn’t miss being in a classroom full of students all day or the sensory overload from all the social expectations that come with being a teacher.

Teaching remotely was more congruent with my personality and now I see the reason for my exhaustion is my solitary autistic nature.

Practicing social distancing was easy for me during the pandemic. While social interaction has been a challenge for the extroverts, the reduction of social interaction has been like a trip to the Super Bowl for me: a huge relief.

My autistic traits

What I’ve learned about myself in the extra alone time during the pandemic is something that’s eluded me for most of my whole life and that is I have many autistic traits. These are not good or bad, but they just represent who I am.

Here are a few of my autistic traits:

• I prefer being alone than with other people or one-on-one interaction than in a group.
• I can laser focus on tasks like writing that I enjoy for hours without interruption.
• I can’t multi-task such as when is my wife talks to me while I am on the phone
• I have a lifelong difficulty maintaining friendships, and I’m content now reading, writing, and spending time with myself.
• I get numbness or a brain fog after I socialize with people for a few hours.
• Conversations are exhausting for me.
• I escape by listening to the same song over and over (my autistic stimming), comforted by the familiarity of the lyrics or beats.
• I have sensory sensitivity to any loud noises (lawn blowers, car horns, motorcycles, loud kids, or environments with a lot of noise).
• I have very obsessive with interests such as writing, preferring to engage in doing what I love than activities I find less interesting.
• I get mentally flooded easily by intense, emotional arguments and can’t think.

Autism Explains Who I Am

Autism explains almost everything about me I couldn’t previously explain. It explains why I like to take showers to shut myself off from the sensory overload I experience from my work.

Autism explains why I didn’t want to gather in person again, and why I am grateful for having an auto-immune condition that puts me at risk of being in a classroom during Covid, and I’m being paid by using my sick days for 17 years.

It explains why I feel the pandemic and my auto-immune condition have been one of the greatest blessings in my life — because without this alone time I would have gone of masking and burning and not knowing the reason why.

I would’ve kept teaching without discovering my autistic self, never embracing the self I’ve been my whole life, but I couldn’t understand because autism frequently goes undiagnosed among high-functioning kids and/or adults.

The discovery of my autistic nature has given me the chance to see what it’s like to be me, and I want to finally let my true self just be.

That means more quiet and solitude.

Less noise and social interaction.

Perhaps, a possible career change.

My wife noticed my autism first

My wife was the first to notice the autistic traits in me, but she usually said this whenever she was frustrated at me when I waited until the last minute to communicate something to her or I didn’t share something with her because I knew she would ask me a zillion questions.

And that would be exhausting for to answer.

In her article, “Turns Out I’ve Been Autistic All This Time (Part I),” Serenity Jean says many autistic men are now “coming out” to connect the dots in being closer to the autistic “female phenotype,” in terms of masking their nature.

That’s me — I am the Female Phenotype — masking my whole life, and now I’m coming out as an autistic male and it feels good to finally be able to say I am or may be autistic, not for anyone else, but solely for my sake.

A formal assessment may down the road, but my soul already knows I’m autistic, beautifully and wonderfully made by God (Psalm 139:14).

I’ve read many books throughout the years, always searching to find some missing piece to the puzzle of my life that would unlock a better understanding of myself and vocation, but I could never find the missing piece until now.

Autism.

Masking my entire life

What I’ve come to realize about myself is that I’ve been masking my entire life as a teacher. Teaching has always felt like I am playing some TV character role that I must remain in for 90-minute intervals with six-minute intermissions

It’s taken me 17 years as a teacher to realize I’ve been “masking.” Masking is autistic vernacular for “camouflaging” your true self and trying to “mimic” others to fit into a neurotypical (non-autistic) environment — a process that I’ve found debilitating because it depletes all of my energy and social resources within a few hours.

Masking is why I think it’s been hard for me to recognize my autistic traits for so long because I’m good at copying the social behavior of neurotypical people, and it’s what I’ve needed to do to perform the role of being a teacher.

Now I carefully manage my energy through the day, don’t not allow any students to hang out in my classroom during lunch, never answer my phone when the secretary calls to ask me to sub a class in my prep period because I know it may push me over my autistic threshold.

Looking for clues in my childhood

I wasn’t the savant in “Rain Man,” the representation of autism in movies that is what most people know about autism. I played basketball, football, and baseball as a kid, every sport my older brother, Mike, played.

I didn’t speak coherently until almost five, according to my mom, and went to a Speech-Language Pathologist, but in the 1970’s only the obvious cases of autism were diagnosed, not high-functioning kids who excelled at sports.

As a kid, I rarely initiated friendships. All my friendships or girlfriends were the result of other kids or girls initiating with me — and it was only the fact I was involved in sports that I was able to make friends during my childhoodz

I was happiest shooting hoops after school at the college gym before my dad picked me up. I’ve replaced this solitary activity as an adult with writing, and during the pandemic, I’ve been able to be that person again by spending long hours in the bathroom alone and writing.

Yeah, the bathroom is my writing office.

I want to find a way to be able to be that person every day in my life — my artfully autistic self who loves to write, but whatever path my life takes from this point forward, I’m glad to have finally embraced my neurodivergent self.

I am hitting the Start Over button in my life by becoming my autistic self. It’s the same person I’ve always been but I’m embracing him as me.

Thank you for reading my story. Here is a checklist of less-recognized autistic traits if you think you may be on the autism spectrum.

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