Sharing from the heart
This post feels incredibly vulnerable for me to write and it has been cooking for some time, it might even be the hardest thing to date that I’m sharing about me to the world. It has felt hard to know how to express it, coupled with writing being the most challenging way to express myself many reasons, not least because of lack of education and dyslexia. I want to share about my neurodiversity and a specific aspect of autism which I have come to understand in myself over the past 2 years. It has turned my life upside down and inside out.
And just so I get this one covered off now, no it’s not a new thing or a trend I fancy. I have had autism and ADHD (audhd) all my life from a small child and have struggled hugely from it all my life without knowing what it was. The only difference now is that I have understanding of it and this means that I can begin to finds different ways of navigating it that might make things a little less difficult for me and new possibilities which I deeply long for. Personally I believe that neurodiversity is rooted in C-PTSD (complex developmental trauma) and also inherited ancestral trauma both in family lines and cultural collective history and I know that’s a controversial thing to say, just my opinion and I know it to be true for me both inherited as well as my actual childhood 
It has taken me a long time to be ready to share about it. Mostly because of the shame I feel due to societal judgements of it. I am though what’s called highly functioning audhd.
I have spent the last 2 years going very deep into how AUDHD operates in me and it has been one hell of a journey. Quite possibly the deepest and most profound one of my life so far. Way more than all the therapy and trauma work surprisingly. Seeing how so much of what I struggle with is not because I haven’t done enough therapy or not tried hard enough (school reports and own internalised judgements of myself) but because my brain is wired so differently. Last time I counted my running total of ‘symptoms’ was about 64. It seems incredible to me how I could get to age 59 and not ever had anyone suggest to me that I may have audhd. And as the journey to understanding myself has unfolded the grief has also unfolded like a tsunami. All consuming and it has taken me to the bottom of the well. It’s a grief that is in part the pain of the shear daily struggle and masking, opportunities throughout my whole life that I have not been able to follow through on, the loneliness of it and empathy for the parts of me that has for so many decades beaten myself up on a daily basis for ‘not being able to dot dot dot”. It’s been a slow process of learning about it and just when I think I have uncovered all there is to uncover I find more….Of course there are also aspects of my autism that has given me incredible gifts and I love these.
I’m not going to go into the entire list of things I live with daily – the reason for this post is to share about a specific aspect because it is the one that has been most painful to me and it relates to how people see me or experience me and I want to change this and mend any unintentional hurt I have caused as a result of my audhd.
The specific aspects I have in quite extreme forms related to the point of this post are:
~ Congenital prosopagnosia (face blindness)
~ Context dependent memory (Only able to remember things when they are in the same place and situation)
~ Fragmented episodic memory (timelines and people get muddled/wrong)
~ Chronic shyness (I know this seems like a contradiction for someone who does public speaking but it’s a different thing, too long to explain here)
~ Inability to create small talk/initial connecting conversation (and even worse with no structure or ‘rules’ for social engagement)
Any one of these on their own would make it very difficult to navigate new connections and or re seeing the same person again just on a personal level but add into the mix being a public figure, it’s the perfect storm. This is at social gatherings, in the spiritual / workshop world and especially festivals and camps, really anywhere other than at home or with close friends, family and my beloved. Its because I do not have wiring that knows how to file a person face in my memory banks. I just don’t have the pathways in my brain. An example of this is that if the person I spoke to in a café at a festival said hello to me even 10 minutes later (or the next day) I would not have any idea that I met them or spoke to them. Especially if they are wearing different clothes, or different hair style, have put on glasses etc. I would need to know where we met and what we spoke about and what they were wearing. I might then be able to remember but often not even then. And this can continue to happen with that same person many times before I am able to build memory for them to be able to ‘file’ them in my memory bank and keep them there. But then if I don’t see them for 6 months or so and they saw me in the street in a different context and different clothes and they said hello I would most likely have no clue who they were. It’s a bit like being in that old film ‘Groundhog Day’ (for those old enough to recall it)
The reason I am wanting to share about this difficulty specifically here is because I have been so deep in grief about my struggle with these social skills because over the years and decades of being a well-known person I now know that there are so many of you who have met me, maybe personally or through my work who have no idea I am autistic (I didn’t know either) and have thought that when I see you for a second, third or even 10th time assume I know who you are and that I am deliberately ignoring you or blanking you. Leaving you feeling like I am some kind of aloof cow, or stuck up bitch or any number of similar things, that I am rude, impolite or think your beneath me (all things that have been expressed to me in recent times by dear caring friends, since being on this learning curve) It also makes me quite tentative about connecting ‘out and about’ as I am constantly navigating how the interaction will play out, so people then feel me as quite cold and unfriendly, when it really just because I am so scared of hurting or harming people that I tend to avoid trying.
And the grief I feel about all this is immense. The idea that all these years people have thought this about me when it could not be further from the truth. It is simply the case that I have not realised that we had met before. I do understand that this must be very difficult to understand if you do not suffer from the same thing. It has been quite a journey for me to understand it myself !! like how can this be, how could I have spent 60 years with this and not known. Well of course I knew as I was living it daily, but it just showed up as me being in a total panic and freeze in the moment and either pretending I know you and saying hello but then needing to get a way fast as I won’t know what to say as I don’t know how I know you. Or the other aspect is avoiding talking or connecting with people at all because I don’t know how to make it work or make small talk, I literally freeze on the spot and my brain shuts down and I have no access to the pre frontol cortex.
I am not saying this to defend anything or wanting sympathy. The intention for this post it to try and mend harm done and that what I want you to know if you are someone who has had this experience with me, to know it is not personal and inside I want desperately to simply be able to connect and feel at ease. Maybe I never will but I have been seeing how being more honest in the moment (now I known what is going on) means that my nervous system can feel a little less in panic and freeze and I am able to connect a little more.
I know there will also be lots of you who on reading this may identify with what I am sharing and I think most of us struggle to some degree with the things I am talking about but for an autistic / AUHD person it is on a whole different level and I so want people to accept and believe my experience otherwise I continue to feel gaslighted, invisible and isolated and like it’s just that I “need to make more effort, or it’s a skill I can learn if I try” the thing is it is not something I can learn as it’s the blueprint of my brain and it cannot be changed. Accepting this going forwards in my life is proving very very difficult and painful and has and is taking me at times to some pretty despairing feelings.
I want to apologise to anyone who has been on the receiving end of what I just described and has felt hurt. It breaks my heart to think for one second that you to think that I don’t care. Please know I care and long to connect, I just have limited wiring for doing it the way society says we should.
The deep rooted connection...
I can connect deeply when my heart and being are ignited and both me and you are in the zone or deep and real. Small talk makes me want to run for the hills – we have so little time and I want to dive in and get open as soon as possible. It’s why I do the work I do…. I am so blessed to have an incredible partner who sees me and fully accepts and loves me in all my weird ways along with amazing close and deep friends in my life which I treasure. Without this my life would look very different and quite isolated I imagine.
There is so much more I could share but this is already a lot and it’s incomplete but my request is that you don’t poke holes in what I have shared and that you can hear from your heart what my heart wants you to know and that maybe going forwards it may feel easier as a result.
I am practicing saying in the moment that I need help to remember and it is making things easier. I am blown away by how much people want to help and that it does make a difference. For those of you who have worked with me in my held spaces and then felt baffled as to why I then seem to ‘ignore’ you when we met later or seemed to not remember you. Please know that this is no way means that what we shared meant nothing or that I don’t care about you, I just need to help finding the file to access all the beauty we shared.
Conversely, I am a deeply spiritual person who feels at the deepest level (both a blessing and a curse at times) I have razor sharp memory for important moments of conversation or connection, for energy, for sensing and reading humans at the deepest level. At a soul level, in fact for seeing deeper into people and feeling their hearts, often in ways they have not felt themselves. I also feel deeply what is going on in the collective field, at the level of spiritual evolution and at a global level. I am a seer and very psychic, I read energy and am a strong empath. I have huge capacity to stay focused and present with a loving heart, which is why I can do the work I do at such depth, it’s kind of like a ‘rain man’ gift. And when I see someone again the deep space of inner work I will recall them fully and all that we shared and experienced together, just not always when I see them in the street for a hello. This is why I work the way I do …and….due to this gift I also can get overwhelmed and need to retreat from connecting outside of these deep experiences of holding and put them ‘in a safe place’ for when I am just in the day to day otherwise my system would go into overload. I want to be in service to humanity to not only my own healing but to others as best I can. My work is the one place I flourish and can be all of who I am as there is form and structure and the whole point of workshops is to be deep and real so I am at home in this environment. One might think that choosing to do the work I do with these aspects of autism would be the worst idea and it’s true, it is the worst idea, had I known back them what I know now I may not of chosen the path I am on. But I don’t regret it and I love my calling both at a spiritual level and the work I do in the world and will continue with it as long as I can.
Next steps and offerings
Once I have had a bit more time to really get a handle on this I want to offer groups and support for people like me and use all my workshop / space holder experience to help others….this is easy for me and why I have spent so much of my life as a space holder cos in this world I flourish with ease…so I think I can help but I am not quite ready yet, more grief to move through and more self acceptance and self love in relation to these aspects of me needed before I can…
There’s so much more to say so this is just part 1 of my exploration…
