my teen experience with depression and late diagnosed autism

My teen experience with depression and late diagnosed autism

TW: depression, body dysmorphia, paranoia

Middle school.

Throughout my life, I have, like most people, experienced loneliness. A feeling so isolating, torturous. A feeling that makes a day last months. A feeling where I wake up Monday morning, and the week in front of me feels so unmanageable, where I just want to lay down in my bed and sleep forever. Because sleep is the only place, mentally or physically, where I don't feel lonely.

But I guess there has also been this alienating feeling, that has separated me from my peers. Loneliness is like a drug, or smoking a cigarette. I hate it, but yet I crave it. I isolate myself. It is addictive. Because loneliness is all I've ever known, and therefore I feel comfortable in it.

It doesn't feel like something I have chosen. It feels like something that has consumed me.

Because every time I try to talk to people, the words get stuck in my throat. Every time I finally manage to hold a conversation with someone, my heart beats fast, my palms are sweaty and I want to crawl into a hole and die. I want company so bad, but the thought of going outside where people can perceive me, judge me, form an opinion of me, know I exist, is so daunting. Why is people knowing of my mere existence, something so scary?

The world closes in around me. I can't breathe. Nowhere is safe, aside from home. There are people, and they're all looking at me. I am being watched, I know it. They know who I am. My name. I can barely get a "good morning" out and I feel like I have to throw up from the embarrassment of repeating myself because I was speaking too lowly.

I am a girl, it is normal that I am quiet. It is normal that I am sad, all pre-teenage girls are. It is normal. It is the hormones. Have you tried drinking water? Do you eat enough? It must be because there is something wrong with your diet. Because you don't exercise enough. Why don't you tell me what's wrong? 

You think you might be depressed?  Well, you're too young for that. 

You're having hallucinations of people watching you. You're hearing voices. You have a constant feeling of being watched, prayed on.

I find comfort in touching myself. It becomes the only part of the day where I feel pleasure. Where I feel anything at all. I do it a lot, and I feel ashamed of myself. But yet I can't stop.

Fifteen is an age of alcohol and parties every weekend, and it is where I start anti depressants. I don't feel sad anymore. But I don't feel happy, either. It is just a big, heavy numbness.

But it eases the bad thoughts, even if I still constantly feel watched. And even if I still can't sleep.

And then I am starting a new school.

The deep hole. The freeing feeling of finding out all kinds of people exist in the world, and not just who I went to school with. from five to fifteen is a long time with the same people.

It gets bad. I smoke a lot, and I never sleep. I don't have the energy to feel horny. All everyone ever talks about is sex, and I cannot imagine anyone ever wanting that with me, or me ever having the energy for it.

I have this feeling that I am in a deep hole, so deep, in fact, that I can't be bothered to climb my way back up anymore.

I drop out of school. I sit at home, inside for days, the thought of going outside so overwhelming and exhausting that I don't bother to try. I get a job, and I drag myself to it every time, the shifts feeling like they last an eternity, but I start to recognise the regulars. I remember a specific one. He came to buy the same single ice cream every Tuesday at exactly eleven o'clock in the morning. One day he stopped coming. I wonder how he's doing.

I don't have any friends, because I cut them off. I couldn't bear to see how good they were doing, how happy they were, when I was miserable. I didn't want to waste their time on me.

I start another job, full time this time. I feel like an alien, an imposter. Like I was forced into this body against my will. And now I have to pretend I understand the rules of this world. I don't know what's normal. If I am supposed to be normal. And what even is normal? Am I too awkward? Am I staring too much? I shouldn't stare. But I also shouldn't avoid eye contact. Where is the middle ground? Does it exist?

I spook every time someone speaks to me. Public transport is my worst nightmare. I sweat. I look at my shoes. I can't wait for it to be over. It is a long time now, since I was at my worst. But I am still dealing with the aftermath every day.

The open door.

I still feel alienated in certain places or situations. Public transport. Classrooms. But the people in my life, my friends, have made it all just a bit more bearable. There is no set recipe for getting better or handling how you feel.

And to be honest, I still feel very lonely. I don't have a lot friends, and I am honestly shit at keeping connections. I am scared to text people. I have tried gaining new friends, but I can't seem to get past that first base. That is apparently something that only happens once in a rare stroke of luck for me.

And I really want more friends now, because I am not depressed anymore. I don't feel forced by myself to stay inside anymore.

It is so easy, cutting people off. It is so easy, to isolate yourself. What is so much harder is picking up the pieces afterwards, figuring out how to move about in society, how to talk to people again and how to show yourself.

It is so hard, because I feel so clueless.

I am going to experience burnout many times again. I am going to feel completely fucking clueless on other people and what they're feeling and I am going to have a low social battery. It is part of who I am, and while it is so incredibly frustrating sometimes, I have to find a way to live with it in a society that doesn't allow me to.

I am autistic. And I hate it so fucking much sometimes. I feel like I don't understand anything about anyone and everything is so overwhelming. But it also allows me to love, hyperfixtate and see things in another way that neurotypical people, and I am grateful for that because I wouldn't be who I am without those qualities. It can be so awful, but it can also be so incredibly good.

I still have a hard time admitting that I am autistic to new (mostly neurotypical) people sometimes, because there are certain things they'll never understand about me, and I have experienced that, lived that. The last person I dated thought I was joking when I explained that I was autistic. A classmate joked about being autistic because he got a low score on the test. My old friends made my cluelessness to sarcasm a constant running joke, and I have many other experiences similar to that.

While these experiences might not seem like a big deal, it is so annoying and exhausting when it is constantly happening, when your boundaries are constantly pushed and your existence constantly made into a joke or ignored, because people don't understand it, and sometimes doesn't try to. And of course not all neurotypical people are like this, these are just my experiences. 

I love my friends over everything on this earth, they made me realise that it is okay if my social battery is low. That it is okay that I sometimes ask too many questions or feel overwhelmed by my surroundings. Because they know that feeling too. It is a much safer space. 

Anyway, I don't really know where I am going with this. It is known that women get diagnosed much later than men, because like everything else, there has been put a lot more research into men than women, and that includes people who are autistic. And also because women are often not taken seriously. But yeah, I just wanted to share a little bit of my experiences :)