The Autism Feelings Executive Collection
In which I explore big feelings from a late-in-life autism diagnosis one feeling at a time
Essays in the series
A link hub that will grow as new essays in the series are released
Stolen Autism Valor Feeling
A little background: I’m a 42-year-old, straight, white, cis male. My pronouns are He/him. I live in a nice house in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. I’m a government contractor working in IT. I’m married and have two young children and a dog named Mochi and an aquarium full of K…
Autism Feelings: Anger at Parents
Middle-aged anger gets trapped. It collects. It pools. It gets confused.
Autism Feelings: The Hope of Unlocking My Anxiety and Depression (and the Fear of Failing to Do So), Part One
When I was pretty sure I had autism but hadn’t yet received my professional diagnosis,
Background
My first post on Substack was about a very specific feeling I had as a person newly diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). It also served as a sort of autism coming out party for me.
Near the top of that inaugural post, I said this:
In the space between first wondering whether I might have ASD and the weeks following my diagnosis, I’ve felt all kinds of things. Here are a few of those things that I felt, each of which could anchor its own essay:
Anger that my parents and teachers and therapists and doctors missed this for my entire life
The relief and joy of feeling seen
The hope that being armed with this new information might make my life a little easier
The hope that this might be the key to unlocking my depression and anxiety
The fear that it might not
The joy and pain of reframing my relationships with family members who also have ASD or who I suspect might have ASD
The joy and pain of revisiting every relationship in every category across every stage of my entire life in an attempt to gain a little insight into why those relationships were difficult for me—to better understand what went wrong
The intent of this series is to address all of the above one feeling at a time—to make good on the claim that each of those feelings could anchor its own essay.