Divergence

Someone is speaking at the lectern. There’s not enough room in my brain for whatever it is they are saying. An old man in front of me coughs every few minutes. Children tap their feet, whisper when this will be over, crumple paper. Parents shush. Teens in the balcony smack gum. Two ladies at the back murmur. Someone kicks a metal water bottle, picks it up, clicks the lid shut. I hear and feel my starched collar rubbing the hair on the back of my neck.

My hearing isn’t great — it’s fairly damaged, actually. The problem is that every one of these sounds arrives with the same priority as the speaker’s voice, and my brain won’t let any of them go. Each one lands like a small, sharp weight. My heart rate ticks up with every addition.

For most of my life I assumed this was just how rooms worked. That the stress was a character flaw I could train away with stoicism and “toughness.” I got good at the performance. Calm under pressure became part of my identity and people noticed. A coworker once told me, “You’re the guy everyone wants around when they crash a plane in the wilderness.” I told him we’d eat him first. I filed those compliments away and used them as fuel: if I can’t handle a situation, I’ve failed.

What nobody was measuring — including me — was the cost. I wasn’t calm. I was full. The plane-crash guy isn’t serene in the wreckage; he’s running on adrenaline and habit, scanning every input, holding the whole scene in working memory so nothing gets dropped. That’s not peace. It’s fucking expensive.

About six months before I turned 40, recovery stopped working. Situations I’d glided through — or at least white-knuckled through — became impossible. A loud room for more than half an hour. A week of back-to-back social immersion on a work trip, ending with me curled up in a ball in my hotel room. The beach, which I’d always found busy, turned into something that felt like the whole universe landing on me at once — crash of waves, seagulls, yelling, four wheelers, the wind, the sand on my skin, umbrellas, my wet swim trunks, everyone else’s swim suits, the spray hitting my face, every piece of trash, the grass in the dunes, the salt smell, the fish smell, the suntan lotion smell, the beer smell, the clouds.

My therapist mentioned autism. I laughed. “You’re a world champion at masking, but the debt has come due.” I’d read a bit by then, and I knew the label fit in the abstract. Knowing and believing your own experience are different things though. I don’t really care about the label, but it’s hard to quiet the judgemental voice that I’ve heard most of my life. “There is no ‘specialness’ here, only flaws to fix.”

Then I started talking to people in my life about it and the response was almost universally “Yes. Correct.” It turns out, I was the last to know. My wife asked “You really thought it was normal that you could sit in a chair doing a puzzle for 10 hours at a time?”

Yes?

I keep getting slapped in the face with evidence and I’m still “Hmm, maybe I just didn’t get enough sleep last night.”