A Landmark Year
That 2020 feeling
I don’t think many of us went into 2020 expecting it to be such a landmark year in our lives. Boy were we wrong, but then hindsight can be a wonderful thing.
I went into the year knowing that it would mark a personal best of 50 years (not out), and this had prompted some personal reflection. I was thinking about my general health and wellbeing and was aware that my lifestyle wasn’t especially healthy — my diet wasn’t the best, I took minimal exercise, and I was a 20-a-day smoker — plus I had experienced several periods of depression and had a debilitating anxiety issue. Overall, I knew things needed to change. I need to take better care of both my physical and mental health.
Then lockdown happened.
I’m one of the lucky ones, it was a positive experience. Working from home, social distancing, quiet streets, all social events cancelled — each of these suited me fine. Weirdly, this isolation seemed to be helping improve my mental health and reduce my anxiety. My diet improved, I quit smoking and, taking advantage of the rules about exercising, I had returned to a childhood joy of hiking the wilds of the Kent countryside.
I joked about how lockdown felt like something I’d been training for my whole life. Oh, how I laughed. Feels a little hollow now. I wasn’t to discover why I felt like this until later in the year and how truthful that ‘joke’ had been. This changing mood and lifestyle reflected the needs of the real me, the one I didn’t know existed.
Cutting a 50 year long story short, throughout my life I had struggled with anxiety and depression, on occasion both had a crippling effect on me, and the anxiety was an ongoing debilitating issue. A couple of years before I’d had a period of significant depression and, whilst under the care of the mental health team, we noticed some symptoms which didn’t fit my depression. Having discussed possible causes they referred me for an assessment which, in view of Covid restrictions, took place over MS Teams. A couple of assessment forms had been completed, by my parents and by me, and after a couple of meetings the psychologist was certain.
In the middle of 2020, at the age of 49 years and 317 days, I was told that I have Autistic Spectrum Disorder, also known as “Asperger’s Syndrome”
I initially found my diagnosis hard to process, it felt like my whole identity had been ripped away, that I wasn’t the person I’d thought I was. I was angry that I had been through my whole life struggling to cope and only in my 50th year did I find out why.
I was reminded of the number of times teachers and line managers had told me that I just needed to “try harder” or “push yourself”. I was already trying hard and pushing myself, I really couldn’t understand what they meant, and it felt like I could never be enough. There was also a significant number of times I’d been out with friends and had a huge panic attack, or how I could never enjoy a meal out with family or friends. I always felt like I was failing at life and couldn’t understand why I was unable to enjoy the things everyone else seemed to take for granted.
With feelings like that constantly running through my head it’s no surprise that my self-confidence had taken a nosedive and I was always at such a low ebb.
Having spent the past two years trying to understand the ‘real me’, I have realised that I can forgive myself to a great extent for these perceived past failures and recognise why my, apparently strange, limitations existed. This diagnosis has validated my experiences and I have been able to recognise that some of my behaviours were intrinsic to me rather than something I should be able to easily change. Most of all though, I have learned to identify those things which I cannot tolerate and to either avoid them or to minimise their impact.
Anyway, welcome to my therapy session, let me just lie down on this couch…
“Being diagnosed later in life is like binge watching an entire TV series with a huge plot twist at the end. Then re-watching it again with this new knowledge, picking up on all the foreshowing and getting upset that you hadn’t noticed it all earlier.” — Anon
