Coming Out of the Stuck-Broke-Desperate-Closet
On the shame around the prison of being an autistic single mom
It feels like the ultimate sin and sign at once, to be a millennial and publish this piece. Who am I to complain? I had an upper-middle-class upbringing. I currently live rent-free in my late grandparents’ home, with an en-suite bathroom at that.
Yes, even writing about me, about this, my personal, ultimately self-made jail, is so icky I want to barf into my… you know what? I don’t have any “millennial things” to puke into. Because I am broke as fuck. My account hasn’t shown a positive balance in months: I’m twenty-eight years old and I have never earned enough money to keep myself afloat. I am also the single parent of a three-year-old. Since my son was born, I have been living on government subsidies. And the time I have left depending on them is running out.
This entire year of 2019, the notion of making a full-time living on Medium has been giving me the side-eye, but I was always afraid this could never be a real prospect because I’m too slow and inexperienced a writer to make it work in the time I am allotted. So, as it goes, because I was afraid, I never gave it a real chance, staying on the lookout for “better” options.
I should have known to play it safe is always riskier than running straight through the fire.
So here I am, a year later, lamenting not having pushed through the uncertainty.
But I also know that things had to happen for me to get that final push two months ago to just start, goddammit — and to be as honest as my interminably narrating brain could muster. Yes — I’m fairly certain I couldn’t do it last year because I was too full of shit. And I am glad I spared the world what would have come out of this noggin if I’d forced myself to put the shit into writing regardless. Of course, I can’t guarantee I’m not still full of shit now. At least I think I’m being honest, and I’m sure that counts for something.
And now? Everything is still so uncertain. I don’t know when — or even if — my kid will go to kindergarten. I don’t know when I’ll be forced to take on a job, any job, just to show that I’m “a contributing member of society”. I don’t know, I don’t know. I don’t know.
By now, I’m even prepared to take on an even more debt than I’m already in just to cover my monthly expenses and the loan payments so I’ll be free of worrying about doing things the way the job center agents are told is right, free of the stigma of relying on the government, free of that everlasting underlying current of needing to do something, anything, fast, now, last week.
Free of the bitterness in knowing that my current job — raising part of the future of fucking humanity — isn’t seen as worthy of actual, worry-free support. Free of the anguish that my choice to kick my child’s father out of my life is still more of a burden on me than anyone else, including my son.
But I am, in fact, not here to complain.
I’m here to come out of the closet — the closet of not knowing what the fuck to do next.
I had a dream. Several dreams, in fact, in rapid succession.
I dreamed of food-blogger-hood and food-photographer-hood. I dreamed of an illegal cake business on the side, selling the best cakes in town to the wealthiest middle-aged homemakers for 100 quid apiece, becoming notorious for my decadent, modern, effortless interpretations of German classics — juicy, not-too-sweet perfection.
I dreamed of beautiful books. I dreamed of becoming a one-woman publishing house—I’d handle layout, cover design, and editing all by myself because these things compound into an end result of delicious quality when they’re done in tandem.
I dreamed of just, please, at least two months to myself as my kid adjusts to kindergarten while I figure out my next steps and forge ahead regardless of knowing anything for certain.
Above all, I dreamed of the perfect combination of self-employment and stability, whatever that would look like once I arrived there.
The reality is, my job center agent has just granted me a month to get my childcare-shit together.
I told him repeatedly all my efforts have been in vain. He is childless, thus, understanding my situation won’t come easy.
While I thought about the despair and resentment this short conversation triggered in me, I realized what an opportunity it is, again, to deal with my general conviction of being undeserving of being paid for what I’m good at.
The only times I was paid at all, never mind the tiny amount it was — not even enough covering rent and utilities — was in a job that eroded both my physical and mental health. At the time, it felt like the only thing I was capable of, and here we get to the real issue. I have talent. I know I’m good at thing — a lot of them. I’ve just never seen that people would actually pay me to do them.
During the past two months, I’ve seen an inkling of what might happen for me on Medium if I put in the effort. I wrote what came, forcing nothing, letting inspiration be my guide, explicitly not doing all the things one is supposed to do as a writer. Full licensing to do whatever the fuck I please.
The last few weeks since I published my last piece have been close to torture emotionally. I came to the point as an autistic single mother where I simply couldn’t do it anymore. Anything.
Emotionally and physically, I was so overdrawn that my meltdowns — usually happening in the evenings when my son refuses to sleep after a hard day — went public, at midday. It was a harrowing experience and I don’t look forward to repeating it.
Since then, I have been forcing myself not to write — or do anything at all “for my future” — but to allow myself rest and repair and to feel into my emotions and blocks.
But for a couple of days now, the itch has presented itself again.
Quite unnerving, the little sucker. I have around 20 unfinished drafts of 1500 words on average sitting there — even more with around 300 words — waiting for me to give them just two days of edits to unleash them into the wild.
When I open one and write and stop and write and drift off, I find myself hopping back and forth between Facebook and Instagram and “Unblocking” (but not actually doing any Unblocking) for the full two hours of naptime until my son wakes up and nothing at all has been done.
I’m avoiding putting my stories into the world because I’m afraid of making money. Not consciously, duh. I hope that much is obvious. The thing is, whenever I’m touching on getting to a new level, the status quo rears its enormous, unwieldy iron head to pull me back down to instability with its infinite supply of distractions in the form of breathless baking, of Instagram numbness and endless, sometimes decidedly bad Medium articles, checking non-existent emails — and “knowing” my writing to be horrible.
My biggest, deepest, darkest fear, present since my son’s birth, is that people out there would see how I’ve gotten nowhere at all since I moved out of my parents’ place ten years ago… The only way to get past this shame I’ve been internalizing all these years is to own it.
Yes: I fucking wish I was somewhere else in life now.
Yes: I thought I’d be a celebrated designer or blogger by now. Yes: I am ashamed of sitting in my dad’s attic, living on welfare for more than two years now. Yes: being a single mom is the hardest thing I’ve ever done and I know it “counts” as doing something — but, yes — I still can’t get past the idea that I should be “making it” regardless.
So here I am. Coming out. To whoever should stumble upon this article:
I’m here. I’m exhausted. I’m broke. I’m a parent that simultaneously hates being a parent and loves it more than life itself. Though constant caregiving is decidedly not my thing and has objectively “weighed me down” for the past three years, it also freed me to pursue my soul’s true calling.
Because I am so bad at it, so irredeemably unsuited to parenting, it seems, I have become somewhat good at it. But because it also seems I can only do it this well or not at all, it wears me down. So fucking much that, during some phases, every single morning, I dread going through just one more day doing the child-things, being here for the child’s many big emotions, being a fucking housewife for people I did not choose to be a housewife for.
I don’t have a clue what to do right now, but I know that this start I have made in becoming my best self, at least internally, has only been possible through the supposed straitjacket that is being a solo parent.
Fuck societal expectations. Fuck being nice. Fuck raising a “well-behaved” child. Fuck doing the “right” thing.
Fuck working myself to death knowing my child will pay for it when I’m too sleep-deprived to give him any attention at all.
Just to be able to say: “I’m doing everything I can.”
Because, yes — that’s exactly what I’ve been doing.
But “doing everything you can” comes at a price. And it changes you. It changes your outlook and it changes your goals.
I’m a different person than I was two years ago, the first Christmas I spent here, in my grandparents’ house.
Granted, my when-you-really-get-down-to-it-wants have stayed the same: A space of my own. Childcare that enables me to breathe during a set amount of hours every day. Work that I love doing and pays well enough for me to settle into myself, to know I’m taken care of, to not have to worry if my credit card will be denied when I try to buy my kid a new pair of pants. Or even — gasp — something for myself.
The underpinnings of these wants have shifted, though.
I’m less breathless, less needing to prove myself to a certain set of people. I’m more focused on what I can do with what I have, less on what others owe me.
I know my core needs: to express myself fully, to live in security and quality, to be able to give back whenever I want, as much as I want, to have the freedom to use my brain for whatever it feels drawn to in a given moment.
But you wouldn’t know it if you looked at me. My circumstances have stayed the same. Even my looks have hardly changed — though I am beginning to notice subtle changes in my face, in the way my eyes look back at me in the mirror. They have acquired kind of fierceness. I like it.
Yes — only I know how I’ve changed. Maybe my mom and best friend can attest to the fact that yes — I’m about a million times more self-aware than the broken new mom I was three years ago. I have embraced who I am more than ever before, and I am honestly stoked to see how much more there is to come.
In the past, rapid forward movement in my life was curiously spurred on by literal space-making in my body.
Of course, it doesn’t mean correlation equals causation, but it does seem an odd coincidence. Twice in my life, I fasted for a month straight. Ten years ago in May, I lived on juices for two weeks, then only water for two weeks. Only two or three weeks later, I was offered a spot at in the Fine Arts program at the University of the Arts in Berlin as one of five people to be accepted without a high school diploma, and out of forty for that year altogether from over a thousand applicants.
Four years later, I did a Master Cleanse (duh— I was very desperate for a change, just like now) — for 28 days. Near the end, I had been invited to twelve interviews by the best hotels in the city. A few weeks later, I received the call offering me a position as an apprentice chef in one of the most renowned hotels in the country. On my birthday.
Though I’ve been hard at work making literal space in my life, fasting for a month straight in the hopes of radically changing my life is not an option anymore — not least because I know what an unstable beast not eating turns me into, and putting my son through that to force a change is not something I will do in good conscience. So what’s left?
I have started exploring the weirdly new endeavor of making room in my brain. It’s thrilling. And I’m now coming around to the conclusion that this might be the reason the past couple of weeks were so unbearable:
My body is purging. My brain is throwing up the previously unseen residue of, oh, around 27 years worth of undiagnosed autistic shame. Of true un-belonging, and of programming taken straight up, even more literally than the literalness with which the child brain processes its surroundings. A black-and-white-ness that faints in comparison to the trouble I still have, after years of effort and practice, when communicating in any form at all.
Every day, something surfaces. Every night, my dreams bask in the glory of suppression finding the light.
Where do we go now?
Nowhere. All I can actively do right now is write. Delve into the depths of what my past is coming back to gift me. Purge, then meditate on it. There’s no lesson here, I’m not really sorry to say. The only purpose of this post is to free myself of the shame.
Yes, I am all the things I am. Yes, I am nearing thirty and my outlook feels bleak. But I’m still here. I made a beautiful, kind, crazy and intelligent human in my body and continued to nurture everything he is and promises to become once he left it. I am taking my time to see myself. I am finding new things to love every day, as much as there is to make me feel I could go into psychosis any day.
This is the beauty of putting shame into words. When it’s there, sitting in many letterforms surrounded by the light of a screen, it’s not so lonely anymore. As of around three hours ago, I no longer feel afraid someone will “find me out”. I’ve given everything I have to give.
