TRIGGER WARNING

Most who have been through what I've been through don't make it this far, but that doesn't mean I get to keep going. Every day I wake up with the odds stacked against me.

As an AuDHDer and formerly incarcerated person who has been struggling with autoimmune disease since I was 6 or 7 years old, I probably shouldn't even be alive.

Almost every day, at some point during the day, I quit, I give up. I have to say the words out loud and repeat, "I quit, I give up, it's over, I'm done..." It gives me some kind of satisfactory release I suppose.

I've only had one job in my life that I didn't quit. After I got out of rehab for alcohol dependency a few years ago, I was delivering pizzas for one of the big chain restaurants and they had to let me go after my background check came back a week or so after I had already started.

That's right, I'm not even allowed to deliver pizzas. The one job I was good at and found out I actually enjoyed. I tried delivering for a mom & pop shop and within a few days my truck started having problems. I didn't have enough money to fix it so I quit, hoping I could save my truck by not driving it, thinking I could get a job I could walk to.

I was really floundering around with no plan or direction, trying to make things work living at the recovery house and eventually the pressure became too much.

I tried checking myself into a mental hospital and they denied me access to treatment. I guess it wasn't good enough that I was having thoughts that were not my thoughts [thoughts I could not recognize as my own thoughts] that were increasingly tending towards suicidal ideation.

I became homeless for about a week after that. Yes, sleeping in your broke down truck, in the cold, auspiciously parked in a shopping center parking lot is homeless. Eventually I got in to a different psychiatric inpatient and after being experimented on with meds for three weeks, still not diagnosed with Autism or ADHD, state parole found me a nice cozy bed in a privately owned correctional facility halfway house.

By the time I landed there, having lived and worked through most of the pandemic after being released from prison, I was really ready to give up. Did I mention I was trying to start a Children's Rights movement at the time in between all of this?

I didn't know whether or not to go on the run from state parole or apply for disability. After sitting around for a few months, eating bologna sandwhiches, smoking cigarettes, watching ESPN all day, I eventually got a job, got out of the halfway house, got a room and started training to run in the mountains again.

Crazy right!?...

Why am I like this?
How did I turn out like this?
Why am I writing about this?
It's because the unmasking of Autism probably started long before I found out I was Autistic. It probably started once the mask mandates were lifted. It probably started when I told my parole agent that I am "something that is popping out early ahead of time" not even knowing what I was saying or what it meant at the time...

There's nothing I can do about it. It's what is right. Too much has happened to me. I've been through too much and that is something that is felt, but not seen by others.

I cannot very well show up to an job interview or a work meeting and tell someone who I really am, what I've been through and why I am the way I am. I cannot go on a date or show up to a group run and say,

"Hi! My name's Andy, I'm a formerly incarcerated AuDHDer… my triggers are x, y and z, I'm afraid of dogs, people, the police... loud noises and bright light bothers me..."
on and on, etcetera, etcetera...

I'm also pretty sure that people don't want to know that sometimes people who aren't supposed to be together; chronic pathological liars who end up hating themselves, each other, God and children because they can't have children, decide to adopt children so they can abuse them, gaslight them, manipulate them, neglect them, torture them...

Unfortunately, some of the most real and authentic wisdom I have to offer those who have been through what I've been through, or worse, is that there isn't always hope and there aren't always answers.

That's the truth.