Growth Happens in the Rest — A Year After My Late Autism Diagnosis

A few weeks ago, deep in exam preparation with my son, my stomach started to act up.

I was bloated, and nothing that usually works would shift it. I was uncomfortable, yet I could not rest.

It was hard to be patient with him when I felt like that. I could feel the restlessness and the discomfort ballooning, and my voice getting louder and snappier.

Once, I would have brushed it off and pushed on. Now I read it for what it is. I am running myself down, and I need to stop, or at least slow down.

My body notices first. It always has. My gut knows before my mind does.

The anniversary of my diagnosis fell in the same month.

I don’t know why the date is etched in my brain, or why I was so aware of it approaching. I counted down to it. When it came, it felt like any other day, and I thought I was not particularly sentimental about it. Then the thought arrived.

It has been a year.

And my heart ached a little.

Only one person knows.

When the video call ended a year ago, I texted my husband. He was at work, waiting to hear. After that, I told no one else.

I don’t know what I thought a diagnosis would bring me. An anchor, maybe. Some direction. I thought it would make me less flighty. I don’t think I was so gullible as to believe life would be rainbows afterwards, but I thought that maybe, at last, I would have some clarity.

It did give me something. It made sense of the life I had lived so far. And it gave me a new lens through which to understand my life now. It taught me to be gentler with myself.

Beyond that, I feel pretty much the same. Still lost. Still unsure. And really, it feels like I am keeping a secret that I am ashamed of.

I know I don’t have to tell anyone. It is private, and I have the right to keep it to myself. I don’t know what telling the people around me would achieve. I don’t need anything from others. What I need is to manage my own challenges, myself.

But with this new clarity, I find myself in confusing territory. I find myself second-guessing even random chats on my phone with friends. Am I too friendly? Am I too sarcastic? Why am I so sarcastic, and does it come off wrong? I worry that others take me wrongly. Now that I know I am autistic, I don’t trust myself to fully understand social cues anymore. So these days, I silence myself. A joke slips out, and it could sound rude, and I wonder if I am being socially inappropriate. It spirals in a way I have never experienced, because I never realised it would ever be an issue.

In a strange way, I am more awkward socially now. In the past I did not read so much into things. I just did whatever felt right. Now I know I am autistic, and I have the awareness to second-guess myself.

I don’t know what to make of this. Carrying the diagnosis quietly is its own kind of work.

What the year did teach me, it taught through the body.

I work in bursts. I get intensely absorbed in something, and then I burn out and stop. I don’t know whether that is the autism or simply who I am. This year, it meant several long breaks from writing here.

What has changed is that I notice it sooner. I can feel the burnout coming now, and I try to pay attention before I run out completely. The stomach was the signal. I heard it late, but I heard it.

So I take days to do only what is necessary to protect my mind and my heart. Knowing I need those days is one thing. Feeling okay about them is still a struggle.

These days I also keep more to myself. I no longer feel obliged to say yes to gatherings, and I no longer force myself to make conversation. It is not that I don’t enjoy conversations. I do like listening to others chat. It is just that I don’t always feel I am on the same wavelength, or I feel that I don’t really have anything constructive to say. Sometimes it feels like making conversation is for the sake of just chatting. I don’t necessarily feel recharged by the conversations. Instead my mind swirls with a lot of thoughts, and that feels like a lot of stimulation.

It is quite a conundrum, because I do have days when I want a proper adult interaction instead of arguing with my kids all day. But then when I do mix with other adults I am not sure what to say, and my brain goes in a hundred different directions, and I feel out of place and unnatural.

As a result, these days, I find myself socially withdrawing. Is that a good idea? I don’t know. But it is about rationing my mindspace, my energy, and managing my sensory load.

When I chat with friends over text, I feel a small rejection when they don’t reply, or when a conversation I am trying to continue trails off. I know life happens, and sometimes it really does not mean anything. So cognitively, I brush it off. But emotionally there is this feeling of incompetence in connecting with others.

I am trying to prioritise my own comfort. I have lived my life thinking I should make the most of it. Go out of the comfort zone. Challenge myself. Meet people. Talk to people. Expand your world. All that FOMO life advice. I absolutely do want to live a full life without regrets. But I realise now that I am not made like others, and forcing myself to fit is just too exhausting.

There is one thing I have kept all year.

I work out four times a week, every week, except when we are away on holiday. Weight lifting. It began as restlessness. Now it is simply how I look after myself. A health check this year told me I need a lot more muscle, so that is my goal for the year ahead.

Anyone who lifts learns this early. Muscle is not built during the lifting. It is built in the rest afterwards, while the body repairs what the work has torn. Push without rest, and nothing grows. Push too hard, and you get injured, and it derails the progress you have made.

I know this about my body. I am still learning it about the rest of my life.

How much to push towards the goal, and how much to sit back and recover? I don’t have an answer.

I am not the only one in the house learning this.

I wanted my boys to fold their laundry and put it away neatly. They have been dumping the clothes in the drawers, unfolded. I think there are too many bigger battles to fight than pristine clothes.

I am trying to teach them balance. To work, to play, and also to rest. I want them to be in tune with their bodies, to notice when they are tired or hungry or close to their limit. To hear the signal earlier than I did. But I also don’t want every ache to become a reason to stop. I am still learning where that line is for myself.

For close to ten years, I sat beside people at the end of their lives. I still try to imagine what I will feel on my deathbed. What is a life well lived?

If this year has been about anything, it has been about inner peace. That has always been what I was reaching for, and it was never really about accolades or achievements.

I started out as a therapist wanting to make a difference on a greater scale. I burnt myself to the ground trying to do it as a job. I have tried other things since, this blog among them, and time and again I feel torn. If I give the years ahead to myself and my family, and less to others, I think there will be some heartache.

But what if it is okay to do my best, and focus on my family? On my children, and on living my own life well?

Maybe that is good enough.

If I could write to the woman holding that phone a year ago, I would tell her this.

Life does not always have answers. It is okay not to know.

Be okay with doing your best. Be okay with slowing down.

Growth happens in the rest.

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The months right after the report are in The Silence Between Knowing and Writing, and the slow work of acceptance that ran alongside them is in The Demon Marks Were Always Mine. The question of whether doing our best is ever enough first came to me from a wife in palliative care, in When Doing Our Best Doesn’t Feel Like Enough.