For five months after my diagnosis, I could not write. The cursor blinked on a blank draft, waiting. I sat at my desk in the bedroom most mornings, after the children had left for school and the laundry was folded and the plants were watered and I had been to the gym and come home and showered.
I’m ready to write.
Not really.
I had things to say. I had so many things to say that I could not bring any of them into focus.
I had been squinting my whole life. I did not know this until someone handed me the right lenses.
Before the diagnosis, the blur was all I knew. I leaned closer. I worked harder. I memorised what I could not quite make out and performed the rest from context. I built workarounds so thorough that nobody, not even me, suspected I could not see properly. I thought the effort was normal. I thought everyone squinted like this.
Podcasts were part of the squinting. I kept them on constantly — while cooking, cleaning, exercising, folding laundry. Always learning something. Always filling the quiet with something productive, because silence felt like wasted time, and rest felt like falling behind. I did not understand, then, that the compulsion to be always learning, always improving, always sharpening my focus was itself a kind of strain. I thought it was discipline.
It was compensation.
The diagnosis handed me the right prescription. The world came into focus. And it was unbearable.
Not because the world was ugly. It was simply too sharp. Too much detail, arriving all at once. Every memory I had squinted through, suddenly relit in high definition. Every friendship I had worked hard to maintain, every job that had cost me more than it should have, every morning I had woken up exhausted and told myself it was a character flaw. I could see now. I could also see everything I had missed. Everything behind me was suddenly, painfully clear. Everything ahead of me was not.
I closed my eyes.
Not literally. But something in me shut down the part that was trying to see.
I stopped.
Not visibly. Visibly, I kept going. I made breakfast. I packed bags. I did school runs. I watered the plants. I answered the texts that needed answering. But the part of me that made meaning of things on the page — the part that tried to bring my own life into focus and hold it still long enough to describe — that part went somewhere I could not reach.
I was not blocked. I was vacant.
There was a constant buzz in my head during those months. Noisy but empty. So many thoughts that I could not make proper sense of any of them — they went in circles and loops and knots, and whenever I reached for one, it slipped out from under another.
Silence became too loud. Podcasts became too noisy. Someone else’s clarity aimed straight at a head that could no longer hold it. I could not find a setting that fit.
So I blasted music instead. Sad, dramatic music that seemed to be singing the story of my life — my woes and my worries and my wishes and my hopes, all of them on repeat, loud enough to fill the entire house. It felt frivolous. It was not productive. It was not improving me. But it was the first time I had let myself stop squinting and simply close my eyes. The music did not explain anything. It did not teach me anything. It just sat with me, in the mess of what I was feeling, without trying to resolve it.
Nothing made sense.
And then the body took over.
I started running. I had never been a runner. I am still not, really — but during those months I laced up almost every day, and I did not stop even when I should have. I ran until my knees hurt and my toenail fell off, and then I ran again. It was not training. It was not self-care. It was flight. Running is what the body does when it cannot bear to look.
What I was running from, I could not have told you at the time. I only knew that the noise in my head quietened slightly when my body was moving. Not the thoughts, those kept looping, but the pressure underneath the thoughts, the hum that was always there. Running turned it down a few notches. That was enough.
My body kept paying. The knees. The toenail. The mornings I could barely get out of bed. I went back anyway. I could see that I was injuring myself. I could not stop.
I think it was my body trying to process what the mind could not. I did not know it at the time. I only knew I had to move and that I couldn’t be still.
I was depressed.
I want to name it properly, because the word gets softened too easily in writing like this. Not a hard time. Not a fog. Not a difficult season. Depression — low, sustained, unmistakable, even if it never tipped into the acute shapes I had been trained to recognise.
This is what nobody tells you about the new clarity: it does not feel like liberation. It feels like the exhaustion of having squinted for forty years catching up with you all at once. All that effort. All those years of straining to bring a picture into focus that was never going to resolve, because the problem was never effort. And now that you know, the straining makes no sense, and neither does the life you built on top of it.
I was still functioning. Everything looked fine. I want to say this because it matters for anyone reading who is wondering whether what they are carrying counts: depression can look like someone who still makes breakfast. It can look like someone who still gets to the gym. It can look like someone whose house is still clean and whose children still have their bags packed and whose plants are still watered.
There was an image going around at the time, of a mother so drained that she had died. After she died, she got up to make dinner. I thought about that one a lot. I cannot afford to die. That was the engine my nervous system was running on. Not aliveness. Just the refusal to stop moving.
A thought came clearly during those months, more than once.
I do not want to die. I also do not feel like I’m living.
Those are two different things. I did not know they could sit in the same body at the same time until they did.
Here is the part that is hardest to write. I will write it because I said I would be honest.
There came a point when I needed to feel pain, just to feel something. I remembered thinking: I understand now why people cut themselves. I am a clinician. I had read the literature. I had never, in all my years with patients, really understood that sentence the way I understood it in my own head. Pain as proof of aliveness. Pain as the only signal sharp enough to cut through the blur.
I did not cut myself. I had used pain before, a long time ago, during a different grief. I know this pattern in my body. This time, I went and got my ears pierced. Two pairs of new holes. One set for the autism. One set for the giftedness. Pain as a reminder to wake up and to move on.
Looking back, part of me wants to call it silly. Childish. Something I should be embarrassed by. But it was not silly at the time. It was the most practical thing I could think of. A legitimate way to feel pain, to feel alive.
I am including this because nobody writes about it. The wellness internet will tell you to journal and drink more water. The research will tell you that late-diagnosed autistic adults are five times more likely to attempt suicide and leave it there. Between those two registers there is a whole territory — the pain-seeking, the not-wanting-to-be-alive-without-being-suicidal, the peculiar logic of needing a sharp sensation when the rest of your life has gone to blur.
This was mine.
I started doing calligraphy during those months. I bought a blank book, no lines, no structure, and a calligraphy pen. I sat at a desk in the quiet hours and copied out sentences by hand, slowly.
One of the first phrases I wrote was this.
One of the kindest things you can do is to be gentle and patient with yourself.
I had been gentle with my patients. I had been gentle with my children, on my best days. I had spent over a decade learning how to sit with people who were reckoning with the gap between the life they had imagined and the life they were living — and how to stay gentle while I did it.
I had never been gentle with myself. Not really. I had spent all those years squinting and calling it discipline.
That was not a turning point. Nothing turned. I wrote the sentence, and then I wrote other sentences. Every morning, I was still flat and my knees still hurt and the cursor on the WordPress draft was still blinking at me. One calligraphy line does not lift a depression.
But the pen had moved. The hand had moved. Something in me had moved something in the world, in ink. Not in focus — not yet. But in motion. It was small. It counted.
I came back to the blog in April. Not because I had resolved anything. Not because I had found my purpose, or my voice, or my way through. I came back because the thing inside me had to go somewhere.
The cursor was still blinking. It had waited. I put one word down. Then another. The picture was not sharp — it was not going to be sharp for a long time, maybe not ever in the way I used to think sharp meant. But I could make out shapes. I could see enough to begin.
The piece that came out was not the one I had been trying to write for five months. It was something else — less resolved, more honest about not being on the other side of anything. Written not with the old squint but with the new, imperfect, too-bright way of seeing.
The post you are reading now is what I did not know how to write at the time. I am writing it from a place that is not fully healed and not fully finished, because the silence was part of the story, and the story does not make sense without it.
I am still learning how to see. The blur is not gone. But I have stopped squinting.
If anything in this piece has landed on something tender in your own life, please reach out to someone — a person, a helpline, a trained professional. This post is memoir, not a prescription. What worked inside my own silence is not a map for yours. But you do not have to be inside it alone.
The diagnosis that triggered this silence is in The Wrong Operating System. The slow work of self-acceptance that ran in parallel is in The Demon Marks Were Always Mine. And the books I came back to when the reading became possible again are in I Didn’t Read Any Autism Books After My Diagnosis.
New essays, delivered as I write them. Quiet, occasional, no noise.
Grow with Their Flow 