In a Perhaps Unsurprising Development, It Turns Out That I Am Autistic and have ADHD

Some news for y'all about me and my brain

For as long as I can remember I have felt different. One of my first memories is of being in kindergarten and looking at a classmate play with a toy car and being utterly bewildered. What was the point? How did it work? Why would anyone get pleasure out of something like that? I hated recess because it involved playing with friends and i did not understand the concepts of play or friendship. I understood watching television. I understood going to the movies. I understood reading newspapers, books and magazines. I understood playing video games. But playing with friends? That shit was just weird.

Growing up I thought that I was different from other people because I had been abandoned by my mother as a baby and that everyone else swaggered through charmed lives with the confidence and ease that comes with not being given up by their mothers when they were two years old.

As a teenager I was convinced, not without cause, that the reason that I felt different from all of my classmates was because I was the only one who lived in a group home for emotionally disturbed adolescents. That made me feel different and not in a good way.

That feeling of being different persisted into adulthood but I thought it was attributable to having led an unusually traumatic life, the kind that you get to publish multiple memoirs about if you are both very lucky and also very unlucky.

It wasn’t until a few years ago that I began to suspect that I might be different from other people on a neurological level as well. My sons are both autistic and my oldest son has ADHD as well and my wife, who works full-time with neuro-divergent children, thought I was undeniably on the spectrum.

My brain is a mystery to me. I do not understand how it works. The world is likewise a mystery to me. I similarly do not understand how it works. It goes deeper than that. I don’t even understand how I don’t understand the world. That is how perplexed I am.

And yet.

I nevertheless chose a profession that relies upon authority and expertise. That’s probably because I feel like I understand film, television, books and music in a way that I do not understand life, relationships, other people’s emotions or social niceties.

My wife didn’t just think that I was Autistic: she said she knew that I was Autistic. It wasn’t a guess. It was a conviction.

So she made an appointment for me to receive an extensive neuro-psychological evaluation to determine once and for all what exactly is going on inside my brain. The only place that would take our insurance had a six month waiting period. I waited patiently. The night before my assessment I was informed that it would cost about twelve hundred dollars and that insurance did not cover it.

So I paid the money and, after an initial consultation, I spent four or five hours answering questions both verbal and written. It was exhausting and depressing. It forced me to confront the very hard life that I’ve lived and the scars and damage that I incurred in the process.

I don’t want to suggest that I’m not doing great but they did tell me that I was in the “severe” range for hopelessness. I’m feeling more hopeful now but I was in a very bad place until very recently and in a lot of ways I’m still there.

It made me sit back and think, “I’ve had a very difficult life. I should show myself more compassion and empathy about my myriad failings as a writer and human being.”

On January 3rd, I got the results of the test back. They said that I had and was also Autistic and had a moderate case of ADHD.

I told him that I did not feel like the “hyper-activity” applied to me since I haven’t felt hyperactive in a very long time and he said that ADHD can also manifest itself as impulsivity rather hyper-activity. I thought about how I’m planning a book that will require more work and research than anything I’ve ever done before, but I also want to write another book simultaneously and I’ve already got a third and fourth book almost completely written and i had to concede that, yeah, I sometimes I get a little carried away, particularly where work is concerned.

I guess I’m grateful for the Autism and ADHD diagnoses because my fear was that I was going to wait all that time and spend all that money and they’d tell me that I had Depression and Anxiety, particularly around money, and i would feel like I’d wasted serious cash getting an answer I already knew.

I’m grateful just to have an answer to the questions that have been coursing through my mind all these years.

Getting the diagnoses makes it easier to have compassion for myself. I haven’t been as organized or efficient as I’d like to be while running this newsletter. I think that’s one of the reasons it stubbornly refuses to become economically sustainable. Having Autism and ADHD might not excuse my organizational failings but it does help explain them.

At the risk of engaging in a humblebrag, I’m not doing terribly for an Autistic man with ADHD and all manner of trauma who is more or less single-handedly running several ambitious businesses while caring for two Autistic children, managing my mental health, trying to pay off massive debt and spending time at home cooking and cleaning and looking after the children so that my wife, the breadwinner of the family, can do the work that pays the bills.

The psychiatrist gave me boilerplate suggestions, like a social skills class to become less socially awkward or job skills courses so that I could procure some manner of employment.

But the truth of the matter is that I don’t know what the hell comes next. They did not send me a book called You Just Learned You’re Autistic; Now What?

I’ve traditionally processed life’s unfathomable complexity and difficulty by writing about it, generally in book form. I would love to do that this time as well. I think there is a terrific book to be written about a forty-seven year old husband and father of two Autistic boys who discovers late in life that he has the same neurological conditions as his progeny.

I’d also like to embark on a survey of Autism-themed entertainment, particularly because so much of it is ambiguous. “Is this character Autistic?” is a question I asked myself regularly even before my diagnosis. It’s a subsection of a question my people ask constantly, which is “Is this person or character Jewish?” Most recently I asked it about Rust Cohle, the tormented genius Matthew McConaughey played in the first season of True Detective and someone I somehow relate to to an embarrassingly intense degree. The answer I came up with was, “Maybe?”

I’m going to launch a feature called in Autism in Entertainment and write about movies involving Autism, starting with the Ben Affleck vehicle The Accountant. It’s about an accountant who is Autistic and kills people. Will I see a lot of myself in the title character? Probably. I know nothing about numbers of finance or killing people but I am Autistic.

Heck, I didn’t even know if I was Autistic a week ago. I had my suspicions and my hunches but I did not have a formal diagnosis.

I’m also glad that I have these conditions because they allow me to understand my sons better, to be able to see their struggles from the inside, because I share them, not from the outside.

Now that I know that I have Autism and ADHD I will have a better sense of how to deal with them.

I’ve also noticed that my readers are disproportionately on the Spectrum. The same is true of “Weird Al” Yankovic’s fanbase so it perhaps not surprising that Autistic readers would consciously or subconsciously seek out a writer who is also Autistic even if he does not yet know so.

Though it is very hard for me to get out of my own head I’d like to learn more about other people’s experiences with Autism so that I don’t feel quite so alone. I’ve got a lot of reading to do, but I should probably also talk to people, which is scary because I’m too Autistic to not feel deeply uncomfortable talking to other people, even about Autism.

So goodbye, neurotypicality! Hello, neurodivergence!

This is going to be interesting!