Latest / Thinking Out Loud | Kimberly / What Changed When I Stopped Asking "What's Wrong with Me?" | Thinking Out Loud
Transcript
- Kimberly: What changed when I stopped asking what's wrong with me? And I started asking, what if my brain was never broken? I spent thirty-three years trying to figure out why everything seemed harder for me than it looked like for everyone else. I thought I was anxious, depressed, too sensitive, too emotional, too rigid, too overwhelmed. Too much. For years I didn't understand why life seemed to take so much out of me. Why everything felt harder than it was supposed to be. And then I got pregnant and suddenly everything felt unbearably loud. Noisy. Needs, touch, expectations. Constant awareness of everyone around me, being told to be considerate of others became exhausting. Because as a parent, you don't get to switch it off when you get home. Eventually I realized I could barely tolerate much of my life outside of my children, and somewhere in all of that I started asking myself a different question. what if I'm not a hard time? What if I'm having a hard time and missing something important about myself? Welcome back to Thinking Out Loud. Hi, it's me, Kimberly. Before we go any further, a quick note. This podcast is for reflection and conversation, not professional advice. Take what resonates and leave the rest. Here we slow down and we explore life's great areas, especially in relationships and behavior patterns we can observe and reflect on. I am not here to tell you what to think. I am here to offer framework to help you understand your relationship and strengthen your thinking and hold space for complexity. Let's get to thinking out loud. Growing up Making friends was hard, especially with other girls. I had difficult time understanding social norms. I understood that sometimes you share and compromise and you take turns. I remember thinking, why does it feel like I'm always the one who has to give up my turn? I didn't always recognize manipulation. that someone was misleading me. I liked what I like and I didn't want to do what I didn't want to do. I tried, I really did. some of the social things that seemed to come naturally to others, required conscious effort from me. Knowing when I asked someone about themselves, transition naturally between topics, knowing when I had been talking too long, knowing what someone meant when they didn't actually say what they meant. I learned scripts, I memorized them, even though it was hard. When the conversation stayed within script, Great, I could do it. But something unexpected happened. Suddenly I didn't know what I was supposed to do and I tried being myself. I would go back to talking about things I actually cared about. sometimes I built connection. Most of the time I was treated like a weirdo. That was hard. Because why did everyone want to talk about the weather or gossip? I didn't care. I wanted to know why is the sky blue. Do boogers actually go into your brain? Why did Pluto stop being a planet? Seventh grade Kimberly needed the answers. I had crushes. I had favorite actors. I had all the I guess normal teenage things. I didn't particularly care about all the social details everyone seemed fascinated about. I cared about how I was supposed to read a chapter in an hour when it took me five. I cared about why school took me so much longer, why everything was so exhausting, why I could remember certain things forever, but forget something someone had just told me like their name. That's where things got complicated. I genuinely cared about people. I wanted connection. friendship. to be kind. Sometimes other people's problems didn't make sense to me. Not because they weren't important to them. my brain had just already processed so much at that point. I was thinking about school, my body, my responsibility, everything I was supposed to remember, everything I was supposed to understand, and everything I was supposed to do correctly. Then there was trust. I trusted people very literally. When someone lied to me, I didn't just feel embarrassed that I believed them. I was deeply hurt because I trusted you. I didn't understand why someone would pretend to care about you while simultaneously making you the joke. There were times where I missed social dynamics completely. I had realized something had happened only after the damage had already been done. that happened enough that eventually I became more reactive, more suspicious, more focused on betrayal. I couldn't understand what I had missed, and that's something I think is important to talk about because getting diagnosed doesn't erase the way people treated you before you had the explanation for yourself. I can understand myself differently now. I can still be hurt by the way I was misunderstood then. Those things can exist at the same time. Before there was language for sensory overwhelm, shutdowns, rigid thinking under stress, emotional floods, or social confusions, there were other words. Too much, difficult, selfish, manipulative, attention seeking, sensitive, dramatic, controlling. Once people build a story about who you are, it can be incredibly difficult to convince them that maybe the story was incomplete. Changing the story requires reflection. It means asking, what if they weren't trying to be difficult? What if they were struggling? What if they needed support instead of punishment? And sometimes that's uncomfortable. if someone was struggling, then maybe some of the things we did in response to that struggle weren't actually helping. we mocked them, dismissed them, excluded them, escalated things, assumed the worst. it's much easier to say that's just how they are than ask what was actually happening for them. I think that's one of the most painful parts of getting diagnosed later in life. You don't just get answers. Sometimes you get new questions. You start looking back at your childhood and realizing, that wasn't me being lazy. It wasn't me not caring. That wasn't me intentionally being difficult. That was me struggling with something I didn't have language to explain. I'm glad I got tested. Part of that was because I am very literal. I wasn't fully allowing myself to treat myself like I had autism unless it was formally confirmed. I needed certainty. I needed to know. a full evaluation and gave me more information than just my autism diagnosis. it helped me understand how unevenly my brain can function. I can be extremely intelligent in some areas while struggling significantly in others. That was a huge piece of that puzzle. My short-term memory was significantly lower than my long-term memory. Which honestly put everything into perspective for me. I can remember specific things from years ago. Random facts. Like, did you know it's pronounced Van Gogh, not Van Gogh? And did you know he didn't cut off his ear for a lady? No, no. He was upset because his roommate abandoned him. honestly, I don't even remember his roommate's name. I know the painting, that Mofo. hurt Van Gah So badly. But also he was kind of a walking red flag, the guy. Again, I don't know his name. I literally refused. Because like he abandoned his family to become an artist, which he could have had both, but whatever. and he left to go hang out with Van Gah anyways, yeah. And also Van Gah? His brother. was the reason his paintings got popular. it wasn't because all of a sudden everyone cared that someone died. It was literally because his brother was always in the works trying to get his paintings sold. Anyways I would remember random facts, patterns, conversations, stories, tiny details that nobody else remembered. Tell me three instructions while I'm distracted, gone. From the outside, inconsistency can look like carelessness. Completely gone. I understand sometimes people need to overexplain things. when people give me all this information and they're overexplaining and I'm guilty of it too because literally I needed to overexplain whether it was literally how other people's brains work or a coping strategy. Maybe both. I remember talking to my husband and saying Honey I don't care that you overexplain. If you want me to listen and understand you either need to tell me from the beginning or the end of your speech what's the point that you want me to take back with. I have been taught that when people talk and I took it literally, everything they have to say matters. And so when I'm sitting there listening to a monologue when all you're trying to tell me is could you turn the TV down? I'm gonna get lost. And so I get it. From the outside, inconsistency can look like carelessness. if you can remember that, why can't you remember my monologue? That's the thing. I don't always get to choose what my brain stores easily. My brain holds onto information deeply. It's just not always predictable. Suddenly some of the contradictions in my life made more sense. I wasn't unintelligent. I wasn't incapable. I wasn't refusing to pay attention. My brain simply wasn't processing everything in the same way people expected it to. And I remember watching something about the sensory overload can feel like in a crowded place. I think it was a child at the mall and they edit it to help people see what it felt like. I remember thinking this isn't how everyone feels. Isn't it loud? Aren't the lights always too bright? Isn't it exhausting trying to process all that at once? wait, this isn't normal. And that was the moment I started realizing something. What felt normal to me wasn't necessarily not overwhelming. maybe I had simply become accustomed to being overwhelmed. I think that happened through my life. I realized I learned to freeze. I learned to suppress, I learned to conceal. Don't feel. be the good girl you always had to be. Don't make other people uncomfortable. Don't be too much. And eventually I started believing that maybe nobody really cared how something impacted me, which created another problem. I thought everyone else was masking too. I thought everyone was constantly suppressing themselves to survive socially. When I couldn't understand why someone reacted differently when I did, I sometimes assume they were making the same calculation I was. They weren't. And I wasn't. We were just experiencing the world differently. That doesn't mean every interaction had to be perfect. it doesn't mean autism makes every behavior acceptable. It doesn't. Understanding behavior isn't the same thing as excusing behavior. There is a difference between accountability and turning someone's behavior into a verdict of their entire character, especially when we're talking about children. I think a lot of difficult children aren't difficult because they're malice. Sometimes they're overwhelmed, dysregulated, confused, sometimes they're reacting to an environment that makes sense to them. Sometimes they're trying desperately to communicate a need. they don't have words for yet. And sometimes what gets labeled as defiance is a nervous system saying, I can't do this right now. And that doesn't mean we ignore the behavior. It means we get curious about them. And there's a difference between asking, how do I stop this behavior? and asking what is this behavior communicated? Because a lot of times I was just out of capacity. It was my brain just snapped. I had nothing trying to get a car to move and there's no gas in the tank. And I think that distinction has changed the way I see myself. For a long time, I interpreted my struggles as evidence of character failure. If I couldn't keep up, I was lazy. If I needed more time, I was incompetent. If I became overwhelmed, I was dramatic. If I was struggling socially, I was selfish. If I was reacting strongly, I was difficult. when enough people tell you that story, eventually you start telling it to yourself. That was one of the hardest thing I had to untangle. I didn't just learn that I have autism. I had learned that I was never broken, simply different. I had to separate the things I genuinely needed to work on from the things I have been taught to hate about myself simply because they were different. I struggled with reciprocal conversations sometimes. And it was funny because I remember the evaluator telling me Do you struggle with reciprocal conversation? I said, Yeah. you never ask the interviewer any questions. And I'm thinking, why would I ask you questions? You're interviewing me. And the amount of people I told, and they're like, Kim, you're not wrong. And they all admitted that they're neurospicy. I feel so seen. And there are some people who do it for the social norm. then there are genuinely people who I don't care I'm getting in an interview and taking this literal. I just am happy to be here and I want to ask questions about you too. wow, those people are amazing. I'm still amazing. It just looks different. there's nothing wrong with either of us. yeah, I have always struggled with reciprocal conversations because the amount of energy, because I am not just asking questions to fill up the room. I'm asking questions I genuinely care about. that takes a lot of energy. reading social cues doesn't always come naturally for me. Knowing when to redirect attention back to another person requires a lot of effort from me. And those are real things. I can work on them. build skills. apologize when I miss something. Struggling with something doesn't automatically mean I don't care. That distinction matters. I spent a lot of my life assuming that if I really cared about someone, I would naturally know exactly what they needed from me. Now I understand that isn't true. Not necessarily. Sometimes I can care deeply and still miss the cues. Sometimes I can love someone and need them to tell me directly what they need. sometimes I'm overwhelmed. I don't have the capacity to perform the social reversion of myself that makes everyone else comfortable. another creator said this, When in doubt, clarity is kindness That's been my whole life. When people were very clear to me and they told me what they needed, they were direct, got to the point. That is where most of my learning and my relational skills grew. it is very exhausting when people make the assumption that just because you have autism, you don't have any relational skills. No, we do. There are people on the spectrum that are completely different from me. there was someone I was talking to in a support group. remember talking to him and he was so different from me on how his like autism worked. it was just like, I don't understand why I have to care about certain things. I'm here having a monologue about power dynamics and this and that. He's like, Wow, that seems to really bother you. And he's like, anyway, he wasn't being rude. during the whole situation, he was trying to be supportive for me. we were having two completely different conversations and I recognized that, but I also could see he is just himself there's nothing wrong with that. I think there's nothing wrong with how you are. I think a lot of people need to hear that. I was watching this lady and she's like, Yeah, like I'm sadistic, and let's not hurt people. her reasoning behind sending someone a pig's head. I'm like, girl. First off, I would not find that cruel. I didn't even know how to get a pig's head. Sweet. I'm gonna learn how to cook this. I'm weird. yeah, don't send people to my house. That would have been extremely cruel. She's like, I'm gonna send these people, these religious people to your house this year and that year. gosh, no, that's terrible. Don't do that to me. why? 'Cause my house is my safe place and I don't like it when people show up unexpectedly. Another reason I wish I would have known I had autism, because it's not that I don't want people visiting. You threw off my groove and now Patricia's out and we're upset. But yeah, no, it's just interesting because I do care deeply. And I still miss the cues. I do love people and I need them to be direct with me with what they need. sometimes I'm overwhelmed and it's just because I don't have the capacity to perform this social version of myself that makes everyone else comfortable. it's hard for the longest time, I wasn't just masking a role that like I curated just to fit in. I was masking a role How can I show people I care? I never left room for maybe I didn't need to mask the whole time because no matter what, the people I tried really hard with just for them to be cruel, mean, and just assume the worst of me was I could never let that mask slip. And this is what the mask slipped is just a neutral face. Just matter of fact, not fluffing up stuff. And that's why for me, I understand where people want to learn. how can I show people that I care? How can I show the person I want to have a relationship with, that I like them, that I want to pursue this. And I've learned to be honest. I tell my friends, I understand our schedules are completely backwards and we have incompatible schedules I really do want to see you. I'm just honest. I think I've just become more and more honest with people. I've told people the truth which is life's really heavy right now. I'm going through a lot. I don't have time to do that. I'm waiting for certain things to align up and I'm doing my best right now but I'm surviving. My tank isn't getting filled all the way. My tank is getting like a quarter fill. And I've never experienced this before because I'm being present. I'm not doing all or nothing. I'm learning how to find balance. that's crazy to me. I'm learning that sometimes because of my neutral face, that when my face relaxes, smiling takes a lot of energy. I'm happy. I'll do things. That's so funny. you're talking monotone, yeah, but that really was funny. Having an emotional reaction takes energy. And I know for some people they'd be like, what the hell are you talking about? When I learn the escalation isn't just anger, sadness sometimes sadness is like you're just so low, you're depressed. But I didn't know that excitement would cause you to be escalated. And when I learned that, I realized that's what I was dealing with, the highs and lows, was because my life had been filled with either disappointment or fairy like Disney story moments. it's exhausting. I've now have negative experiences with that. I'm like, I don't want to pretend like kumbaya, this is parent trap. And now we're gonna get along because we're at a funeral. I know myself well enough to be like I can't authentically heal and let bygones be bygones because someone died and we're at a funeral. For me, I don't wanna pretend like everything is fine. I don't wanna pretend like nothing bad ever happened. And I'm starting to realize it's not that I'm cruel because I didn't show up to one of my grandparents' funerals I didn't know you, You were not very kind and you kind of made a lot of our lives hell. But I also didn't add to the pot and try to harm her. for me, that's how my brain works. some people will be like, That's cruel, Kim. Do you not know? I don't think you understand. I have processed my feelings so quickly. I think so much all the time. This is why we have a podcast, Thinking Out Loud, there are moments before I even got a dog, I was crying about, my gosh, one day my dog's gonna die. I didn't have a dog yet, and I was bawling. Before I had kids, I was thinking, my gosh, my kids are gonna grow up and start crying. sometimes I was already grieving something that didn't even happen yet. Or I didn't even get to that chapter in my life. that's the thing you don't understand it unless you struggle with that. Well, not even struggle. You don't understand something when someone thinks completely different from you and their brain works different from you. I've kind of learned to understand. I don't know what's best for you. You only know what's best for you. that's why I try to do this podcast the way I do. Is because I can't give you the answers. I can't figure it out for you, but I can help you. Like, hmm, you sure about that? You sure about that? if you don't believe in yourself, I want to ask you why. Why? people talk to me about how I can't do a pull up, Kim. Yeah, you can't right now. Why can't you work the muscle up? I'm too old or I'm a woman why are you limiting yourself? Yeah, you can't just sit there and try to do a pull up. You have to break it down. You have to learn how to hang off the bar and then slowly pull yourself up and not fully pull it up. you have to slowly work a muscle. This idea that we limit ourselves, that's pretty much what I'm trying to say in this podcast, is sometimes you think you want stuff and you don't. sometimes you're limiting yourself when you didn't need to limit yourself the entire time. I've noticed for me and how my brain worked that sometimes I need silence and Sometimes I need to process before I could explain why something hurts. And sometimes I don't understand what happens until hours later and sometimes it's days later. And that doesn't mean I don't care. It means I process things differently. I think we need to respect that with other people. I think that's one of the biggest things that my diagnosis gave me context, not an excuse, not a free pass, context. Context change how I respond to myself. I don't want to spend the rest of my life turning every struggle into a character flaw. I don't want to ask what's wrong with me every time something is difficult. I want to ask what's happening here? What do I need? What is overwhelming me? And what expectation am I struggling with? Is this something I need to learn? some things I need to accommodate, communicate, or I need to stop forcing myself to do simply because other people think I should be able to do them. Those are different questions. getting a diagnosis has forced me to look at relationships differently. There are versions of me that are incredibly easy for other people. I was accommodating. I was agreeable. I didn't always express my preferences. I didn't know I could have preferences. I could override myself, make myself smaller, convince myself that some things didn't matter. When you do that for long enough, people start believing that you don't have needs. And until you finally start expressing them, then suddenly you're difficult, selfish, spoiled, inconsiderate, too much. And that realization hurt a lot. It forced me to confront the possibility that some people aren't necessarily loving me in the way That I want to be loved. And they loved the version of me that was easiest for them to live with. The agreeable one, the accommodating, the self-sacrificing, the version that didn't ask for much. Eventually I had to ask what happens when I stop performing comfort for other people. I can't spend my entire life making myself easier to understand by making myself smaller. I can't spend my entire life absorbing everyone else's emotional weight while minimizing my own. I don't think. That's what relationships are supposed to be. I want to be able to care about someone without abandoning myself. able to love people without constantly monitoring whether I'm making them comfortable. be able to say, This is what I need, this is what I do, this is what I can't do. sometimes I need time. that doesn't make me cruel, even though I was made to believe it did. It makes me a person with limits. I think learning that has been one of the most unexpected forms of relief. Before, I thought being a good person meant being endlessly available. Now I'm learning that being a good person also means being honest about what I have the capacity to give. I care about you without being able to meet every need you have. I can love you without being able to process everything at the same speed as you do. I can want connection without being socially on all the time. I can have boundaries without those boundaries being proof that I don't love people. That has been freeing. It's also been sad. There is grief in realizing that some people may never revisit the assumptions they made about you. There is grief In realizing that getting answers doesn't guarantee the other person will understand. grief in knowing that clarity doesn't automatically lead to reconciliation. realizing that sometimes people would rather preserve their version of you than make room for a new one. And I think that grief is worth acknowledging. Sometimes we talk about diagnose like it's supposed to be this beautiful before and after moment. Before confusing, afterwards healed. That's not what happened to me. I didn't become a different person. I became a person with more information about the person I already was. The information was both comforting and painful. It explained things. It made me look back, looking backwards hurt. For almost three years I was completely burnt out, overwhelmed, emotionally exhausted. I could maintain my routines. Anything new felt like too much. I became reactive, I was hurt, I had a hard time letting things go. And part of me needed distance from people who had harmed me. Harmed me casually. I also learned that not everyone around me was unsafe. Some people were willing to learn to understand my needs, my limits, my preferences, my non-negotiables. I think that distinction matters. I don't want my diagnosis to become some story where everyone else is the villain. And I'm suddenly incapable of taking accountability. Some people would want me to believe that. that's not what I believe though. I have things I need to work on. I have hurt people. I've misunderstood people. I've reacted poorly. I've had moments where I needed to apologize. I don't want accountability mean that every struggle has to become evidence that there was something fundamentally wrong with me. those are different things. I can say I could have handled that better without saying there's something wrong with who I am. I can say I hurt you without saying I'm a bad person. I need to work on this without saying I need to become someone else. Maybe that's where the relief comes in. Diagnosis gave me a way to separate behavior from identity. I gave myself permission to stop turning every struggle into a reference of my worth. I think that is especially important for people who grew up believing they were difficult. Sometimes we spent so much time proving that we're good that we never stop to ask whether we're allowed to be human. We're gonna mess up. misunderstand things. have limits. need help. have strengths that come naturally and weaknesses that don't. None of that automatically tells us whether we're worthy of love. Now, when I think about autism, I don't think it answered every problem I ever had. It isn't. My life is more complicated than one diagnosis. It gave me framework, it gave me language, it gave me context. Most importantly, it gave me another way to interpret myself. Instead Why can't I be normal? I ask, what would make this easier for my brain? Instead, why am I so overwhelmed? I can ask, what is overwhelming me? Instead of why can't I do this like everyone else? I can ask, is there another way I can do this? Instead of what's wrong with me, I can ask What am I learning about myself? And those questions feel very different. One starts with shame, the other starts with curiosity. and I think curiosity is where I want to live. Not because curiosity means I never have to change and that I never let go. Because it allows me to change without hating myself into it. Back to the question. What changed when I stop asking what's wrong with me and started asking? What if my brain was never broken? Just different. I stopped trying to argue with my own experiences. I stopped assuming that every struggle was evidence of a character flaw. I started to learn who I actually am underneath all the expectations I had spent years trying to meet. My diagnosis didn't erase the years I spent feeling misunderstood. It didn't repair every relationship. I didn't go back and give younger me the word she needed. I gave me something I didn't have before. Clarity without self-blame. It gave me context for the moments when I thought I was failing. When maybe I was overwhelmed. It gave me language for the times I thought I was broken. When maybe I was overloaded. it gave me permission to stop treating difference like defects. I'm still learning, I'm still figuring out what my limits are. I'm still learning how to communicate what I needed. I'm still learning what I need to push myself. And when pushing myself is another way of abandoning myself. I think that's important because This isn't a before and after story. It's not a fixed story. It's not even a finished story. It's a different way of understanding the story I've been living in. There was a reason, not an excuse, not a justification, simply a reason. And maybe that's what I want people to take from this. You don't have to wait for a diagnosis to start being curious about yourself. You don't have to have a perfect explanation for every struggle before you're allowed to acknowledge that something is hard. You don't have to hate yourself into becoming better. You don't have to make yourself smaller because someone else finds your needs inconvenience. Perhaps most importantly, you are allowed to learn yourself. you are allowed to discover what something you thought was a character flaw was a need that went unnamed. to recognize where you genuinely need to grow without turning that growth into punishment. discover that the person you spent years trying to fix might have needed understanding more than fixing. So if you're listening to this and there is some part of yourself that spent years calling yourself lazy, difficult, dramatic, selfish, too sensitive, too much, or not enough, maybe don't rush to defend it. Don't rush to condemn it either. Be curious. What if there is more context to your story? What if understanding yourself doesn't excuse everything you've done, but finally gives yourself enough compassion to understand why you do what you do? what if your goal isn't to become someone else, but learning how to become more fully yourself and work with yourself instead of against yourself. Thank you for slowing down and thinking out loud with me. Whether you leave a comment. Send me a message or sit with these questions privately. I hope you give yourself permission to explore them without needing an immediate answer. Sometimes understanding ourselves isn't about finding a perfect label. replacing shame with curiosity. Sometimes the most healing question isn't what's wrong with me. It's what am I learning about myself? Until next time, take care of yourself. And remember, you don't have to hate yourself into becoming better. You don't have to prove your worth by being easy for everyone else to understand. You don't have to become someone else to earn understanding. I'll see you in the next episode.