The Moon from Mystical Moments Tarot by Catrin Welz-Stein

For most of my life, I’ve felt like a failure. A rather fair-to-middling one, I grant you—I did have loads of privilege and a cussed determination to fall back on—but a failure nonetheless. 

Let’s get right to it. I started struggling—and failing—young. My entire academic life was a masterclass in toil and mediocrity. I have actual memories from nursery school, anxiously waiting for nap time, because that was when I got a pause from the already difficult work of being educated. I remember feeling aggrieved even when learning to write my birth name, Melissa. Seven letters! And two of them were S’s, a letter I was repeatedly scolded for consistently writing backward. That I remember this astonishes me. How many other people remember the confused shame of learning to write their own name? Like I said, I got a head start in having a hard time. And this, friends, sets a tone. 

Kindergarten was rough. I got my first pair of prescription glasses and my first migraine that year. I lived in terror of being called on to tell the time on the big analog wall clock or, god forbid, tie my shoes in front of the teacher and class. Again, I have distinct, anxiety-fueled recollections of feeling behind the class and, increasingly, the sense that I was different, less capable than my peers.

I floundered in elementary school. I tested into remedial classes and never outgrew the labels of “weak” and “reluctant” reader. I was as awkward as the day was long. Those glasses were already equipped with Coke-bottle lenses, and the taunt “four-eyes” felt like a familiar curse. I did summer school for the first time in grade school to try to improve my reading. I don’t recall any of my friends requiring these interventions, though I can acknowledge that there may be a bit of selective memory at play here. But what I can remember is frustration, embarrassment, and growing self-doubt.

Middle school happened, along with tutoring and more summer school for my now clearly abysmal math skills. That said, my general intelligence managed to shine through a bit here. I even made the honor roll on a few occasions! It was during these years, however, that I began to solidify the disconnect between how smart I believed myself to be and the grades I was able to consistently achieve.

This was also the age when gym class turned into the stuff anxiety dreams are made of. I began underperforming in my academic classes, while simultaneously, PE became a reliable source of mortification and dread. I was awkward and uncoordinated—I could not hit, kick, or catch to save my life. My body would not respond to my pleas to perform properly any more than my brain would. My classmates could sense this ineptitude and tried to save themselves by dissociation, picking me dead last for every team activity. Good times. 

Now, I was savvy enough to hoodwink my teachers in middle school, but high school was different. I was reaching the limits of my act. I stopped all clubs and activities: no more chorus, theater, or art classes. I don’t think it was a conscious decision, but flying under the radar became my modus operandi. 

I scraped by with slightly below-average grades and the annoyingly constant reminders that I wasn’t fulfilling my potential. During these last few years of formal education, my inner experience shifted away from the idea that I was a smart kid who just needed to work harder. By senior year, I had diligently authored the internalized story that I was someone who could only fake being smart and, as such, would not amount to much. Or more—if I put myself out there, I would be found out, so best to avoid involvement or participation. I graduated with little to show beyond rotten SAT scores, the diploma, and a wicked inferiority complex. 

I managed to get into the only college I applied to, and thus began the final stretch of my academic flounder—and the one that truly snuffed out my spirit. I couldn’t fake it at the college level, and while that was painfully clear to me, the precise reasons remained obscured. Over the years, my personal narrative maintained that I was simply too anxious to attend college, but something always sat beneath that assumption. Something more profound and more confusing. Whatever the reason, in 1993, after only one year, I dropped out of college and never earned a degree of any kind. 

My professional life was equally unimpressive and determinedly wishy-washy. I held a short series of jobs that I stumbled into more or less. In the thirty years since I graduated from high school, I’ve had only four job interviews. And those four jobs have not resulted in anything notably rewarding. No promotions. No real engagement. No drive. Just life lived paycheck to paycheck. Beyond that, there was also the high stress of managing personalities at work. Bosses, coworkers, and customers alike could all send me into tailspins of escalation. I made friends and worked well with others, sure, but it was hard to keep calm and confident when I was so unsure of myself and my abilities.

The final and longest chapter in this lackluster tale was a position with zero mobility at a tiny internet company. I held on to it for twenty-three years. People often told me that staying in that position for so long showed loyalty and stick-to-itiveness, but I knew better. It really reflected my complete and utter dread of change and lack of faith in myself: the idea of changing careers was petrifying in the extreme. 

Overall, the prevailing feeling I had in my professional life was one of limitation and fear. I intentionally held myself back in almost every way possible and had, for the most part, given up on the idea of a “meaningful” or “successful” career. I could not even imagine a lucrative one. I’ve joked more times than I can count that my retirement plan is the apocalypse. If only.

I haven’t moved as much as my peers. I’ve only had seven addresses in my fifty years. I was a renter. Never a homeowner. Well, I am now, but not in the usual way. I stumbled into that too. See above, fear of change. 

I spent the majority of my life without a driver’s license. I used to brush off questions about my lack of license with terse, flippant replies about city livin’ and how I only needed public transit, a bicycle, and my own two feet. While that’s largely true for city dwellers, it wasn’t the whole story. I avoided getting a driver’s license for so long because the prospect of driving—with all the financial, practical, and safety unknowns and implications—felt completely beyond what I could imagine handling. In short, I refused because I believed I was incapable of being a driver or owning a car. The whole idea just seemed absurd beyond all measure. While I now have a better sense of these self-imposed constraints, for most of my adult life, I explained my lack of a license with the increasingly common refrain of “too much anxiety.”

I finally got my license at the tender age of 45, after moving out of the city and into the suburbs—because, at that point, I had no choice. Necessity may be the mother of invention, but it can also breed bravery. It’s tempting to be self-deprecating about the delay—most people check off this rite of passage at sixteen—but no. I did it, and I’m proud. It’s one of the few moments in my five decades that feels like a true and glorious success.

I’ve never been married. I’ve only had one romantic relationship that lasted more than six months—and it was the only one that became a live-in partnership. That lasted several years. I (intentionally) got pregnant and birthed a magnificent child, but the relationship didn’t survive the transition into full-on adulthood and parenthood. We separated over eight years ago, when the kiddo was three. Since that breakup, I’ve been on three “dates.” Thinking back, I wince at how dysregulated and shut down I became afterward each. Dating is the most terrifying thing I can imagine. A full-blown intimate relationship feels as impossible as flying to the moon.

I know that on its own, any one of these situations—even several at once—doesn’t inherently make someone a failure. There are numerous reasons a person might choose to live a life that resembles mine. The trouble was, the reality of choice was only superficially part of my experience. On a deeper level, I was paralyzed. I felt barred from these adult rites of passage and benchmarks by forces I couldn’t name—inclinations, fears, and pressures shrouded in a deep lack of awareness and, ultimately, vocabulary. But they were there all the same.

The Moon from 5 Cent Tarot by Madame Clara

I can’t tell you how many times I gave up—or never even started—efforts to change my circumstances because I fundamentally believed I just wasn’t capable. Or, more vaguely, because I told myself the pursuit was simply “not for me.” I’ve spent the vast majority of my life convinced that I was incapable of being a functional adult.

Beyond this bizarre, self-limiting belief, there was also genuine, honest-to-god anxiety around newness, change, and anything I didn’t understand or found unfamiliar. I was often stupefied with fear over simple tasks (buying a phone card) or chores (going through a car wash). Even games I had never played before. If I intuited they would be too hard (Scrabble) or confusing (Wingspan), I would avoid them like the plague. These parenthetical examples are just the tip of the iceberg. The list of off-limit activities seems endless. 

Even now, it often feels like there’s no way out of these mental traps. In these moments, my thinking is so rigidly black and white that there’s no recovering from a decision or assumption once it’s been made. “Self-limiting” feels too gentle a term to describe the experience. “Self-negation” feels more accurate.

So, let’s recap the first three decades of my adulthood. School was a mess of the stressful and confounding, and I could not face the idea of higher education. A normal workday was both over and underwhelming in equal proportions. The mental and social challenges, whether in front of a computer screen, over the phone, or at the water cooler, seemed unrelenting. I managed to get by due to sheer force of will and an unyielding reliance on the familiar. Dating was—and still is—a horrifying nonstarter. I can’t even talk about most of these topics without getting freaked out to the point of mental and emotional shutdown. 

It’s as if I’ve experienced some kind of post-adolescent failure to thrive. All the while, I have entertained a dazzling array of mental health challenges: Depression. Anxiety. Suicidal ideation. Self-harm. I’ve even enjoyed a troubling laundry list of subclinical psychotic traits: intrusive thoughts, paranoia, derealization, auditory hallucinations, and more. 

I self-medicated: I smoked, I drank, I did drugs. I dissociated through vast swaths of my experience, both as a child and a young adult. I have very few memories from the first half of my life, and the ones I do have don’t paint a happy picture. I am still prone to hardcore dissociation and work daily to stay vigilant lest I get swept away in any number of maladaptive coping strategies. I know dissociation is a natural part of life with a human brain, and in traumatic situations, it can be helpful and adaptive. I get that, but try telling it to the friends I’ve disconnected from, or to the child who depends on me to create memories with her, and, most importantly, to be present with her.

My early adulthood felt pretty dire. I discovered alcohol, and the self-medicating began. In my early twenties, I managed to find a solid and helpful therapist, and my life “in session” began. I was first prescribed SSRIs and SNRIs in the ’90s.

Thank heavens, life started looking up in my mid-30s. All that therapy and those psychiatric meds seemed to be paying off. I was also just getting better at being human. One learns coping skills. One matures. As the years wore on, I gradually lost sight of how difficult my earlier life had been and came to believe that much of my suffering had stemmed from an unfortunate chemical imbalance in my brain. Meds and therapy were helping, so that must have been the case, right?

And things really were improving. I shed the enormous weight of depression and anxiety in my late 30s and entered my 40s happier and healthier than I ever thought possible—and with a baby girl to boot. But even so, I couldn’t shake the lingering self-denial and rigidity that kept me from making bold, positive changes in my life. I couldn’t figure out what the hell was wrong with me, or why I was like this. The truth is, I’ve felt othered and stigmatized by myself for as long as I can remember.

The term neurodiversity was coined by sociologist Judy Singer in 1998. I’m not sure I encountered it until the mid-aughts—maybe around 2010—but it’s hard to say. In any case, the variant term, neurodivergent, was, and still is, especially appealing to me.  I had always had a fondness for things left of center and a tad strange. And while neurodiversity speaks to inclusion and the positive normalization of difference, neurodivergent rings out with weirdness, otherness, and edge, and not in a negative way, but in a deeply appealing one.

You see, the chief feeling that arose as my awareness of neurodiverse communities expanded was jealousy. I felt left out. I had no explanation for my persistent dis-ease with life or my complete lack of measurable adulting success. I looked at these communities—primarily folks with autism and ADHD—and thought, These people have an explanation. These people make sense. I didn’t make the same sense to myself. I was too normal, too typical. I wasn’t special, brilliant, or bright, nor did I embody any of the qualities I saw shining out from neurodivergent minds around me or in the media. I was a neurotypical failure.

Of course, as you read this, you probably see where things are headed. If you know me, you know exactly what I am leading up to. Let me lay it all out.

Intuition from the Woodland Wardens Oracle by Jessica Roux

Since my daughter’s birth in 2013, I have come to understand that I have always been challenged by sensory processing issues. Primarily tactile—from my childhood horror of tags in my clothing to my anxious adult distaste to walking barefoot, and god help me, the electroshock skin-crawling torture of the shower curtain touching my skin while showering…shudder—but also olfactory (ugh, perfumes), oral (textures!), auditory (noises I can feel), and even visual (did you know there is a correct kind of clutter?). My senses assault me more than they please me, and I rarely find neutrality in my sensory experiences.

When I was 45, I read about complex post-traumatic stress for the first time. What a bombshell. While many practitioners can’t or won’t officially offer a C-PTSD diagnosis (it’s not in the DSM… yet), I have self-diagnosed as such and have been officially given “unspecified trauma-related disorder” and a PTSD diagnosis.

Around the same time, I was also officially diagnosed with fibromyalgia and IBS. Those, along with my lifelong migraines, are three hallmarks of what is now being recognized as Central Sensitivity Syndrome (CSS).

At age 49, my worldview and sense of self essentially exploded when I was diagnosed with ADHD and the big two “dys-orders”: dyslexia and dyscalculia. Although I haven’t been formally assessed, I believe I am also dysgraphic and dyspraxic.

At age 50, I finally found words to describe something that had been haunting me most of my adult life–I am aphantasic. THAT explains some odd shit, including why language around one’s “mind’s eye” and any type of visualization practice was completely and frustratingly confounding. I also have to wonder if there are ways that this type of difference impacts my other flavors of neurodivergence, especially dyslexia. 

So, there I was, halfway to 51, and on a mission to read everything my dyslexic perimenopausal brain (yes, that too, and don’t even get me started on how I think perimenopause should be considered an acquired neurodivergence!) could manage about my diagnoses. This led me to tangentially absorb a LOT of information on autism… especially how it can be unconsciously camouflaged in those assigned female at birth and raised as such. ESPECIALLY middle-aged ones. Hoo-nelly. “Bombshell” does not cut it. How about “sea change”? In May of this year, I received my ASC evaluation results: I am autistic. Also, note that I will be using the newer term “Autism Spectrum Condition” from here on out.

The deeper I look, the more divergence I seem to find. It feels bananas to me that I didn’t receive some of these diagnoses sooner, or that I did not know these things about myself sooner, but how could I have?

I could not have known I was dyslexic because I truly did not understand how dyslexia impacts people. It’s at least a thousand times more nuanced than the wholly incomplete and unhelpful portrayal of people described as borderline illiterate, who are said to struggle with reading because their letters appear swiggly and jump around on the page.

I did not think I had ADHD because the only version of that disability that made it into my worldview was the deeply reductive story of the hyperactive boy child, with no impulse control, who can’t stay seated in school.

This all feels doubly, triply, quadruply true of autism. I had absolutely no idea what Autism Spectrum Condition looked like for the majority of the people on the spectrum because I was only aware of how it manifested in children who were diagnosed (largely because they were struggling in schools and under the weight of societal and medical structures that were not made to accommodate them) or from the adult men I knew who had been diagnosed with Asperger’s. 

Just because you don’t know you are a thing doesn’t mean you aren’t that thing. Turns out, my brain is fucking WEIRD.  I am a deeply neurodivergent human and a goddamn baller at masking and at making systems work. I was not failing; I was diverging. This changes everything. 

People have different feelings about labels and diagnoses, and I get it. More than anything, though, I believe in my bones that information is power. This particular power comes with the ability to create change and, potentially, to heal.

I have a lot to share about these revelations, how they came to be, and the feelings they evoke. That will all come in a series of essays, I hope to share over the next year or so.

I feel practically compelled to share this information. I can’t shut up about it. I am info-dumping about me. I am my own intense interest! But, friends, all self-referential autistic humor aside, it’s also deeply healing and validating for me to share in this manner. Past therapists would say that this need to share, while intellectualizing and categorizing, is a ploy for connection and safety in creating systems. My astrologer friend would say it all stems from my natal chart and all my Geminian airiness. It’s probably a bit of all of that. 

But the compulsion to share is simple and straightforward, too. I have struggled for so long, and the underlying causes have been obscured the entire time. I’ve been mismeasured, mislabeled, and have been missing the table of contents of my own story. I want to illuminate everything so I can finally put down the burden of shame and confusion, take a deep breath, and say to myself and the world: There you go. You see? It finally makes sense. I finally make sense.

Thank you for reading this far and being a kind witness to my disclosures. 

Thank you for coming on this journey of self-discovery—and, I hope, the eventual joyous release from the hardship caused by a lifetime of ignorance, delusion, and masking. It is also my sincerest hope that as I catalog the mysteries I’ve solved—enumerating symptoms and sharing the details I’ve gleaned along the way—you might experience one or more light bulbs flicker on and gleam in the darkness… for yourself, a partner, a sibling, or best of all, your child. If I can help even one person illuminate their history, celebrate their glorious brain, and embrace their neurodiversity, I will be so glad. If reading this brings you or a loved one a step closer to diagnosis or much-needed awareness, I will be immensely gratified.

So come along, let me speak to you of ASC, SPD, CPTSD, ADHD, all the troubles (and joys) that begin with “DYS” and on and on. I hope you will learn something.  I never intend to stop learning or helping myself, so I hope that effort might help you, too. 

Much love, my friends.