Tremors & Tears

Over the fall season of 2022, as I learned more about what it meant to me to be Autistic, I started to shake. At first I assumed this was low blood sugars, as I am diabetic and on medication to reduce my blood sugar. However, as it happened more and more often and for longer periods of time, I began to suspect that it was something else.

Over the winter of that year, I had a couple episodes of breaking down crying in the kitchen while working on a meal. Now, cooking has always been a little stressful for me due to executive dysfunction and time blindness, but mostly I enjoy it. However, after that second episode at the end of January, I put two and two together and realized I needed to get myself into therapy, pronto. So within that first week of February I had a therapist and a session booked.

Over the next few months, it became clear that I was dealing with moderate to severe Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD). This is a sneaky thing, especially for an Autistic guy with Alexithymia often completely blinding me to my internal emotional state. I did not feel anxious, even a little. Now, I had a lot on my plate, and had lived a lot of life in the last few years, but that is normal right? When I took the anxiety screening quiz, my results actually came back as only “mild” GAD. But when my therapist asked me to discuss my life and any areas of stress in a more open-ended way, she immediately adjusted her assessment to “moderate to severe”.

I got on medication which eventually helped stop the shaking, but it didn’t actually resolve the underlying anxiety. For that, I have had to do the “real work” of therapy, introspection, and life change.

A Tactical Retreat

I started by accepting the fact that I had too much going on in my life, and something had to give. As an Autistic person with almost no social life outside of my family, this already was a major change. Work ended up being the place I had to turn the volume down, since I couldn’t do “less” of my wife and 2-year old son who I already felt I barely saw.

I stopped volunteering to help people when they reached out in our company chat, or I at least waited longer to see if anyone else could help them. I stopped looking for ambitious (or often any) new projects to do in my “spare time” between tickets. I pressed pause on my “Growth Plan” as a Senior Engineer, with my leader’s full blessing and support. This was a start, but it wasn’t enough.

Money & Marriage

The next area I tackled was my stress around finances. You would think working for Dave Ramsey this wouldn’t have been an issue. And while I was single, it kind of wasn’t: I had a lot of discretionary income and slowly worked through paying off all my debt. Then I got married, and while we weren’t in debt, we weren’t making much if any progress with our long-term savings goals either, even at the start.

In our 2nd and 3rd years of marriage, finances slipped even more, and we started slowly draining our savings. We knew it was a problem, but were (now both) dealing with anxiety issues and a toddler, so we didn’t prioritize it. But recently I realized we had less than a year of runway at our current burn rate, and it has been slowly killing me.

So at the advice of one of my next level leaders, I got hooked up with one of the financial coaches in our network (and even got some help with the fees). This was a huge help, and we stopped hemorrhaging money within the first couple months of coaching. Over the last several months, we have been able to contribute more money back to our savings again, and as we are coming to the end of our 6-month commitment, I am confident we will keep moving in the right direction going forward.

Self Care & Sensory Overstimulation

While all of that was going on, I was also working with my therapist on perhaps the greatest change I needed: proper self-care for my Autistic body. My ongoing severe anxiety prevented us from being able to the core work of processing trauma in my life, so we focused instead on managing the anxiety by managing my body.

With a lot of practice, I was able to start getting a good sense of when and why I was feeling Autistically overwhelmed. Mostly this was sensory issues, like too much sound or light (or both). I got some special ear inserts that dull annoying high and low pitched sounds (like the omnipresent white noise they play in my office). I started using my noise cancelling Apple AirPods Pro a lot more whenever I didn’t need to actually hear what was going on. I even started using them (or actual ear plugs) at loud events, and just living with not being able to hear people as clearly. I got some cheap sunglasses for my office so that I could dim the lights when they seemed to bright. I even started to identify previously unknown sensory sensitivities like spicy food which contributed to my overall chances of overwhelm.

The hardest sensory environment change I made was limiting my socializing. Socializing itself is a lot for me, as I navigate small talk and try to follow multiple streams of conversation around me. But it also often happens in otherwise loud and/or visually busy environments, which just drain my spoons way too quickly. So I drew back. I stopped going to the Friday lunches with my engineering team. I stopped going to company social events unless they were mandatory (and even then, I reserved the right to bail if it was too much). I had to choose between some pairs of social events with my church group if they were happening on back to back days, because I needed time to recover after each one.

Slowly, slowly, excruciatingly slowly the anxiety has been receding. In the beginning, I didn’t need reminders to take my medication, because I started shaking so much when it wore off after a few hours. Now, I often forget to take my “after lunch” dose until mid afternoon and skip my “late afternoon” dose entirely many days.

Overwhelm & Life

It took a long time though and the ever-present anxiety slowly wore me down to the point of feeling under siege. Then I started taking an anti-depressant and while it made me feel much better in some ways, it has been a big step backward in the overwhelm department.

Before starting this medication, I would have said my Autistic sensory sensitivities were mild: clearly higher than normal but manageable. Now, everything has had the volume turned up a bit. Previous situations that were clearly stressful due to sensory issues but manageable with some accommodations now regularly push me towards the overwhelm limit. It also has been harder to tell when I am reaching that overwhelm limit, which has led to several shutdowns and most recently my first mini-meltdown. Shutdowns used to be incredibly rare for me, but now they are frequent enough that my wife has learned to identify them and help me exit high input situations. Also just in day-to-day life, I have noticed that I am almost constantly stimming where before it used to be more sporadic.

So I am still in the process of getting back to “normal” and deciding if I am ready for more intensive therapy. It is frustrating, because in some ways, I am feeling better than I have in months (due to the suppressed depression and managed anxiety) but in other ways I feel like I am the most Autistically disordered I have ever been.

Slowly, I am learning to accept both the good and the bad of being Autistic, and coming to the point of being able to say:

I am happy to be who I am as an Autistic person


For more reading on the topic of Autism: click here
For more reading on the topic of Mental Health: click here