Coping Tips for Autistic Women
I am compiling a list of resources for aspie women along with tips to manage symptoms and navigate the world. Regretably, most of my personal experience comes from living undiagnosed and unaware about this for the last 27 years. There was a giant elephant in the room with everything, and I have only recently worked it out. This means that most of my habits prior to this point were ones attempting to cope with a giant unknown, the limits of which were unclear. But they more or less worked, because, as I am realising, there’s always been something they are attempting to address.
With other diagnoses and ways I attempted to explain and understand my difficulties, there were finite causes and treatments. I should have been improving if I tried x, y, or z. And I did improve my symptoms in many ways, but there was something missing from the picture. That is that autism is my personality, my state of being, how I process and view the world. And no tool, medication, process or treatment was ever going to change who I really was. Being misdiagnosed (or being missed and failing to receive the autism diagnosis) means that I have been trying to correct something that you cant ‘correct’, and shaming myself for something fundamentally me.
Some of the tips I learned over time, from how I am as a person, without the framework of reference of neurodivergence or autism:
My sensitivity has always been a big waving flag. I felt and saw things others didn’t. I felt more deeply. I sensed the microeffects and changes in everything. I responded harder and faster to any chemical, environmental shift, any positive or negative event, As we all do on the spectrum, we attempt to navigate our sensory environment. And we come up with coping mechanisms, good or bad, before or after we realise we are on the spectrum. For me this was a strong aversion to the things that upset me, that disturbed my senses. It was an orienting of myself in a way to avoid the disturbances, going inwards, withdrawing and even shutting down. I learned that I could not and did not want to handle crowds, loud places, supermarkets. I lived in a giant simulation attempting to minimise and avoid as much as possible the things that hurt. I learned that I was extremely sensitive, no one else seemed to be, and I just had to manage it. Since discovering autism in the last weeks, I am able to embrace the fact that sensory overload is a thing, and I really do feel pain in my body when things are too much and too loud, and just wearing earplugs has mitigated so much of this. I was gas lighting myself before about feeling a certain way because there was no explanation, that I was aware of anyway.
I have had so many problems over the years, since I was a young girl. I used to get food poisoning symptoms really easily. I had hidden allergies. I remember a lot of my childhood spent doubled up with stomach pains, or having a fever. My family didn’t know any better and fed me and treated me as they did every other member. I was not the same, I did not feel the same, but I took it all in. By the time I was in my early teen years, I had cemented my aversion to certain foods, taken the only control I had at the time against an encroaching and controlling mother and turned it into anorexia. I avoided things I didn’t like, again, and set up a system of control that made more sense than the gaping wounds and confusion within me. Starvation triggered bulimia. And a viscous cycle of malnourishment and dysregulation unfolded. I didn’t learn until many, many years later that my system was so sensitive and damaged that if I tried to go back to how I used to eat as a child, I would get terrible symptoms. So my coping tips as I have healed from the eating disorders and become more aware is to figure out what the triggers are, what hurts, and to avoid it. This along with adding in nutrient dense foods and working on the deficiencies has done wonders for me. I’ve done tremendous work on my autoimmune conditions, gut problems, sensitivities and inflammation levels and the difference is like night and day. That I can induce psychotic symptoms by deviating or introducing foods I am intolerant to is no joke. The tip I can share is elimination diets truly do work, the keto diet is recommended, and eating the carnivorous way saved my life. My eating disorders for almost 15 years INCLUDING the 7.5 years I was a vegan, mostly high raw and fruitarian depleted my nutrients so badly that every symptom was enhanced 100% and I was eating pretty much ONLY food I was actually intolerant to. Ahem, plants, I’m talking to you. The peace I feel, the nourishment and rest on a nervous system level having eliminated them is unreal.
I have always known I was different, in a deep, visceral way. How the adults in my life answered questions was inadequate. I saw through people and things. I was far too intense and serious. I learned to watch and observe humans and pick up cues so as to attempt to fit in. I spent the majority of my life masking, something I am only now finding out about and unraveling. I kept notes on the human experience, and saved colours, sounds, feelings, because I felt like I couldn’t communicate the truth of myself otherwise. Over the course of my life there have been inexplicable (until now) events. Lost friendships and relationships, strings of broken promises, people not acting on what they say, confusions and miscommunications, and many dangerous situations and predatory bonds. I made what sense I could of it from whatever lens I could find. It was the trauma, it was my soul contract, it was what I deserved, it was being targeted- all close, but not quite within the realm of being so naive, open and fundamentally different as you are on the spectrum. I just always assumed everybody was like me. I had to learn the very extremely hard way that not everyone felt and thought in the same way, nor had good intentions. I still struggle with the fact that humans don’t tell the truth. It is of no relevance whether they secretly know it. Most people are more comfortable with illusions. I always knew this, but the diagnosis gives me a lot more peace around it. It’s allowing me to accept the fact that if I look around the majority of the people I see are not walking around processing and over-analysing everything, feeling sounds, decoding patterns and obsessed with hacking the code of reality. Less pressure that way, and more in the way of what can be viewed as natural interaction on my part. I will solve the mystery of the universe out loud otherwise, and get the blank looks and the discomfort. I have found my people, a tribe of likeminded individuals, I have gathered friends over the years that didn’t run from my weirdness. But I am mostly content to be on my own, knowing that I can only use what is around me to try to convey how I feel and who I really am. And that will probably be a book, a movie or a work of art, much better than a 2pm rendezvous when I can’t stop talking about the hidden signs.
With the intensity of my emotions I have developed borderline personality disorder as a means to cope with being autistic and not knowing. I have been diagnosed with both that and bipolar because I have intense stints of emotions. They come and go in waves, lasting hours, lasting days and weeks. I consider it to be an energy management system to cope with the demands and stressors of modern day living. Creatives always withdraw and hibernate, and come out with new insights and art to share. The way that I feel and view the world is special. It’s at the basis of my writing, what I choose to engage with and how. My emotions make me who I am. I feel intensely, I share passionately about how I feel. I snap, I break, I shutdown, I come out again and I am a bright, shooting star. There is an excited little animal that lives within me and it is the strongest most passionate thing known to man. I thought that my negative experiences or trauma killed it, but this is before I knew it IS me and cannot die. So I have stopped trying to cram these emotions in or explain them. Stopped trying to attribute them to whatever script people were following when they dealt with me. Throwing me into the depressive, anxious, panic stricken, eating disordered basket case category. The missing piece now makes so much sense. The ways I responded to being autistic were coping mechanisms, such as developing a personality disorder, to deal with the pressure. My psyche splintered under the weight. My tip here is in embracing your inner life and world, embracing that you are different, so that all of the mental and emotional acrobatics needed to attempt to explain the issues or fit in can be put to rest.
Being different and feeling differently means I naturally saw and expressed things in quite a strange way. I was convinced of a secret world to reality, behind reality, living on behind a paper shell, so to speak, that would rip if only I could reach out and tear it aside. That conviction was rewarded as year after year my awareness grew, my gifts multiplied, and the experiences I had revealed to me the hidden hand of god. There was very much design to the universe, a pattern, weaving through all things. And i was a part of it, not some discarded afterthought or simple byproduct that had no place. In the early years, I kept my convictions to myself, nursed them with experience. I died a thousand deaths in dark nights of the soul, crashing against the turf of my ignorance. I broke open, and everything I had been so sure of as a child was revealed to me again and again. I was convinced I had a purpose, I could feel the deep tides of human emotion and motion, could feel into the genetic sequence that had birthed me. I felt like an alien, but that slowly over time the map of my operation was being revealed to me. This is what it feels like so many years later to stand here and find out about being autistic and realise that how I felt in my soul all these years was real, and that I can begin to truly fulfill this mission now, to share my experience in words I know others will understand because they feel the same way too. It was the challenges that I never understood, while the gifts were the reason to stay alive. My message to myself and others now is that there is a point, a reason to persevere and understand yourself more. The suffering reveals so much of the true state of things, so that we can protect our tender hearts and build new things that honour who we really are, our souls.
Resources, movies, literature to follow. I just wanted to share something of a summary now of my realisations since coming home to myself.
