If you follow me on other social media, you know I’ve been going through a lot. I am transparent with my audience about things in my personal life (unless it’s not mine to share about) and tend to live my life authentically. However, not everyone who reads this knows what’s been going on, so I wanted to give an update on a few important things in my world and offer some insight into what’s happening.
New Year’s Eve, I checked into inpatient mental healthcare for suicidal thoughts I could not make stop. While I didn’t act on any of them, I certainly came close enough that I knew I needed help. It wasn’t that my friends or family abandoned me; they didn’t. In fact, they kept close and were doing everything in their power to help me. However, sometimes you just need professional help.
I spent six days in inpatient care at a local hospital (Parkland Medical Center, Derry, NH) and received truly top notch care. The people there were incredibly kind and very good at their jobs. I was treated with compassion and dignity, and I am deeply grateful for the help.
One of the things that sent me in there was, to be blunt, autistic unmasking. The process of doing that is incredibly intense, and it has resulted in a number of identity shifts that are causing havoc on my life and on my sense of self. It’s been hard. In addition to that, I’ve been working on navigating my alexythymia (inability to experience or identify my emotions well). That work combined with a bunch of factors that were firmly outside my control resulted in me having a massive number of incredibly hard feelings all at once and having no way of processing them or managing them. So I just sort of collapsed.
While autistic unmasking is talked about a lot, it’s rare that it ever really comes across how incredibly difficult it is. Not just because of our relationships to others and skill regression—which are challenging enough on their own—but because it forces us to look at parts of ourselves we may have hidden away or tried to kill off. I referred to it as self-archaeology where I’m digging through my mind and finding shards and pieces that were removed or broken away in order to make myself fit.
At this point in my life, nearly forty years old, I am kinsugi-ing those pieces back in place. For those unaware, kinsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold. It not only embraces the broken piece but acknowledges that the break is important in the history of the thing and honors that fracture by highlighting it rather than trying to ignore it.
That has resulted in some heavy revelations about myself, not the least of which that I am a trans man. I’m more than just non-binary; I’m a man. Even writing that now is hard and stressful. Not because of the reaction of others (anybody with me on my journey has known me as non-binary for five years now, so the haters are gone), but because of the fundamental challenges that poses for who I am underneath.
All of the massive identity shifts that have happened (and are happening) have left me feeling unsure of myself in many ways. At the same time, I feel like I’m the Velveteen Rabbit becoming. That process is difficult, painful, and frightening. While I definitely know that whatever I find down here in the depths of myself won’t be bad, it’s still a lot. It’s sort of like meeting myself for the first time.
In the midst of all of that, we have had other things happening. A family member dear to me has died, and I am having unrelated family conflict with other people who are also tremendously important to me. I have had friends going through absolute hell and needing support. Not to mention my career is doing things. Good things, but things. This has resulted in me working long hours many days and not spending as much time with my husband. Understandably, that also has caused difficulty for both he and I. Not because he doesn’t support and encourage me at all but because he misses me. I also miss him.
This whole experience has felt like trying to stand up to an incoming tide. Every time a wave knocks me down, I stand up and cough out saltwater only to find another crashing over me. The sand under my feet is moving all over the place, and all the while I’m trying to frantically pick other people up, too.
I know I have been a bit remiss in my blogging/podcasting and definitely in my newsletter which I need to put together and start sending out more regularly again. However, the complexities of living my life right now are enough. I have also been booked solid since before Christmas for work, and I have a number of very large projects I’m working on with tight deadlines, so I have been head-down in those trying to ensure my clients get my best work.
All of this adds up to significant complexity, and I’ve been attempting to sort out my mental health, identity, professional self, meet obligations, deal with health challenges (of which I have many), and balance my friends and family. I am in leadership in six places, and that’s a lot for anybody. All of these different pieces and parts are in motion, and I’m doing my best to balance them. It’s hard.
I am hopeful that in the coming months I will have some answers to questions whose presence is making my life hard. With those answers received—whatever the answers are—I will have data to make better future plans on. At the moment it feels like I can only look at the next fifteen minutes at a time at most. No matter what my calendar says.
I will be back to more regular updates and activity, and I am not vanishing off the face of the Earth, but I felt I owed you some sort of explanation as to where I’ve been and what in the heck E has been doing since just before Christmas. The short answer, of course, is: a lot.
Thank you all for your continued support, kindness, and compassion. I know none of you are complaining about my presence or lack thereof, but at the same time, I owe you some degree of explanation and transparency. That is why you’re here, after all.
