My background is pretty bland and depressing. I'm 37 years old, diagnosed ADHD, clinically depressed (as in major depressive disorder), anxiety. Self-diagnosed autistic after reading this book and realizing that yeah, every facet of my outward self is designed to placate people around me, to fit social expectations, and to try and minimize attention to myself because I associate getting attention with humiliation and shame.

I've always been a weirdo. I've made no secret of that here. Social problems fitting in as a child. Incredibly smart from a young age, they tell me. I taught myself to read at age 2, I'm told. I later learned that's sometimes called "hyperlexia" and is strongly indicated with autism. I don't recall doing the "classic" autism things as a kid like lining up my toys instead of playing with them, but I absolutely preferred to be by myself and had trouble relating with other kids. I was bullied from a young age, always had trouble making friends my entire life. I've always felt ostracized, humiliated by my peers more than anything else, unable to relate. I learned I had ADHD at a young age, around 8, and they threw some Ritalin at it and called it a day. Didn't start actually understanding what ADHD is until the last few years, like post-pandemic, when I started really researching it in earnest and finding out a bunch of things that I was always made to feel were personal flaws that made me a shitty, childish person were in fact documented symptoms of ADHD that I didn't understand. When I read the breakdown of what "executive function" is I cried for a long time. Finally, one of my worst demons had a name. It wasn't some shitty thing about me born of cowardice and worthlessness, it was my goddamn brain being weird and not working right, and me not understanding how to work with it. From there, I learned the names of other demons that have tormented me my entire life. Alexithymia. Rejection sensitive dysphoria. Sensory overload. Burnout. Emotional dysregulation. So many things that I'd never been told about and had no idea how to deal with. A place to start. I sought out an ADHD specialist to deal with it, and the anxiety and depression that came along with it.

I've been suicidal since I was 15, in and out of therapy since I was 16. What I mean by "suicidal" is that I think about suicide near-constantly. Most of the time nowadays I'm inured to it, it's like wallpaper, it's like "haha oh brain when will you learn that splattering yourself all over the wall is not the answer, now let's get in the shower to get ready for our job we hate." I used to cut myself when I was under a lot of stress at a grocery deli job when I was 19. I've had a loaded shotgun in my mouth, both hammers cocked. I fantasize about putting my head out the window on the freeway, rubbing it down like an eraser on the center concrete divider, yanking my head off and rolling it down the street like a bowling ball, being impaled by a piece of falling satellite debris, anything to keep it a ridiculous fantasy and not a practical way out of my unending pain. And I do mean pain. Chronic pain from flat feet and a fucked up knee and back and neck issues. Emotional pain from long-term social isolation, very few friends at any point in my life, zero romantic/sexual success despite tons of effort and varying approaches and "working on myself" for decades like everyone told me to with no results. I'm not a virgin, if it matters; I don't think it really does anymore. Favor arranged by a friend. Disappointing for a variety of reasons but... I digress. The real pain is never having been in a relationship, wondering just what the fuck is wrong with me, and learning to hate myself for this and a great number of other reasons over the years, never really knowing the root of my suffering. I really have felt worthless. Useless. I've internally compared myself to toilet paper: something that you keep around because you can use it, then you throw it away. Detestable otherwise. I've felt like it's a certainty I'll die alone never knowing a true friend, never feeling love. Never making anything of myself. Jumping from shit job to shit job, picking up non-transferable skills like knowing a lot about cameras in 2009, how video games are tested, how to make sausage, how to clean an industrial rotisserie grill and dump the chicken grease out of it, and the latest: how to fill out DMV paperwork for California in highly specific circumstances. Never feeling like I was worth much. Always feeling like my emotions were at best an inconvenience to others, that my interests were stupid and lame, and that I was always going to be a weirdo who makes everyone else uncomfortable so I should just hide myself away from the world, or remove myself from it entirely as a matter of moral duty.

I've had a lot of trauma in my life, some of which I've only recently come to terms with. When I was 6 I was inappropriately touched by another boy maybe a year older than me on a playdate, for instance. I felt like it was shameful and dirty, given my Catholic upbringing, and felt like it "didn't count" since I didn't resist, didn't really understand what was happening, and the perpetrator was, indeed, another boy around my age and not an adult. Just some touching, that's all. But the shame and guilt and fear I had associated with it festered in me for years, and it wasn't until I was reading The Body Keeps the Score last year and figured out that dwelling on this memory triggered panic symptoms in me that I said "hey maybe it does count" and talked to my therapist about it. I explored other threads of trauma in my past as well, realizing that yeah, it did fuck me up to have almost no friends, to never fit in, to be convinced I was inherently evil by a church that was at that time covering up mass child molestation. That's trauma. That's real. My fucking brain and body are telling me so. I also started taking seriously the notion that I had autism, like really focusing on it instead of letting be a stray thread of thought that I kept dismissing even though it kept surfacing like a DUNE sandworm sensing a plot development about to happen.

So what convinces me is that I get deeply upset by bright lights and chaotic overlapping voices, and just figured these were just annoyances everyone had to deal with, more or less, and pushed it all down. All of my social problems I attributed to just not paying attention and being "socially r-----ed" as I so eloquently put it as a younger man. I just thought I was cringey, and just dumb to not pay attention. I began to worry I was a sociopath or psychopath because of my "lack of empathy," since I had a hard time understanding why people feel the way they feel in the moment, needing to think about it later on to understand. As I explored the notion of being autistic -- or rather, AuDHD, which I say as "A U D H D" because "Audi HD" sounds like a European luxury sedan -- and relating very directly to more and more things people have posted both here and elsewhere on social media, directly labeling the thing I relate to as autism, an autistic thing that autistic autists diagnosed with autism by autism specialists do, and learned how a professional diagnosis can cost $2000 and often isn't covered by insurance if you're an adult, suddenly the notion that I'm autistic didn't sound so fucking crazy anymore.

So I stumbled on this book while looking for books on the tism, and looked up the author to make sure they weren't a quack. Lo and behold, I see his name loosely associated with Jessica McCabe, the How to ADHD girl, who has never steered me wrong on resources before. So I read this book, cried as I read through damn near every chapter, talked about it with my therapist again, who agreed that yeah, it's expensive as fuck to get assessed and probably not worth it in my circumstances, and instead steered me to some self-diagnostic tools that, as usual, all pinged me as autistic as fuck. The top-rated one (for accuracy, if you knew how to read it and interpret it, as far as separating the normies from the autistics [cool people ] goes) was the RAADS-R. The threshold for "autistic as fuck" is 160, I got a 165 on it. So, yeah, probably. Won't change much in how I treat it with regards to therapy and whatnot, but in terms of how I understand and interpret myself and my needs? Groundbreaking. Very much needed.

And so I saw the Bell Hooks threads and thought, fuck it, why not? I mentioned it, people said they were all for it, they started making threads in anticipation of it, and I thought, it helped me a lot, and it can continue to help me to come back to it and read it again. Why not do it with one of the most principled, accepting, and supportive communities I've ever encountered? Someone here could benefit. Maybe I could actually make a positive impact on someone else's life after all.