When my masking muscle memory atrophied after four years of remote work, forcing myself back into full-time office life wasn’t just uncomfortable—it was unsustainable.
For the next two years, I forced myself to manually operate social scripts that used to run automatically in the background. I calculated my posture, monitored my eye contact, filtered ambient noise, and navigated complex social dynamics through sheer willpower.
Eventually, the tax came due.
It didn’t happen all at once like that ten-second freeze in Atlanta years earlier. Instead, it was a slow, crushing erosion of my internal resources. I woke up every morning feeling as though my nervous system had been scrubbed with sandpaper. My energy reserves were depleted before I even stepped foot out the door. The things I used to accomplish with ease felt like dragging concrete blocks uphill.
I felt completely hollowed out, detached, and emotionally exhausted. Something felt deeply wrong. I was increasingly irritable, less tolerant of everyday stress, and carrying a cognitive load that seemed entirely disproportionate to the demands of my life.
Like many adults in their late 30s and early 40s reaching this point, I reached for the only framework society had given me to describe profound, persistent fatigue and withdrawal: I must be depressed.
It was a logical conclusion on the surface, yet that theory never fully fit the data. I still experienced joy and looked forward to future plans. I still possessed hope, ambition, curiosity, and purpose. My physical energy was fine—this was a profound emotional drag, not a bodily fatigue.
Reluctantly, I sought professional guidance. What followed was not a single, neat diagnosis, but a succession of explanatory frameworks. Each one illuminated another part of my architecture, revealing patterns that had been hidden in plain sight for decades.
The discoveries themselves were not surprising. If anything, each produced the exact same reaction: not shock, but quiet recognition. Nothing felt new. Quite the opposite—each explanation simply revealed that something I had spent my entire life treating as an isolated anomaly, a contradiction, or a personal failure was actually part of a larger, coherent system.
What I was experiencing wasn’t a primary mood disorder. It was classic autistic burnout—a state of profound mental and emotional exhaustion caused by a lifetime of heavy masking and chronic sensory overload.
Shortly after turning 40, after a lifetime of living with seemingly disjointed quirks I could never fully reconcile, the pieces finally locked into place: I was identified as neurodivergent (Level 1 Autistic). As we began peeling back the layers of my life, we uncovered the other foundational pillars running through my psyche—aromanticism and asexuality.
Hearing those words wasn’t heavy or discouraging. It felt like being handed the actual owner’s manual for a complex machine I had been trying to run on the wrong fuel for four decades. I wasn’t broken. I wasn’t suddenly failing at life. My brain had simply spent 40 years running high-demanding neurotypical emulation software on neurodivergent hardware—and it had finally run out of memory.
For forty years, I had treated the various quirks of my life as disconnected data points, each occupying its own separate folder in my mental archive:
- My discomfort with traditional romance
- My unusual relationship with physical affection and nudity
- My relentless drive for personal autonomy
- My sensory sensitivities
- My unconventional views on family, partnership, and parenthood
None of these observations appeared related. I simply ran my own programs, completely unaware of how heavily those daily adaptations were taxing my system. By standard metrics, I was a walking contradiction—highly pragmatic yet deeply empathetic. I never fit comfortably inside the neurotypical box, nor did I match the pop-culture stereotypes of neurodivergence.
But I was never ashamed to be me. That fundamental self-acceptance is precisely why I was able to navigate the neurotypical world so effectively for so long.
Then the puzzle pieces began to lock together. As I analyzed the data, a broader pattern emerged: many of the concepts society treated as inseparable appeared entirely independent to me.
