There is both fear and resolve written across her brow

This post was originally written August 20th, 2021

I don’t know what it is about this screenshot that made me want to save it. I’ve deleted so many images from my phone the last few weeks, making room for the lessons I’ve been filming, and each time I hesitate over this one. I have a cloud service, so the thing is not gone when I hit delete, but it’s now one of the few pictures saved to my phone.

Ever have that feeling when you look in the mirror, where you don’t recognize yourself? Startled by the passing of the years, we hone in on the micro details of our perceived imperfections and pick ourselves into pieces, disjointed, disconnected from our own being. My eyelids are drooping, my nose has a point, my lips are allergic so they’re ever cracking, my jowls sag, my brows are thin.

But that isn’t what I see when I look at this candid, lost in my own reverie, picture of myself.

I see a woman who grew up not knowing she was Autistic. One who learned how to mimic other children’s speech and behavior patterns and hide the impulse to echo certain letters or words out loud, even when she knew how good it would feel to let those silky vowels and consonants flow through her lips. That girl who spent the better part of her early years so terrified of getting called out for talking out of turn in class again, that she simply didn’t talk much in school at all. I see the one who hid in closets with a book and flashlight when everything outside that closet door was too loud, too bright, too much, and everything inside felt cozy, warm, and safe.

When I look at this split second screen capture, I see my face, unscripted, without the smile I’ve learned makes me look more friendly and approachable, because my resting state tends to frown and make me look unwelcoming, leaving people to guess whether I’m mad at them or upset at something, even when I’m happy for their company.

I see a woman who has been through some shit, because she is too trusting of others words and dismissive of their actions. Because spending an entire 55 years of her life not knowing why things didn’t work out for her the same way they did other people, caused her to believe her own self was what couldn’t be trusted. That the knowing that welled up deep inside was a burden and not a pathway to her freedom.

Looking at this face in screen capture instead of the bathroom mirror is a perspective I rarely see. A fleeting moment in time, but I instantly recognize the crushing amount of information, the number of messages, and the database of words and their meaning I’m likely sorting through to get out of my mouth what I’m trying to say. There is both fear and resolve written across her brow.

She fears being found out. Never before my diagnosis, did I understand my own imposter syndrome as well as I do now. Prior to the year 2021, I would have explained that something like 65% of executives report having that feeling, higher for women, so naturally the rest of us non-executive types might experience it too.

Post diagnosis and the remembering of the experiences that should have alerted some school authority or health official of my neurodivergent mind, I see it for what it is now. A common trait for undiagnosed people on the spectrum who had to grow up learning how to be a person by carefully observing the people in their lives, heightened by the external messages that it indeed was these other people whose opinions really mattered.

We, the late diagnosed spectrumy adults are the Pinocchio’s of the world. Gippetto is an ever present voice inside pushing us to become real girls and boys.

She is resolved, this woman who carries such a vast internal world in her breast. To not let the past, crisis to undiagnosed crisis, be her story. She has battle wounds and scars aplenty. But she is resolved, this woman, to come through it, not as the tattered fragmented parts of a whole so often seen in her own reflection, or the stories of her failures from the past.

She is resolved to write her own story now. As a whole, and complete, and beautiful woman who knows her own worth and believes her own voice. She is resolved to accept the things of the past, the number of years lost to undiagnosed burnout. She is committed to proving, not to the world, but to herself, the things she is capable of doing.

When I look at this image, I see a woman who is no longer lost. She has finally found her way back home.