Take me to the other side…
Take me to the other side. This is a blog post that I never thought in all my life that I would ever get to write. Over the past 6 or 7 years I have been writing about the process that Rhoda and I refer to as “peeling the onion.” The onion peeling began as far back as 2008 but really started to take on steam when I met Rhoda at a Christmas party in 2015. The process involved discovering that I was autistic at the age of 41 and at the same time removing the years and layers of anger, emotional scarring, bad memories and post-traumatic stress which had built up on my soul due to growing up not knowing I was autistic and the effects it had on my relationship with my family and others.
Ever since I was a teenager, I have been longing to make it to the other side, to borrow the title from a song by Aerosmith. The other side refers to the real me which had been buried since I was a toddler under the protective onion which had built up around my soul. Childhood was not easy for me at all. I spent most of it not fitting in with society, fighting with my parents, angry, having meltdowns daily and generally unpleasant for most people to be around. The older I got, the worse things got. Very few people could see that underneath the porcupine puffer exterior was a very gentle, empathic soul. My soul constantly hurt. Yes, there were times of great joy when I was young, but most of that was overshadowed by the ugly exterior. I did not even like my exterior. There were quite a few times when I flat out hated myself and wondered why God even created me.
Even into my early 20s very few people could see under my prickly and often explosive exterior was deep and loving heart. My natural mom, my “Aunt Kathy” could see it from infancy. Even after my adoption she kept very close touch with me and was my support and sanity throughout childhood. My college girlfriend saw through the exterior and loved me dearly. And I had a few friends growing up who could see through it, but that was all. My parents were convinced that I was the angry young man from the Billy Joel song of the same name.
The first real view into the other side from someone other my Aunt Kathy came when I was in seminary. One of my classmates was in his late 30s and had spent a good bit of time as a counselor/therapist before entering into seminary. Due to the stresses of seminary, Adrian had seen both the best and worst of me. One day he commented to me that he could see that I didn’t actually have the prickly exterior that most people saw but instead he could tell that I had a gentle, loving heart. The next real insight into the “real me” came about 3 years later in the library in the town I grew up in. I was signing up for a library card and the librarian remembered me from pre-school. She was so happy to see me and had nothing but wonderful things to say about the little boy she remembered me being. I referenced this event in much greater detail in a previous post a few years back so I won’t go into full detail again, but recall at the time wondering who this young boy she remembered was? He certainly was not the me that I knew.
The rest of the process of peeling the onion, searching for my true self that was buried under years of anger, pain and post-traumatic stress has been very well documented on this blog, so I don’t feel the need to rehash this. I had made great progress in this endeavor by the time I started seeing my therapist, Heather, this time last year. Heather has worked with many autistic people and understands the challenges autism presents to a person. She also understands how post-traumatic stress would make the struggle with autism even more difficult. And yet she has been willing to gently push me to do what needed to be done, while at the same time being supportive and reassuring. Over the past year quite a bit has changed in my life for the better. I weathered a nasty storm in the last part of 2021 and the result was amazing. As a result of making it through the storm I have begun to realize that I am much more loveable of a person than I ever thought I was and that I have actually begun to form new, true friendships as opposed to the posers who left my life in the early 2010s when life got rough for me.
Starting with living in darkness for 2 months during Nov/Dec 2021 due to a corrupt landlord and moving in to 2022, several events have occurred which would have in the not-so-distant past caused me to meltdown publicly. Each of these events was stressful enough that the result in the past would have been ugly. And yet with each event I made it through them without losing composure and without making myself look bad. During the same time period it had become increasingly obvious to me that I was beginning to make new friends who actually enjoyed spending time with me. At first, I tried to blow off both of these concepts mostly because in the past they were completely foreign to me. I was not used to not melting down over stressful situations and was not used to experiencing other people genuinely showing love for me. Or at least that had not been the case for the vast majority of my nearly five decades on this planet. With each occurrence and each week that went on it was becoming clear to me and my closest friends that serious growth and change was occurring.
The more things have changed, the more I have been forced to accept that the way the old me handled and experienced things was past history and had been replaced by a new, much more gentle and approachable me. I am still autistic; there is no cure for autism. I still have some serious battle scars from the past, even if they are healing. However, I have begun to learn to be much more mindful in how I handle things and to accept that I am a loveable person. For a while I knew this information mentally but it had not yet begun to reach my deep sensitive soul. But even that has begun to change. As I have looked back and analyzed the past year I have begun to realize that the very thing I have been wanting since I was a child is no longer a wish and a dream, but has become a reality. I have made it to the other side. I am finally able to begin seeing the person that Adrian told me he saw in seminary and the old teacher of mine remembered from pre-school. The real me. The me who is no longer controlled by his temper and no longer controlled by the wounds of the past. The creative, fun loving, caring me that God made me to be. And yet, the journey has just begun. Now that I am finally starting to see that me, now it is time for me to begin to understand and fulfill the reason God put me here. What will I do with that? I do not know. But I am forever thankful to have made it this far and am excited for what the future holds.
Glory to God in the highest!
