2024 came on the heels of 2023. Let me tell you something about 2023. It was fucking rough. I don’t remember it particularly well, but I remember how it felt. Like I’d been hit by a semi-truck.

In May of 2023 I flew home from a business trip overseas and slept for three days. When I was finally awake it was obvious that something was wrong with me. I was beyond exhausted. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t do anything. I felt sick. I felt stressed. My body hurt. My head hurt.  Doing anything exhausted me to the point of needing to lie down. I couldn’t catch my breath walking up my basement stairs.

I took COVID tests, I saw an urgent care doctor when I couldn’t get in to see my doctor soon enough. I saw my doctor. Medical tests were all over the place. Even my blood pressure which had been well-controlled with medication since I was 25 years old was out of control. 

That was all horrible, but it wasn’t even the bigger problem. My attention span was nonexistent. I didn’t want to eat anything at all. I didn’t want to do anything at all. And to make things even more interesting I had lost the ability to read more than a couple of words at a time. 

The prognosis: Burnout.  Nervous Breakdown, Dissociation. All of that heaped onto my plate which was already quite full. At my doctor’s insistence, I wound up taking an extended medical leave from work. I have trouble recalling all the details, but my doctor wound up extending my initial leave because I wasn’t doing any better. But this time I had added both a Psychologist and a Psychiatrist to my mighty professional team of people trying to figure out what the fuck was wrong with me. And it was pretty easy for them to all agree on a diagnosis of ADHD. 

Everyone saw that coming, right? So we tried medication and learned new ways to do things. And that all worked very poorly for me. Speed is not my thing. The meds made me feel focused for a short time,  but outside of myself for hours. I tried to pour all of my effort and focus into meditation practice because it was the only thing that didn’t feel wrong. Well, that and watching the Lord of the Rings Trilogy multiple times per week. 

When I went back to work things weren’t great. Work had been a major stressor. Since it was work that pushed me over the edge in the first place, going back was daunting. As it turned out, circumstances at work hadn’t changed for the better. Returning to work after leave I was restricted to half-time and my doctor built in several modifications/ accommodations for my return. It wasn’t enough and I wound up on medical leave. Again.Then back to work. Again.

I had never planned for a career as a yo-yo.

In February of 2024, I left the company I had been with for 11 years. I also mostly left the Open Source project I had worked on for 15 years. I also stopped working on the new podcast my partner and I had recently leaned in to. Because my brain had space for none of that.

Also, my beloved shadow, Spike the cat, died. That really sucked.

By this point, my life was primarily sleep, medical, and mental health appointments. I struggled to make time for friends. I struggled to communicate with all but the people closest to me. I probably struggled to communicate with them too, but they never let me feel it. 

My doctor, psychologist, and psychiatrist all felt there was something they were missing. My daughter did too and asked me to consider the one thing I wanted to consider least of all.

After more than a year of working with the doctors, working on myself, testing, evaluation, and conversation we got to the bottom of it. On December 5 I received an Autism diagnosis. 

Suddenly, 47 years of confusion and oddities started to make sense. Shame, guilt, confusion, arguments, anxiety, meltdowns, breakdowns, burnouts, and generally feeling like I had to dress up in a human suit every day of my life and pretend to be, well, a person.

Shortly after the diagnosis was official my partner asked what if anything it changed for me. 

Nothing. Nothing at all. 

But also absolutely everything.