Leaving Home with Undiagnosed Autism

Family Heartbreak, Youthful Defiance, and Neurodivergence

Late one night I was dragged out of bed and confronted by two people I didn’t recognise: the quiet one angry, the stoic one crying. I had broken my parents.

It was an intervention, a plea not to leave the family home, a warning that I was making a huge mistake.

My 19-year-old brain had other ideas. I understood their fears on some level, but the desire for autonomy outweighed the heavy emotions in the room.

My life had felt like a rehearsal I was always getting wrong, with loving directors relentless in their attempts to steer the show. The effect on my undeveloped brain was the belief I was never enough, that I was stupid and required constant instruction, incapable of making my own decisions or learning from my own experiences.

Ideas and plans were often cut off at the knees to save me from myself. Each intervention crushed my creativity and trained me into a coping style that held back full effort in the face of inevitable critique.

I had just finished a creative course preparing me for the advertising world. During it I became entangled in a relationship born more out of circumstance than intent.

As my muse lay asleep in another room, I sat confronted by the distress my choices were causing.

It was the eleventh hour. By daylight I would be on a full day’s drive to a new city and a new life.

Yet my parents were in pieces. They begged me not to go, Dad bellowing for me to see the damage I was doing to Mum, who sat weeping uncontrollably.

I dug in. You can’t keep trying to control me. I need to make my own experiences. I was cold and closed off, unable to process in real time, only frustrated that everything had to be a problem.

Their main fear was that I was leaving with the wrong person. First generation in the country, from separated parents, culturally a world apart, they couldn’t imagine anything good coming from it. They had seen all this before, as had I.

A teenage romance Mum had disapproved of years earlier saw my driving privileges revoked. My response was to cycle two hours to her house and stay the night.

Looking back, the autistic markers are clear.

I seemed to have a maturity gap, my father’s relentless critique and instruction likely its source. I gravitated towards people in difficulty, those having a hard time in life and giving life a hard time. They, in turn, gravitated towards me: the vulnerable oddball without a filter, eager to treat other people’s problems as puzzles to be solved.

Mum could always sense the inevitable crash, having seen it all before. But I was steadfast in my need to get gone, to live free.

So as I sat breaking my parents’ hearts, I knew they weren’t wrong, yet I doubled down, obstinance the only path to escape.

That night left lasting damage on all of us. My inability to process the emotions led to a cruel silence. I became incommunicado for months as I tried to navigate a new life, rejecting Mum’s begging calls to return. It’s a guilt that only deepens as I age and unpick the complexity.

I had become the wayward son for no good reason other than perhaps mind blindness.

The rules, the regulations, the structure and instruction, all of it had made me feel trapped. In time I would realise it wasn’t malice, but my own lack of understanding.

I fuelled instability in the relationship. If demands rose above a certain threshold, I vanished. Unable to face confrontation in the moment, I would run and meltdown in private. As I had done as a child. As I would continue to do as an adult.

The volatility of emotional overwhelms was dangerous. I would drive at double the speed limit through blurred vision, or walk into stormy seas at night, willing the powers that be to take the pain away. I had no idea what my problem was, only that I was frustrated, sad, confused, and desperate for the madness to stop.

Six months to a year later I began reconnecting with my parents, shortly before returning home after finding my belongings hurled from a second-storey window. Such was my propensity to cause distress, and my lack of real time empathy or resolution.

My avoidant attachment style was always to turn on its heel and walk away, leaving a trail of broken hearts and confusion in its wake.

I take too much responsibility for the damage I’ve done, but there must also be self forgiveness for my ignorance and undiagnosed autism. Not as a free pass, but as part of my becoming. We are all guilty of emotional carelessness, all trying to feel better in the only ways we know how.

I still wonder how things might have unfolded had I received an early diagnosis. Would it have made a difference? Perhaps not. The young me was naive yet indignant, and may have chosen the same path regardless.

Hindsight has allowed me to truly appreciate the stress I put my parents through, and the love they offered regardless. I later learned that time taught my mother to quiet her instinct to protect and instead wait for me to come to her. I also learned my father had once fled from his own parents, though the ties were never quite mended. Regret now yields to acceptance, ignorance to wisdom.