Success Without Synthesis
The Autistic Self That Cannot Absorb Its Own Accomplishments
A lifetime of doing has not translated into being. The hollowness I feel as a midlife autistic in spite of a substantial list of achievements has forced some uncomfortable philosophical work.
When I audit my life, I can see the list clearly. But I cannot feel it as confidence. It is simply information. Most people absorb their accomplishments into their sense of self. I do not.
Because I cannot metabolise achievement, it never nourishes me. My autism categorises and indexes as I perform my way up the ladders of life. As a result, I am competent without feeling it. I do not inhabit the data.
When my boss called me to the boardroom one day I shocked him with the inner self. I was breaking character as I so often did when met head on, and he proceeded to try and rectify my inability to speak through tears with a speech he had prepared. It was a glowing list of accomplishments and praise that was to crescendo into the offer of directorship.
Unfortunately it broke me further. I could not process what was happening. It was further evidence that the exterior me was at odds with the interior. I was helplessly honest. I did not even know if I wanted to be there anymore.
Five minutes later over email he asked if I would be happy for him to hand it to a younger, less qualified colleague, and I said yes with some relief. But it hammered home that the accolade was not about skill, it was logistical. It solidified my sense that the game was disingenuous, that I was nobody. I had committed this kind of self sabotage many times before, yet another data point in my internal matrix.
My competence was an obligation to the world around me, a way to fit in, to be accepted, to keep up. But that did not mean reciprocation. Every mountain climbed became the new baseline. Every piece of praise became pressure to surpass the previous level. Competence had become a currency without intrinsic self worth.
Eventually that empty identity collapsed. The self I built externally had no internal structure. It fell because nothing inside it had ever settled into place.
Being good at things never gave me the feeling of being whole, just someone who people called on for help. If they did not have a problematic project, they did not need me. The productivity mask kept me upright, but once it fell away I had no idea who was underneath.
After my breakdown, when a sibling said how proud they were that I walked the length of the French Alps in less than a month, I dismissed it. It was simply walking. Anyone could do it with the luxury of time. Only now am I trying to absorb the experience and feel the weight of doing something rare, rather than reducing it to distances, elevation and days on trail. I need to metabolise that achievement into my identity.
Who will I be if I can be energised by what I have done rather than drained by what I must do next?
The more I achieved, the less I felt. Depression returned to the gap between the self I presented and the self I was left with.
If I do not learn to absorb what I have done, I will always perform for a life I am starved of. And perhaps that is the ache beneath all of this. I am full of evidence yet unable to feel any of it as my own.
