When Solitude Feels Safer Than Support
Self-Reliance, Autistic Vulnerability, and the Fear of Being Understood
I do not like to ask for help. When I need direction, I double down on the difficulty and find my own way. It is a kind of vacuum, rarefied and isolating yet clarifying. Free of noise, the silence becomes precise.
It is not pride so much as a need for self-sufficiency. I am not embarrassed to be lost. I lean into the discomfort of it. I do not want to trouble people, and deeper still, I do not want them troubling me. I want to test myself. I need to know I am capable. My instinct is to avoid interference and to sidestep the well-meaning certainty of others.
Being lost feels preferable to being guided.
Yet I am often the first to offer help, and when asked, I rarely manage to say no.
Herein lies the problem: why can I not allow others the same satisfaction of helping me? What drives this double standard?
It is a survival mechanism built on control. Helping others is safe. Being helped is vulnerability. It risks being understood, which can feel like the core threat within the autistic experience. Autonomy becomes order, a way of avoiding the chaos of collaboration.
For many autistic people, being seen is not comfort. It is the feeling of walls turning transparent. Better to ask the questions than to be caught answering them.
The neurotypical person often expects to be understood. My autism registers intrusion with the abruptness of someone stepping into a private room.
The world misreads my aloofness and mistakes it for disengagement or apathy, distrust or arrogance. Few recognise it as preservation wearing the mask of shyness.
It is easier to hold the rope for others than to let them take my hand. My empathy fuels this independence rather than softening it. When I share a problem, it feels multiplied rather than eased.
I remember the early thrill of childhood exploration, those innocent sensations of discovery, only to have an adult meddle with my sense of agency. Rather than feel encouraged by their direction, it cut to the quick of my ignorance. Either I was too slow to figure things out for myself, or I was doubling down on my sneakiness to do so.
The heroes I immersed myself in glorified self-sufficiency. The stories built around them celebrated the lone journey and the myth of coming from nothing, a story that pathologises dependence. We are social creatures craving control on our own terms, which is a difficult landscape for neurodivergent people to navigate.
Accepting help can feel like relinquishing authorship of your own life. Ironically, it was my therapist who reauthored mine by providing an autistic looking glass that reframed the life I thought I understood.
My inner sanctum collapsed like a tent in a gale, revealing the shadows and the disorientated shapes inside.
I am learning the middle ground. Independence and interdependence can coexist. If they could not, getting lost alone would become a missing person story rather than a rescue mission. I could not have been a creative director without others to direct, and without previous directors shaping my own development.
The leaning in, then, becomes an act of acceptance rather than withdrawal. Finding the space to float in isolation and the courage to trust may be the equation I have been trying to calculate all along without knowing it.
