So I just wanted to write a blog post updating where I've been (again). First: As I've mentioned before, I've dealt with a lot of health issues over the past decade or so. Some of those were mental health-related (grief from losing five family members each year from 2011-2015) and some were physical issues. All of them have been fairly challenging.
And I never guessed that the two serious physical injuries would help me find the missing puzzle piece to my mental health struggles.
Long story SOMEWHAT short, I shattered my right ankle in June 2021 and was FINALLY mostly recovered from that when I broke my left ankle a few months ago, in December 2024. I'd already received an ADHD diagnosis in 2023, quite a few years after my son's diagnosis spurred me to seek my own. But despite what I THOUGHT was the answer I'd been seeking as the root cause of my anxiety and occasional bouts of depression, I still found myself floundering for seemingly no reason. I was overall pretty happy, successful in my day job (although it ironically left me little energy to write or feel creative), had family and friends who loved me, and did my best to be a kind and caring person.
So it was hard for me to understand WHY I found myself disliking myself so often.
Then I lost all ability to mask at all with the first ankle injury, and sensory overwhelm and meltdowns hit me so hard I found myself saying things like, "I feel autistic." I have several friends who are on the spectrum, so I was familiar with a lot of the sensory and processing challenges many of them face, but I never once considered the fact I could be as well.
Not until then.
But once I mostly recovered physically, I started masking again so heavily that I didn't make the logical connection. Until I broke the second ankle, thankfully only in the one non-weight-bearing bone rather than all three, and it was painful but not nearly as much as the first time. But yet--I was still equally overwhelmed and melting down easily over sensory input. So that's when I started saying, "Maybe I AM autistic" rather than just "I FEEL autistic."
In a future post, I'll delve a little more deeply into all of that. But for now let's just say that I'm hoping at least knowing this now, in my late 40s, will help me arrange my life and resources in a way that I won't be constantly running myself into the ground and hitting burnout mode because of undiagnosed conditions.
Since this turned out a little longer than I planned, I'll wait until the next post to give an in-depth update on writing projects I'm working on. I'm also planning to resurrect and regularly update my author YouTube channel, Rambling Prose (hoping to have an update and Story Engine prompt cards unboxing video edited and uploaded soon) and posting on my BlueSky account. In the meantime, if you want to get a little sneak peek of upcoming projects, feel free to check out my Upcoming Releases page on this website.
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