Maybe You’ll Never be Happy. But You Can Be Interested.

Finding meaning in an ordinarily unhappy life.

Welcome back to Autistic Advice, a semi-regular advice column where I respond to reader questions about neurodiversity, accessibility, disability justice, and self-advocacy from my perspective as an Autistic psychologist.

You can submit questions or suggest future entries in the series via my Tumblr ask box, or you can email questions to askdevonprice at gmail.

Today’s questions come from neurodivergent people who, despite working hard at accepting themselves and unmasking, still find that they are riddled with shame, and unable to imagine a future in which they are happy.

Here’s our first anonymous question from Tumblr:

Anon, it does not surprise me to hear that there are layers upon layers of shame stacked all atop one another in your mind, like the uncountable coats of sticky white paint a landlord coats his units with instead of ever cleaning them. It gets confining, doesn’t it, being expected to do everything, while being denied so much? When you think on all of the societal rules that guide your life, and the punishments you’ve faced that taught you what those rules were, doesn’t it get difficult to move around freely, to place your things where you’d like them, hell, even to breathe?

Shrugging off society’s “shoulds” and reclaiming a better, more empowering life for yourself often works this way. The outermost layers of shame that we begin to work on are the ones that most obviously wound us, and most visibly impede our lives. But beneath those overt levels of shame, there are lifetimes of trauma and societal messaging lurking underneath. Working on shame in its most obvious forms can sometimes reveal to us our deeply ingrained issues.

For example, a lot of people are very aware they feel ashamed about their bodies. It’s no secret we live in a society that abhors fat people and would rather see them die of medical neglect than accept that human beings have all manner of bodies. If you feel ashamed about your body, you might be reminded of it every time you go clothes shopping, shower, get dressed, prepare a meal, step on the scale at the doctor’s office, or try to send a sexy nude to a stranger.

It’s not uncommon for people to speak openly about loathing their bodies, and alongside the exploitations of the diet industry, a whole parallel industry selling tepid “body positivity” is there to offer workbooks, therapies, and flirty, controlled-top panty sets to you. So if you’re ashamed about your body, you probably know it — and you have some framework for understanding where that shame comes from, and why you might want to see it gone.

The same thing is true for other overt prejudices people face in society — if you are affected by anti-Blackness, transphobia, ableism, classism, and the like, you probably know to some extent that you do. You see how it affects you and your communities all the time, and you probably want to overcome that shame so that you can claim more of your power back.

But what happens after you start making real progress in vanquishing that shame? Let’s say you have surrounded yourself with fat liberationist buddies, read books by Aubrey Gordon and Da’Shaun Harrison, attended a Lindy-West-esque fat-girl pool party, tried eating intuitively, and started grounding yourself using self-pleasure and yoga?

You might find that the constantly-running monologue inside your brain is not so fixated on your body size anymore. Or the tenor of the internal conversation has changed. Maybe now you do not hate your body, but you hate that you wasted so many years not fully living. You might no longer hate how you look, but you might still feel ashamed to eat in public (and if you are fat, you are still getting stared at and judged when you do!).

Your self-loathing and rumination may have entirely flipped the script on you, even, and now it shames you for every single fatphobic thought you ever have, because it makes you a bad fat liberationist and not a true friend to everyone in that movement, a failure at working on yourself and at achieving the American dream of boundless, untroubled personal happiness, and so while your life has objectively gotten freer and more connected, you don’t really feel any better than before.

It is pretty typical for a person living in a Puritanical, morally restrictive society to keep stewing in self-hatred long after they have decided that society made them feel that way for unjust reasons. Inside of your mind there are core beliefs about how the world works, and values that indicate how you think the world should work, yes, but you also have emotional and psychological patterns that function somewhat independently of them. So sometimes you shift away from old beliefs and bad values that didn’t serve you, but find that the feelings and thought patterns that kept them going are still there.

So, let’s say that you used to hate your body because you believed that fatness was undesirable and a sign of laziness and failure. You’ve read up on the *besity paradox and set point theory and looked at a ton of porn featuring fat cuties, and now you don’t believe any of that stuff anymore. Your mind dropped those old beliefs and values. But your mind is also still engaging in the process of judging your desirability and evaluating your worthiness based on how hard you try and how much you measure up to some external moral standard.

And so you’re miserable, because you still don’t feel you are being a good enough person or following the rules. You feel anxious because you’ve oriented your whole life around meeting external standards, but now you might not even be sure of what the rules are any more. You’ve thrown out the values that mainstream, fatphobic society gave you. So what should you value now? Is it kindness? Generosity? Self-sacrifice? Political radicalism? Self-love?

Your mind is still so well-trained in self-denial and Puritanism that it can make almost any belief into a reason to punish yourself. You believe in fat liberation? Well, you aren’t doing enough to uplift people who are more affected by fatphobia than you. You believe that everyone should have access to food and medical care without gatekeeping based on income and body size? Well, people are starving and dying on the street, yet here you are sitting at home eating a yogurt parfait. How disgusting of you.

It is easier to change a belief or a personal value than it is to change the entire architecture of your mind. And that really sucks, because changing beliefs and values is already hard! It takes a person years to de-condition themselves out of an irrationally hateful belief system. Even after those beliefs are gone, the mental instinct to hate and judge can still be there. You may free yourself from certain damaging social “rules” along the way, but your brain is still searching for the laws to follow in order to be a good person.

Like every lifelong eating disorder sufferer, I am quite good at inventing rules for myself to follow, and then crushing all gasps of selfhood beneath them. When I was a teenager on the pro-anorexia Livejournal community, my rules were concerned with calories. But after I started trying to get a little bit better, the rules were about how much time I spent in physical activity. After I got invested in resisting fatphobia, my rules had to do with getting enough nutrition and looking “healthy” in other people’s eyes. But still I had this need for rules, to create a structure that could contain my life, and set specific guidelines by which I could judge my success and failure.

Socially, I was getting abstract signs of failure all the time. I was too Autistic and weird and disinterested in most other people to ever feel a success in the world. But my rules gave me hope, because they said I was failing repeatedly for a specific reason, and that I could one day be successful, virtuous, and beloved if I only got my behavior perfectly in line.

I kept making up new rules, about everything, then feeling ashamed of myself for failing to follow them. I had daily word-count goals, socializing goals, activism goals, reading goals, financial goals, rules about how I was supposed to carry my body, dress, speak, think, feel, meditate, masturbate, clean, and enjoy my down time. My rules set the standard for what it meant to be a good person. But I never felt like one.

One way to get over that shame, potentially, is to banish all aspirations of being a good person, and simply allow oneself to be.

What does it actually mean to be a good person? I know I don’t believe what the law or Christianity have to say about it. I wouldn’t trust any institutionalized religion to tell me how to live. The professional organizations to which I belong have signed off on some seriously unethical, immoral stuff. I can’t really judge my conduct based on how other people view it. A lot of people have absolutely horrific worldviews. I don’t fully agree with any of my friends about how life should be lived. They make lots of decisions I never would. I don’t think there’s a God. I don’t think nature cares what I do.

So who decides if I am a good person? And how would I even know if they did? I’m not getting a medal for it. I’m not going to heaven. All I have is this life as I am experiencing it right now. Nobody is in charge of it. It is not being graded. The majority of my life will be witnessed and evaluated by no one but me.

Am I going to carry out my entire existence looking over my shoulder at the imagined psychologies of others, feeling terrible every single time my actions don’t line up with what literally anyone on the planet might consider ideal? Or can I simply accept that I am an animal that hungers, gets horny, gets triggered and feels threatened, that sometimes wants to hurt others and sometimes can be selfish, but is mostly just acting out of my impulses and prior training, and that none of it necessarily means anything?

I find a kind of refuge in this naturalistic nihilism, Anon. Maybe it will work for you, maybe it won’t. But when I look at my chinchilla, or the birds outside, I know that they are not wondering what they should be doing. They are just doing — all manner of things. They have reactions that can be violent or cruel. They can be loving caretakers, playful goobers, and snarling amoral killers all in the same breath. They are living, wild accumulations of external pressure, reaction, and experience. And what do you know, I am too.

Beneath each layer of self-imposed rules that I peel off, Anon, I find an older, more primordial coat of paint that tells me something about how the animal of me was treated long ago. I need to be thin became I need to be fit became I need to be hard-working became I need to be attractive became I need to convince people to take care of me. I understand where that shame really came from, in the end. It was from being young and vulnerable, and not having anyone who was able to protect me.

The upshot of finding so many layers of shame hiding inside of you, Anon, is that you are developing greater self-awareness. You used to think you were ashamed of just your transness, let’s say, or of your inability to work a full-time job. But beneath that outermost layer of shame, you are finding the buried, older rules that guide you, and the shame that informed them. You can tackle those layers of shame one-by-one, and though it is a lifelong, ugly process, it does bring you greater clarity and freedom at each stage.

I’m still a completely self-loathing wreck, but now at least I know it is because I fear being a complete void, with no one around that loves me and nothing to live for. That’s an existential, philosophical ache I can use to connect with other people, and maybe make some decent art out of. Grappling with the hatred of the void beats hating and starving myself. It is better to know what’s going on inside you, even if a lot of it isn’t pleasant.

But also, hear me out Anon:

What if you expect that some of the time, maybe even a lot of the time, you are gonna feel bad? That you might be an anxious, shame-ridden, ruminative person whose brain casts about for reasons to feel inadequate no matter what you do? Could you make peace with that? Could you have a life that is worthwhile even if the shame never goes away?

If you’ve been prone to rumination going as far back as you can remember, it’s reasonable to expect that to remain for the rest of your days. That needn’t be the end of the world, or an especially big deal — you’ve lived a whole complex life already while carrying this spiraling monkey on your back, through times good and bad, and you can continue to carry it through times that are joyful, and tragic, and chaotic, and most of all, interesting.

As human beings, we evolved not to be happy, but to survive. There is a utility to our anxiety and ruminative thinking. Our active minds do solve problems by thinking very hard about them, and we do avoid misfortune by gaming out future worst-case scenarios. Of course, worrying and overthinking can get us into awful trouble just as much as it protects us, but it’s an inarguable part of having a consciousness all the same. It may not be enjoyable, but neither is that straining need-to-pee feeling that sends us running to the restroom. Responding to discomfort keeps us alive.

A lot of shame-spiraling happens because our brains are trying to protect us from future social rejection — looking out for missed signals, second-guessing assumptions, and imagining potential faux pas. And when we are marginalized, we actually are getting rejected just about every single day, so it’s quite natural for us to dread interacting with people and wondering constantly if something we are doing is “wrong.” We have our reasons to worry.

The Biological Causes of Mental Illness Cannot Be Separated From the Social Ones
Case in point: Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria in kids with ADHD or Autism.devonprice.medium.com

Your shame, Anon, is not your fault, it’s not the sign of an insufficiently ascended worldview, it’s not from a lack of dedicated inner work, it’s not a moral failure, and it’s not a defect you can easily fix. Being riddled with shame and fixating on the negative is just a thing that happens in your life. It happens to you, it happens to me, it happens to just about every marginalized person.

But you can continue having a full life. You can try new things, meet new people, question your beliefs, adopt new ones, develop a new spiritual practice, break your old rules, get obsessed with new ones, disappoint people, impress others, fuck up, learn, forget, let go, and continue.

Your life can be a monster-of-the-week TV show in which the status quo resets at the end of each plotline and you have to learn the same lessons again and again. You can commit yourself to doing acts of pure altruism in your community while being absolutely vile and petty to your ex. In short, you can be a complex and conflicted animal, one that never stops having triggers or showing the signs of past neglect. We don’t expect our rescue animals to ever become blank slates free of trauma, do we? We still love them even if they’re afraid of men in tall hats who hoard their food and poop on the carpet forever.

You can be full of shame and neuroses and still be loved. And love yourself. Some of the time. On a good day. When you’re not being freaking the fuck out about one of your imaginary rules being violated. And you might just be adorable and relatable to huge segments of society even when you are wrapped up in these irrational meltdowns. In the midst of the storm, you may learn how to look up and admire the greenness of the sky, or analyze the twitching of your pulse in your arm. You can learn something and take a keen interest in yourself and others, always. Even when you are beside yourself with self-loathing and misery.

Your shame and rumination, Anon, are not your fault. They’re just something you have to find your own way to live alongside. And though they are a burden that you carry, you needn’t carry them alone.

Our second question this week comes from an unmasking Autistic who is having trouble figuring out what they want out of life, and what could make them happy:

Wanting things and feeling pleasure don’t come easily to all of us, Anon. We can blame this anhedonic tendency on many factors.

First is the Autistic bent toward alexithymia — many of us are quite poor at identifying our feelings, due to neurological differences in how we process stimuli and body states, because we have been repeatedly conditioned to ignore our discomfort and be quiet about our interests, or some combination of both. Autistic people famously dissociate from reality a lot, because the world can be so unpleasant and unwelcoming to us. Most of us have been abused multiple times, and we lack power in society, so we haven’t been able to go after the things that we want. Sometimes we cope by ceasing to have those troublesome wants at all.

Wanting and enjoying things is a skill that can atrophy, and sadly, we may have been protected from it having atrophied. Not caring and not wanting can preserve a lot of energy and protect us from pointless fights. But eventually, many of us become settled and safe enough that we do want to want things to go after. Our reflex to quiet every reaction and imitate those around us hits its breaking point, and we know that pretending to be a non-person will kill us. But by then, it’s hard to get our wants back — or to be present enough in reality to enjoy them.

And then, there are just some people who do not feel positive emotions very strongly. Try as they might to recapture childlike joy, unwind, and free themselves from repression, they find that they just never can, and that expecting themselves to be happy only sets them up greater frustration. The (it must be said, deeply individualistic and American) expectation of great happiness becomes yet another neurotypical quality that they lack, another way in which they fail to measure up.

But life can be so much more than happiness, or getting what you want. And truth be told, most people eventually come to realize that moods like happiness are fleeting, that getting what you desire offers only a short respite before the wanting comes back anew with a fresh target, and that a life that we find meaningful and interesting is far more attainable than one that is pleasant.

Let me point you to a really interesting recently published scientific paper, Anon, finding that individuals who are high in self-control tend to prefer meaningful activities over pleasurable ones:

Psychologist Katharina Bernecker and her colleagues measured participants’ tendency to engage in self-control as well as their hedonic capacity, in other words, their ability to experience pleasure. As the design of this study implies, people vary in their ability to enjoy things! Some people just experience pleasure more readily and are more motivated by pleasure than others! This alone should lend you some comfort, I think. If you are not an especially pleasure-wired person, whether by trait or by trauma, you are far from alone.

People high in hedonic capacity were people who tended to agree with the following statements (note, some at the end of the list are reverse-scored):

The Trait Hedonic Capacity Scale developed by Bernecker & Becker, 2021.

These high hedonic capacity pleasure-seekers were compared with people high in self-control, who tend to agree with the following items (or to disagree with the reverse-scored items, which are marked with a minus sign):

The Brief Self-Control Scale by Tangney, Baumeister, & Boone, 2004.

If you are a person who has masked your Autism traits for a long time, or otherwise carefully regulates how you present yourself and the choices you make about your behavior, then congratulations, you are probably a very high self-controlling individual. And if you find it very difficult to slow down in the moment or experience pleasure, you probably don’t have a very large hedonic capacity.

(It is possible for a person to have any combination of scores on these two measures, and for example to be both self-controlling and pleasure-seeking, but for our purposes I think it’s safe to place you as low hedonic capacity, high self-control, Anon).

In a series of three studies, Bernecker and colleagues looked at how high self-control and high hedonic capacity individuals approached spending their free time. When given an hour to spend however they liked, participants who were high in hedonic capacity (in other words, the ability to enjoy pleasure) preferred to pursue activities that they ranked as highly pleasurable, including baking, eating, napping, talking with a loved one, or taking a walk. Conversely, individuals who were highly self-controlling were more likely to spend their time doing activities that they ranked as meaningful (such as reading, working, gardening, doing chores, or working out).

It might sound pretty self-evident that people who are interested in pleasure choose to spend their time on pleasure and that people who exert a lot of restraint over themselves choose instead to take part in activities they find meaningful. But what’s really interesting here, I think, is how much participants enjoyed the activities that they selected and found them satisfying.

It turns out that high self-controllers didn’t just decide to spend their free time doing laundry or working because they felt they should do so. They also got more satisfaction from meaningful tasks, more than if they had chosen to spend their time on supposedly ‘pleasurable’ activities. They were not motivated by the pursuit of straightforward pleasure. They ranked reading a book, knocking an item off the to-do list, or lifting some weights as more enriching, fulfilling, and motivating for them, and they cared more about these aspects of life than they did about pleasure! Individuals high in hedonic capacity, in contrast, preferred and were more satisfied with activities they said left them feeling soothed, amused, relaxed, indulged, and so on.

This study points to the fact that happiness is not everything, and people actually differ quite dramatically in which ways of spending their time make their lives better. And that means there are no recommendations for leading a good life that are one size fits all.

If you are someone high in self-control and low in hedonic capacity, you may have had the frustrating experience of trying to lay back and relax on your day off and being unable to quiet the whirring of your brain. You take a bath, but you can’t keep your eyes off the soap-scummy grout that needs to be scrubbed off. You share a languid restaurant meal with a best buddy, but through every course you can’t help but think about the items on your to-do list and grow panicky and bored.

Now of course, an inability to enjoy activities can come from burnout, depression, or excessive pressure to be productive. But you also might feel frustrated when you seek pleasure because you are just not wired to enjoy pleasure right now, and would find it easier to let go and enjoy yourself if you had an interesting challenge to keep you busy instead. Many Autistic people find working on a project related to their special interests to be a far better way of recharging their energy and lifting their mood than attempting to “relax” or have fun in neurotypical-approved ways. You may find, Anon, that the same is true of you.

In Bernecker and colleagues’ paper, participants high in self-control tended to appreciate activities that they described with the following adjectives. Why don’t you take a moment to read through this list, then write down what life activities feel this way for you?

What Activities Feel:

• Meaningful?

• Worthwhile?

• Fulfilling?

• Productive?

• Important?

• Purposeful?

• Inspiring?

• Elevating?

• Motivating?

• Enriching?

An interesting challenge of Autism unmasking is figuring out what a worthwhile life even feels like for us, and abandoning the expectation that such a life will feel the way it does for non-Autistics. Our best lives might not look happy, outgoing, energized, extroverted, or anything else that we have been taught it has to be.

For years I have been covertly masking to myself as a far more sociable person than I actually am. I still feel a deep shame about spending much of my 20’s nearly friendless, and fear returning to the suicidal depression of back when I had no support system. I’ve spent years trying to prove that I can be an outgoing, likeable, warm social organizer who throws wonderful parties and brings people together. And I have found that I can be. But this performance of having escaped my sad, old Autistic past comes at the expense of my peace far too often.

I get tired and cranky from being so socially connected all of the time. I can listen well to other people for hours, and leave them feeling really good, but it makes me feel more alone. What I really want to do is hole up in my room with lots of books and video games, crawling out of my den to only briefly interact as a nonverbal observer. It’s deep thinking and intense sensations that helps me to check out from my worries and relax. Realizing that my most satisfied self is actually quite withdrawn, analytical, and not “fun” is one of the big challenges I face in my unmasking. It’s still hard to explain to other people, because I worry they will see me as cold, uncaring, unemotional, and not worth sticking around for.

Thankfully, I am motivated by a good challenge. I like new experiences, developing new skills, figuring things out about myself, and upending people’s expectations. And so I think I will make it through this and be okay. Not happy — I never really have been — but even more skillful, aware, and informed than I was before.

So if you are having a hard time knowing what you want, Anon, I suggest you try focusing instead on what you find interesting. Be curious. Dive deep down an internet rabbit-hole, visit a library or a museum, and get lost in your special interests. Organize information, build new systems of understanding, make a video essay on an extremely niche subject, attend a conference on depictions of cognitive science in science-fiction novels.

Try new things and see what you think of them. Test out a new hobby. Learn a craft, an instrument, a language. Volunteer for an organization that does work you admire. Say yes when a friend invites you somewhere you never thought you’d like to go, like Grandpa’s Cheese Barn or a rodeo. Do something new for the bit. Do it for the story. Do it knowing that you probably won’t like it, but that you will learn something from it about yourself, the world, and the human condition.

Visit new social spaces and study the people. Notice which populations of people you find admirable in some way. Do you like the brazen attitude of punks and goths? Find it impressive how devotedly the 80-year-old woman at your local park battles against the invasive soapwort plants? What can they teach you? What aspects of their life and personality can you borrow for your own?

Be curious. What do you find remarkable in other people? What do you want to learn more about? What objects in your neighborhood do you not recognize? How can you figure out what they are, and why they were built? How can you get nearer to people who make you feel engaged? What parts of history interest you? What areas of your community? Are there any machines you want to understand the workings of? What do the people in your life find interesting or inspiring? Can you ask them about those things?

Set goals that take you out of what’s familiar. Give yourself a task to complete that gets you moving your body, interacting with new people, or exploring a new environment. Challenge yourself to visit every park in your city, say, take a photo of every species of bird you see, bake every item in Martha Stewart’s Christmas cookie cookbook, set up a freshwater aquarium, get good enough at Magic: The Gathering to compete in a local tournament, or deadlift 100 pounds. Failure at this task (or failure to enjoy it) literally does not matter; you’re giving yourself a watchlist, but for experiences.

Notice how you feel. About all of this! What sounds viscerally unappealing to you? What spaces and activities make you feel ashamed? What activities surprised you? Why? Get curious about those feelings. It’s okay if you don’t like any of the new things you try, or abandon them altogether. You are gathering data. Experimenting on yourself is valuable, even when an experience sucks! Acknowledging what you dislike is often the first step to recognizing what you do enjoy — and what enjoyment means for you.

Anon, I am anhedonic and cold and detached most days, and I doubt that I will ever be happy. In spite of all that I’ve done, sometimes I really just hate being conscious and being myself. But I am a curious person who lives to try new things and understand more about the human condition, and to make something of that understanding (including pieces of writing), and that saves me. You can find more about yourself through what fascinates, perplexes, frustrates, compels, shames, infuriates, or motivates you. Anything that provokes a real reaction in you is worth paying some attention to, I think.

When people write in to this column wanting to change their lives around, I often encourage them to both have fun and to find something about the experience interesting. I believe that in the end, our ability to be interested and learn is the one thing we always have. Our wonderfully hyperactive, critical minds are always there for us, even in times of loss and unthinkable pain. We are the universe witnessing itself. We are animals fighting messily to survive, using a whole host of contradictory and unpleasant instincts, but we are able to tell ourselves stories about it.

So make the story of your life one you want to read. It might not have a happy ending, but you can give it a hell of a plot.

Shards of ice in the north branch of the Chicago River. Beauty in a season of coldness and discomfort. Photo by author.