My Autistic Journey Into Mindfulness

I’ve spent my life shutting out my surroundings. It’s time to try embracing reality instead.

Photo by author. Description in piece.

This piece was originally published to Medium on June 1, 2022. Why I’m migrating my archive to Substack.

There’s a foot-sized painted ceramic salamander sitting on a stone next to my neighbor’s garage. He’s so charming to me, with swirls of navy, burnt sienna, and pale green snaking across his white flesh. His tail is broken. His eyes are bewildered and hollow. I come to a halt in the middle of the sidewalk just to marvel at him.

My overly sensitive, yet withdrawn Autistic self feels an attachment to this inert creature instantly. I don’t empathize with people easily, but with cute objects and animals, I feel a sad, tender yearning for connection. Along with those feelings, there comes a burst of quiet gratitude for the homeowner who thought to put such a delightful little friend in their front yard. For the few moments I’m with this salamander, I’m transported away from all my social anxiety and fretting about deadlines, and find some belonging in the material world.

I’ve walked down this exact sidewalk every single day for months. I’ve lived in this neighborhood and paced its side streets for over eight years. How have I never noticed this salamander before?

How much delight have I lost the chance to experience, because I’m always so swept up in dissociation and stress?

The first time a therapist recommended mindfulness to me, I scoffed at her. I couldn’t see how carefully observing water cascading over my spoons while I did the dishes would do anything to mend the misery in my life. In fact, being more present in reality seemed like it would make my suffering worse.

Many Autistic people report “blanking out” of reality in order to cope with sensory overwhelm. Some of us also disappear from the physical world when there are too many faces and bodies around for us to fully process. One Autistic person I quoted in my book told me that at large family gatherings and at school, the people around him all become “blurry” and he travels into a mental realm that is entirely his own. But the way I tried to detach from an often-rejecting, overstimulating world was by forever flinging myself into the future, forming new commitments, making new friends, completing impressive projects, speeding on from one obligation to the next.

I was hell-bent on staying as active as possible back then. I was always finding new side hustles and teaching jobs, and cramming my nights with performances, concerts, meet-ups, and parties. I was desperate to prove that, despite my social and developmental disability, I could be accomplished, well-connected, and well-liked.

I could let nothing get in the way of the respectable, popular image I had created for myself — especially not the person that I actually was. There were intense waves of anxiety and grief forever moving through me, but I ignored them. If I paused all my frenetic busyness for even a moment, I feared all these difficult feelings would swell inside me, and drag me down to depths of dysfunction I could never recover from. Presence and awareness were the enemy. I had to keep moving.

…

The Dialectical Behavioral Therapy Skills Workbook for Bipolar Disorder by Sheri Van Dijk

Recently, I opened up The Dialectical Behavioral Therapy Skills Workbook for Bipolar Disorder by Sheri Van Dijk. My partner has Bipolar, and I thought the exercises in the book might help me understand them better. One of Van Dijk’s first recommendations for people struggling with mania or depression was to practice mindfulness. Not because it would make anything better. Only because it would force a person to accept how things actually were.

That’s one of the primary goals of Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (or DBT) , after all — to help people come to terms with the reality they are inhabiting. From there, they can begin to examine how they choose to navigate that reality, and identify new behaviors that might help them make it through life with less unnecessary turmoil and self-hatred.

The developer of DBT, Dr. Marsha Linehan, engaged in shockingly violent acts of self-harm in her youth. An otherwise religiously faithful and well-behaved girl, she had no explanation for why she kept trying to hurt and kill herself as a teen. She was divorced from her own emotions, explosive and unpredictable. Eventually though, she made a dramatic recovery, got her PhD, and became an internationally renowned therapist and a researcher on suicide prevention.

In her own process of healing, Linehan learned to hold two principles in balance with one another: radical acceptance of reality on the one hand, and the development of resilience and new coping strategies on the other. These two forces — acceptance and change — are forever held in tension, under DBT. Both are needed, and they are forever in dialogue with one another (hence the term “dialectic” in DBT).

Let’s say that your romantic life might be a mess of rejections and your brain is swirling with paranoid thoughts that scare the hell out of you. In Linehan’s view, your past experiences and present emotions are simply neutral facts that you cannot change. Instead, you must accept them as features of your reality, and examine what decisions you might make to improve how you cope with that reality.

So instead of standing outside your ex’s window, sobbing and begging him to take you back, you might decide to journal about your feelings in the bathtub while listening to soothing music and crying. And instead of cutting or burning yourself, you might get your body the endorphins it craves by eating a big bowl of ice cream or throwing a ball of socks at the wall repeatedly and screaming. The reality of your life might still suck, and as you engage in these strategies, you probably will be quite miserable. But you won’t be actively making your life worse. And you’ll survive your lowest moments relatively unscathed.

Using such methods, a DBT adherent slowly learns that they can survive even life’s worst disappointments, and weather the most intense of emotional storms. And the better a person gets at accepting reality and changing how they respond to it, the closer they’ll be to having what Linehan calls a “life experienced as worth living.” Not a perfect life, or even a consistently happy one. Not a life rid of problems and mistakes. Just a life that, on balance, was worth getting through.

Building a Life Worth Living by Marsha Linehan

…

Though it was originally developed for patients with Borderline Personality Disorder (which Linehan herself has), DBT is well-validated and has been shown to beneficial for a variety of people at risk for depression, self-injurious behaviors, and suicide ideation. This includes Bipolar people like my partner, and Autistics like me.

People with a variety of mental illnesses and disabilities are prone to try escaping from the world — and to beat ourselves up for the complicated, difficult emotions that we have. Many of us have absorbed a lifetime of mental illness stigma, and believe there is something innately “sick” with how we think and feel. DBT and most mindfulness practices hold that this isn’t actually the case. We don’t have to change who we are, or how we work. We can just accept the hard facts of our existence, and instead put our attention toward how we might react to those facts more effectively. For all of this, mindfulness is key.

But I had always loathed mindfulness, and had no concept of how to do it. Anytime I tried to meditate or ground myself, I simply felt more nervous and unsettling. Being present was like opening a floodgate of unhappiness and annoyance that I had long kept damned. Clearly I was not suited for it, and was doing it all wrong. Or so I thought.

“The point of mindfulness isn’t to help you relax or calm yourself,” Van Dijk writes in the DBT Workbook. “…the only goal of the exercise is to be in the present moment more often. When looked at from this perspective, mindfulness always works.”

Huh, I thought. My old therapist had never framed mindfulness that way. Whenever I had heard about mindfulness in support groups or random self-help books, it was always presented as a solution to issues like depression, neurosis, and social anxiety. Mindfulness would make me worry less, I thought. It would make me feel more comfortable out in public.

But as an Autistic person, the present was hell to me. It was so intense, and confusing. In the present, there were overpowering smells, bustling bodies, perplexing facial expressions. Out amongst people, I saw endless opportunities to say the wrong thing or miss some crucial social cue. It was no wonder I’d always been trying to live in my head and blot reality out.

“Whatever the experience is,” Van Dijk writes, “it’s already there. Just let it come to your awareness.”

I couldn’t argue with her there. The pain that was inside me had never stopped lurking. I’d been trying to outpace it for 34 years. If I couldn’t beat it back, maybe it was time to allow myself to face it. Then I could see what, if anything, my pain had to teach me.

…

It’s a hot, sunny day in early May and I’m sitting at a table in the park, trying to read. For some reason I have always forced myself to leave the house first thing in the morning. There’s some bug in my brain that tells me if I stay indoors all day and don’t speak to anyone, I must be some kind of loser. It would be “too Autistic” of me to act like that. So I force myself out. I try to deny what I am, what I need.

Photo of a picnic table, by author.

The black metal table radiates warmth into my palms and forearms. I feel the sun beating down on my head. Car alarms go off intermittently all around me. A red pickup truck scratches over a speed bump. I keep finding my attention trying to jolt away from the moment. I don’t want to be here, I don’t want to notice all this. But I gently I take hold of my attention, and direct it back.

Mindfulness, I am learning, is not about perfection. It’s about noticing that you have abandoned the present, and then choosing to return. This, too, is described at length in Van Dijk’s book. It is natural for human attention to waver and flow in and out of the current moment, so mindfulness is not a skill anybody’s innately “good” at. What appears to be crucial, in developing a mindfulness practice, is setting aside time to intentionally inhabit reality, and to merely notice when your attention wavers, so you can then welcome it back.

A woman sits at a table near me, along with her toddler-aged son. She’s snapping her gum and holding a lengthy, full-volume conversation over speakerphone. Her son keeps dashing all around us. It’s all harmless, but I can feel my blood pressure beginning to spike. I’m so sensitive to movement, unpredictability, and noise. A throbbing emerges in my temple. My jaw tightens.

Normally, this is when I jam earbuds in, blast music, and flip through my phone. There are so many tools to aid in my dissociation. Social media was basically engineered to prevent a person from experiencing the world around them mindfully. But today, I choose to stay in reality. I let the actual experience of being myself in this world crash over me like a wave.

The park is too busy and distracting. I’m in pain. My stimulation level keeps climbing, and my body is responding as if it’s under attack. It makes me feel sorrowful, knowing that being out in public so often causes me such discomfort.

I want to be normal. I don’t want to be so easily hurt and outmanned like this. I don’t want to feel this way. I have been trying to not feel this way for decades. But I feel this way. This is it.

After a few minutes, I stand up and slowly walk home. For once, I’m not angry at the woman, or her toddler, or the world. I’m just resigned. The turmoil I’m experiencing has always been here. I can’t fix it. I can only accept it, and then change how I behave. Today, acceptance means listening to the frightened animal inside me, and changing means lovingly leading it somewhere more safe.

Photo of the author’s feet on the sidewalk.

As I walk home, I focus on the sensation of my thin Converse hitting the uneven gravel. I stride through a construction site and notice the gentle give of the mud beneath my feet. A cool breeze kisses my face as I approach my building, which overlooks Lake Michigan. I take hold of the hot metal door in the alleyway, and allow the sour rot of garbage to waft up my nostrils. I listen to the pleasant slap-slap-slap of my feet as they hit the stairs.

The more regularly I practice mindfulness, the more attuned I am becoming to my own discomfort. There are many situations that I find myself leaving now quite swiftly, and many hungers that I’m just learning how to satisfy. I work from home all day quite a lot now, and find myself needing a lot of time asleep, in the dark, and alone. When I go outside, I try walking slowly. I let my breath fill my belly. I turn off my music and podcasts, and close all my tabs and apps. I post less. I write more.

The jitteriness fades. I don’t burst out screaming in anger anymore. I’m sad and tired. I’m at peace sometimes. When the lilacs are in bloom, their scent catches my attention, along with wet loam of the dirt after it rains. I pause to look around, to draw myself close to these features of my environment, to see them, to smell them. When a stranger pauses to compliment my outfit or share some benign non sequitur, I hear them.

I live in the world now, with all its frustrations. I experience myself moving through the world slowly, bathed in light and pleasure, and I am also far more aware of the pain I am often in. Mindfulness means noticing when I’m not doing well, and taking care of my body. It means recognizing how difficult I actually find life to be, and grieving for the alienation and lack of accessibility I face. But it also means I get to stop running away from the inevitable. It means cool breezes, warm palms, and occasionally, beautifully painted salamanders. And I’m accepting all that pretty well.