Chapter 23, Discovering a Love for Life.

I'm Kat. I was diagnosed with Asperger's when I was 35. In college, I had been successful academically, but certainly not socially. I did terribly with roommates, so I spent most of my college years by myself. That's been a common trend in my life-- trying to find a group of friends.

After I graduated, I had applied to graduate school, and I was planning on going for a PhD in linguistics, but that didn't work out. And I was at a loss, so I moved home. I went through a period where I was extremely emotionally volatile and had terrible mood swings. I started with a family physician, who put me on some antidepressants and sent me to a psychologist.

The psychologist said it was cyclothymia, but nothing really actually solved the problem. I was never really happy. I was always still miserable and extremely moody. Despite those feelings, I was home. Graduate school was off the table, so I needed to get a job.

Because my degree was in Greek and Latin, I didn't have any vocational training, so I got a job at a call center because what else are you going to do when you have no marketable skills? Working there, I noticed that the people in IT were the ones having the most fun because they were not chained to a desk.

I hated being chained to a desk. I hated being on the phone all the time and being micromanaged. Over time, they made it very apparent that I was not going to be invited or encouraged to succeed in a more traditional fashion, and I got fed up with being passed over for promotions and other positions, so I quit.

After that I found another job doing logistics for a retailer. It was nice because I didn't have to deal with customers. I could be in and out early in the morning because most of the job was unloading boxes and putting stuff out on the floor before anyone was around. Still, I thought back to the people in IT at my old job. What they were doing looked like so much fun, and it was computer sciencey, which I was always interested in, so I decided to get some vocational training.

Part of the vocational training program was to help me get a job in the tech sector, and I learned a lot. I got to go to what I referred to as nerd camp. It was a two week period where I was in a house down in Silicon Valley doing lots and lots of hands on labs, and I did really well.

One of the people doing oversight commented that the only reason I didn't complete the final exam the fastest was because I had no previous formal tech experience, and the person who beat me did. I was really good at it, so that led me to my first role in the big league tech sector at Microsoft.

Unfortunately, I ended up making some very big mistakes in the sense that they caused headaches for customers and, hence, headaches for the company, so I ended up getting terminated from that position. In an unusual way, it worked out because that was exactly the same time that my grandmother was in the last months of her life, and my mother needed another person to help her tend to her. So in a way, it all worked out.

Eventually, I got back to another contracting position at Microsoft, but the problem with contracting positions is that they are short term, and some of them have fixed end dates. That position was great, and it gave me some hands on experience. I really enjoyed it, but it was 12 months only, and per their policy, I couldn't go back for three or four months.

During that time, I had decided that I wanted to specialize in database administration, so I got a whole bunch of training. That landed me in a non-contract role, where I had actual employment at Microsoft. However, that role proved to be overly stressful for me. I was working nights in an operation center. My job was to respond to alerts, explain how they broke, and then fix them. It was like the computer version of being a firefighter.

The actual duties of the job intersected with my interests and provided enough novelty for me. I really appreciate computers as opposed to humans. They are far more predictable, but the pace was so fast and intense. It was not low stress at all.

There were a lot of nights where I would just sit around waiting for something to break. There were moments when I would think, you could be using this time to go study x or do y, but the role was so draining and demanding that I did not have the wherewithal to do anything else.

I was getting so much pushback. I was having really bad interactions with my bosses. The goalposts kept changing. My cohorts were getting promoted, but I was not. I was having really bad mood swings on top of my already bad mood swings, and I just felt like I was sinking.

Even when I had low stress jobs, I was still moody and withdrawn, but this was just a whole different level of existential angst. I asked myself questions like what am I doing here? Why am I even alive?

What purpose am I serving? There is no joy in this life. There's nothing to look forward to. There's no reason to be so miserable.

I was suicidal for a really, really long time. I'd always wanted further testing. I had always wanted to learn how to stabilize my moods. The nature of my job was to understand how the whole system works from end to end. It was about getting down to the root cause in an extremely specific and extremely detailed way, and with the pressure of the job, it made me want to translate that into my personal life I wanted to get to the bottom of my emotional stuff, so I made some changes.

Making Some Changes. I started several rounds of counseling. One of those rounds got me to the point where I could move out of my parents' house. I bought a house, and I've been there for the last seven or eight years.

Moving out has been incredibly therapeutic. I did not realize how sensitive I was to noise. I love my family, but some of them were very noisy, and being away from that lowered some of my stress.

Having my own house also allowed me to establish boundaries with my own space. No one could barge in without my permission. I also left Microsoft and ended up at a small local business, where I was running the entire IT department for that company. The company was based in transportation. They were very seasonal, so it was maybe 100 people in the offseason, and then maybe 200 in the summer peak.

It was a big job. I was in charge of not just the firefighting, but all of the infrastructure, all of the computers, all of the servers all of the network, all of the Wi-Fi, all of the internet. Part of running the department was that I had people reporting to me. I'd never had that before. I also reported directly to the CEO, something that also never had happened before.

In some ways, it was hard, but in other ways it was perfect. For the first time in my life, I suddenly became aware of how capable I could be. My mother had been telling me since I was a kid that I was brilliant and that I could do things. My reaction then was always, that's nice, mom, that's nice, but I hadn't had the opportunity before. I had never really felt like I could do it but I did and I proved myself in the midst of a huge challenge.

It was a huge challenge because not only was I suddenly responsible for managing people, but I was in charge of all the technical stuff-- processing, making a budget, managing the budget, and purchasing. Purchasing was a whirlwind, oh, my goodness. I did that not just for my department, but all of transportation itself and dealing with suppliers on a regular basis. Some of those I talked with were in another country or in multiple different countries.

So I had the technical challenge, but I also had the social challenge of being the face of the department. I had to provide end user support to everyone from the front line all the way up to the CEO. I had to give presentations not just to the senior leadership, but also all of their bosses and the advisory board. It was a fantastic learning experience, but after a year, the people who hired me were no longer there, and I got new bosses who were not a very good fit.

I was not part of the mainstream. I could not fit in, and so I was a target. But continuing with the counseling, I learned how to self-advocate effectively and socialize. Really, for the first time in my life, I was learning basic social engagement skills and using them in the face of abuse from my new bosses.

I decided that I wanted to take things a step further, so I scheduled two psych evaluations. I wanted a first opinion and a second opinion, and the second opinion is the one that gave me the ASD diagnosis. That diagnosis was really validating, but it also sent me on a frenzy of questions.

What does this mean? How do I deal with it? There had always been a sense of sensitivity and intensity in my life. Part of that sensitivity meant that I experienced traumatic things as really traumatic.

The Asperger's diagnosis made a lot of sense in that regard, but as always, with my personality, I wanted to get to the bottom of everything. There had to be a way of harnessing or channeling that intensity. That led me to all kinds of bodywork and eventually into somatic experiencing, and that was a game changer. I love my somatic therapist so much.

Over the course of a year, until COVID-19 hit, she and I met on a regular basis, playing with motions and movements. What came out of that was an openness and appreciation of what my body does for me as well as an understanding that my emotions are not something I need to be afraid of.

Over my life, I'd gotten a lot of flack for having emotions and for showing emotions, and I couldn't help it. I spent so much time fighting my body and fighting the fact that I had emotions, when in reality, feelings and sensations are not bad. They are something to be curious about. Panic in one moment does not have to mean panic in the next moment.

All of the darkness, all of the things I had thought I was supposed to suppress, were welcome because emotions need light and air. Emotions need to breathe. How else are they going to be dealt with and resolved? The more that gets stuffed in the closet, the more crammed the closet gets.

So I was making progress. I was dealing with my emotions and pent up intensity in a healthy way. I was meeting with my therapist. Then COVID-19 hit, and I was out of work for a year. The transportation company closed, and my position went away. At first, the thought is terrible, but the stars aligned, and God arranged for me to take a year of leave.

Really, it was a sabbatical year in the dictionary sense because coming out of that transportation company, I could tell I was exhausted. I was so tired, I knew it was going to be more than a month before I would be ready to go back out on the job market, so I amped up working on myself.

Over the lockdown, I started doing some body mind integrated meditations. As a result, I could suddenly register what it sounds like when people are responding positively to me. I understood that I actually do make a difference in people's lives, that I actually do bring joy to other people and can support them by just being me.

Not only do I bring joy and support, but people actually love and care about me even when I can't feel or recognize it. That part was huge and, previously, a completely novel concept to me. I'd had such a run for eight years of high demand positions with people who were not promoting or supportive of my growth and health. Through those eight years, I had felt like I was fighting on the front lines without any support.

To continue the analogy, I needed to leave the front lines not just to the med clinic or the field hospital. I needed to go home and rest and get some serious R&R. Thankfully, this past sabbatical year has been exactly that. It allowed me all kinds of opportunity to rejigger and learn more about what is supportive to me.

[? Be water. ?] Looking back at my journey just a year ago is incredible. Now, I'm not just in a good place. I'm in a great place. I'm also back at Microsoft, and I managed to get myself a very overdue promotion working with a team doing things that I've been wanting to do for years and years. It's still working with the hardware, still with things that I can see and touch. Whether it's silicone or a piece of metal, it's a meaningful responsibility and strategic work.

I'm so much happier, it has blown my mind because joy is available for me. Joy is a love for life. I have discovered a love for life and appreciation for my body, and that my body and I can work together. Mind body integration has changed so much for me. I had thought I needed x, y, and z to be happy.

I had thought that happiness was a choice, but it turns out that neither of those things is quite correct because I couldn't be happy until I stopped fighting my body and learned how to be curious and open because my relationship with myself is where it all starts. If I have a good relationship with my body, I can have a good relationship with everybody else because everything flows. One of the analogies that I have really drawn from is, be like water. For a long time, I was capsized in a river, hurtling towards a cliff with no idea how I was going to survive going over.

When you become water and learn to let go, and that cliff comes, you just dissipate. You become a waterfall. For water, there is no pain or hurt upon hitting the bottom of the cliff, only movement. I put my trust in that movement because life can take you where it will, but the running river at the bottom of the cliff will keep flowing.