I Have No Idea What to Do With My Recent Autism and ADHD Diagnoses

For long decades, I’ve wondered why I felt so different from everyone else. Readers of my tragicomic memoirs The Big Rewind and You Don’t Know Me But You Don’t Know Me know that there are LOTS of possible answers to that question in the excessively colorful life I have led and the extreme misadventures in mental illness that I have experienced.

When my sons turned out to be autistic and have ADHD I began to suspect that the reason I felt different from other people is because I am different from other people on a neurological level as well. This hunch was strengthened by my wife’s fierce conviction that I was definitely autistic.

My wife, who works with neurodivergent people professionally as a therapist and counselor had a lot of evidence to support her belief. For example I self-published a five hundred and sixteen page book about “Weird Al” Yankovic’s life’s work in various mediums.

I spent way too much to be analyzed and earlier this year I got the results back and discovered that, yep, I am, in fact, autistic and have ADHD.

I’ve spent years wondering whether or not I was autistic. It felt like I was a puzzle with a few pieces missing. It felt like there was something massive that I did not understand about myself.

I am proud of my literary career and the books that I have written but when I look back at its evolution a lot of it feels like an expression of mental illness. That was certainly true of You Don’t Know Me But You Don’t Like Me. That was not a book or sane or, looking back, neurotypical person could have written. The same is true of The Weird Accordion to Al and The Fractured Mirror, which is just under 700 pages at the moment. Every Day Ever is my most ADHD project to date. I will need that hyper-focus to watch and write about one thousand wildly uneven episodes of the longest show on television.

Here’s the thing: I have no idea what to do with my autism and ADHD diagnoses. I was hoping that I would feel relieved after finally getting an answer after all these years but I do not know what to do with this new and frightfully important information.

I don’t know how to use this new information to help my life and my career and finally find a way to stop sabotaging and undermining myself and make some real progress. I don’t know how to get out of this pattern where everything that I do seems to fail.

There’s part of me that feels like I should go on a voyage of self-discovery and find out as much as I possibly can about the neurological conditions that have played a huge, even central role in my life without me being aware.

Looking back a lot of what I saw as horrific personal shortcomings and unforgivable flaws are symptoms of ADHD and autism. I wasn’t just an awful person whose life was a mess because he couldn’t get his shit together; I was just neurodivergent. I was just different. I was just on a different wavelength than neurotypical people.

It’s easier to have more compassion for my younger self knowing that there was even more going on inside my brain than I imagined at the time. But it’s also made me question my judgment and wonder to what extent I am making major decisions that will have a huge impact on my life and to what extent autism and ADHD and depression are dictating how I think and behave.

The Big WhoopNathan Rabin