I have a vicious cycle in my life. One that I’ve repeated over and over. I get overwhelmed, and I ghost.
Every time this has happened, I’ve had a justification for it. But I see it now as a pattern. One that I’ve skillfully rationalized to myself. But the complex rationale belies a crushing truth that I’ve been too afraid to recognize.
What is that truth? That I’ve been putting the pedal to the metal all. my. life. With the parking break on.
That truth is that I’m a skilled actor, who’s been playing a role in his own life. Many roles, in fact. And it’s fucking exhausting.
Now that I’m stepping back a bit, and seeing the lay of the land, I’m marvelling at how sort of okay I’ve been overall. I’ve really got this role nailed.
But the past few years have felt like I was acting on stage and suddenly a giant vortex opened up and dropped my shadow self on stage with me. And I see what I’ve been running from.
I feel like a necessary part of me recognizing this, is reflecting on all the ways this ghosting pattern has showed up. And the elaborate justifications that I constructed to make it okay. It has pervaded all my relationships, and all my efforts to build things on teams.
The big one was with my mom. I was having meltdowns at home as a teen, and it was clearly really hurting her emotionally. And my anger at her felt too big to resolve with her. I felt deeply that I needed to remove myself from that situation. My nervous system reacted to her with genuine panic. I wasn’t strong enough to regulate myself while exposing myself to that. So I said goodbye, forever.
Now that I’m a parent, I can see how crushing this must have been for my mom. And I have a ton of grief for the pain she’s had to endure. But I also feel like what happened was the result of misunderstanding, and lack of resources. Now we know that autistic kids can hit a really hard time when puberty arrives. And it was indeed a very dark time for me. What I was going through required fierce parenting, and strong community support. The reality was we were struggling, and my mom was in bed sick for a long time.
I internalized something when my mom got sick. I was the cause. That was my only possible conclusion, the more I saw how my meltdowns were baffling and hurtful to her. I must have connected seeing her feelings get hurt, with her actually getting more sick.
So when I left home, I wasn’t just angry at her, I was grieving for how much my meltdowns hurt her. That combination of feelings was totally overwhelming.
But out on my own, an autistic kid who nobody knew was autistic, was, at times, a total fucking nightmare. I had soon alienated almost everyone at school. I isolated myself to a degree I now look back on and marvel at. I was living with almost no meaningful human connection outside of my bonkers family system.
What is a human without human connections? A ghost. Might as well be.
Every time I ghost, I’m convinced that who I am in that moment isn’t acceptable. And by not owning up to whatever my issue is, I throw myself under the bus. I choose to hide instead. And every time I do it, I reinforce it. I convince myself that I’ve kept myself safe.
I’m trying now to surround this part of myself, this very scared and overwhelmed part of myself, with as much love as I can. That was a frightened kid who didn’t know how to turn those alarms off. So he had to shut them out.
When I shut those alarms out, I also took my entire boundary system off line. My boundaries are emotions that are felt in my body. I had shut off that signal, because it was just too loud. I was having boundary violations every time someone enforced any routine innocuous expectation on me. Being inside power hierarchies was full of triggers for me.
My conclusion was that I must be kind of a shitty person. I would reach saturation with something, try to push through it, and find myself grinding my gears. Gamun! Push harder! It wouldn’t be long before I’d just feel sick and exhausted.
Also, the reasons are not really the point. The point is, I have a toxic pattern, that is having a negative impact on me and some of the humans in my life. I’m here to say I want to hold myself accountable for this behavior.
I’m feeling into making a different tradeoff going forward. Instead of performing skillfully and exiting stage left when I inevitably exhaust myself, I want to allow myself to show up a bit messy. A bit vulnerable. A bit more human.
Less like a ghost.
I am a mum to an autistic PDA boy of nearly 12, I understand this story well, your mum will still love you no matter if she can't understand you, you are on the journey together, x