Rediscovering my boundaries after achieving sobriety

Drugs and alcohol are endemic to our society. It’s impossible to go out socially without coming across them. There were a lot of complex reasons for why I used drugs and alcohol, but a big one was that they helped me feel more comfortable in social situations.

As an autistic person, I have never found socialising easy, at least not in the way that my neurotypical peers have. I am an awkward and anxious person, constantly second guessing myself and working hard to maintain a neurotypical mask. Maintaining that mask has been a heavy burden, which is part of why drugs and alcohol appealed to me.

When I popped a pill or snorted a line, I was the same as the others around me. Suddenly I was in a world where people interacted with me in the same way that they did everyone else. My anxiety was easier to cope with, and I could flit from situation to situation in a social setting.

The problem was, that my mind and body had boundaries, and when I was using, I did not recognise those boundaries. I would constantly push myself beyond what I had spoons for. The resulting burnout would cause me to use more drugs and alcohol just to cope with the feelings of emptiness. I was trying to pour from an empty cup.

When I achieved sobriety, I had to work to reestablish my boundaries. I no longer had my chemical fix to help me cope with a world that was, quite frankly, hostile to people with my neurotype.

I was still able to enjoy socialising with my friends and family, but at a certain point I would just hit a wall. In the space of seconds I would go from happy and laughing, to withdrawn and unable to speak. Often I would find myself needing to escape situations, feeling panic creep up on me. Sometimes I would take myself off to the toilets and have a meltdown out of sight of those I was socialising with.

I had to learn what my limits were. I had to anticipate that moment when my spoons would run out, and listen to my mind when it said it was time for me to go home.

This wasn’t easy. I wanted so much to be like everyone else. It took me some time after achieving sobriety to find a place of self-acceptance. For a good two or three years I beat myself up for not being like everyone else. I would try and force myself to be like everyone else, while knowing deep in my heart that this was causing me a great deal of psychological harm.

An important part of establishing my boundaries was self-acceptance. I could not have found it without discovering the online autistic community. It seems absurd to me that no one tells you that there is a huge community of autistics, I had to discover it for myself. I suspect some may never find the community because they do not use social media.

The autistic community taught me to love who I am, that it was okay to have boundaries that were different to my allistic peers. Even more so, they taught me that it was okay to have boundaries that differed from other autistics. Suddenly I was in a world where it was okay that everybody was an individual with individual needs and strengths.

I learned that it was okay not to have the energy to maintain a neurotypical mask, and I learned that it was okay to walk away from situations before reaching the point of panic or meltdown.

I am blessed to have very supportive friends and family. They help me maintain my boundaries, and have become adept at recognising when I have met my limits, often encouraging me to go away and do what I need to do to regain those ever so elusive spoons. I can now walk away from uncomfortable situations without blaming myself. I have learned to love my own self-advocacy.

Of course, learning to respect your own boundaries is a piece of work that never ends. Our boundaries shift and change as our lives progress, and what may be reasonable on one day, may be impossible on another. I am constantly learning how to budget my energy.

Some days I still make mistakes. Even recently I have gone through burnout because I over worked myself both socially and professionally; and yes, socialising IS work. However, I have learned to accept my mistakes and learn and grow from them. I no longer attack myself for failing to meet my needs, humans are imperfect, and autistic humans are living in a hostile world that constantly works to oppress them.

If you’re new to sobriety, I want you to know that it is okay to make mistakes. Sometimes we screw up. It’s an uncomfortable fact of life, we can’t be expected to do everything perfectly. The main thing is that we do not allow those mistakes to snowball, and make us give up. Life only moves forward, so once you make that decision to embrace a more positive future, you can’t look back.

Psychosis and autism: My tenuous relationship with reality

Psychosis is a topic that (much like addiction) is rarely talked about in the autistic community. I suspect that it is more common than people care to admit; I also suspect that most in the community would not have any particular knowledge of what psychosis is besides Hollywood’s stigmatised take on the subject, and possibly what they have found on google.

The simplest answer I can give to the question “what is psychosis?” is this; psychosis is a total split from reality. When psychotic, the world is a vastly different place for the person. For me, it was a world of paranoia and persecution. I was no longer able to tell the difference between fact and fiction.

The first indication that something was wrong (for me) came when I was 18 years old. I had just moved out of home, and my three year long relationship came to an end. I started hearing disembodied voices calling my name. Very quickly they progressed to voices telling me that I couldn’t trust my friends, that they didn’t really like me and that they wanted to harm me.

For years I drowned out the voices and paranoia with a vast cocktail of illicit drugs and alcohol. The stigma attached to hearing voices was too great, I was scared to tell anyone what was going on, so I self-medicated. It started with cannabis and alcohol, and eventually I found myself heavily addicted to opioids, benzos, and spice.

The problem really came about when I achieved sobriety. I no longer had my buffer. Without the chemical crutches, the voice hearing became extremely intense. At the height of it, I was hearing multiple different voices including;

-A demonic voice that told me paranoia inducing lies about how dark forces in the world were working to harm me.

-A voice that i called “the sociopath” that would ask me to harm people.

-Two voices that never spoke directly to me, but would comment and bicker over everything I did. All day. Every day.

-There were other voices that I didn’t hear with any great regularity.

I also started to see a women in a black dress in my house. She never acted to harm me, and was not particularly threatening, but it was unsettling to say the least. Among other visual hallucinations, I would see spiders in my bed, and demons following people around. The visual hallucinations were as real as my best friend who is currently sat across the room from me.

The final nail in the coffin was the delusions. Delusions are difficult to explain. Imagine spending your entire life looking at a blue sky, but suddenly everyone is telling you it’s green. They present you with mountains of evidence that the sky is green, but all you can see is blue. The more you try to tell people the sky is blue, the more concerned they become about you.

I had many complex delusions, but the most notable ones were that I believed I was trapped in a computer simulation, that I had a microchip under my skin broadcasting my thoughts, and that my family had been replaced by imposters.

Of course this subsided with medication, but it threatens to return any time I experience stress. It taught me that my reality can change over time. For me, the boundary between what is real, and what is imaginary, is so very thin. My symptoms are largely controlled by the medication, but it is always there, under the surface.

This situation was made all the more complicated by being autistic. Professionals told me that I didn’t meet the criteria for a schizophrenia diagnosis because I wasn’t “typical” in presentation. My position on that has always been this; I am autistic, nothing about me is typical.

As an autistic, I pride myself on having a rigorously logical approach to everything, and yet, my brain can invent its own reality at a moments notice. I still have bad days where I hear voices and experience paranoia. I have learned that it is when I lose the ability to recognise that these things are not real, that i have a problem.

Psychosis was and still is a terrifying experience to me, but it has made me resilient. I have learned to survive in a multitude of different worlds.

If you or a loved one may be experiencing psychosis, please speak to a psychiatrist. Psychosis is an incredibly complex state that can not be willed away by lifestyle or all the good intentions in the world. No one deserves psychosis, and I mean that honestly. It has taken me years to trust my mind again, and I would not wish that on anyone.