I have autism

A couple of weeks ago, I turned 39. And only last year did I find out I have autism. But to dial down the shock factor, let me clarify. I have high-functioning autism. Okay, let's make it even easier - I have the same Asperger's as Musk. See, not so dramatic anymore.

But knowing you have autism is better than not knowing. Before that, I just thought I was broken. I couldn't figure out why communication was so hard for me. Where my long emotional slumps came from. Why I was so withdrawn into myself.

For example, since childhood I couldn't make eye contact with people. And I clearly remember when I started training that skill every day. I'd find someone in the crowd who would meet my eye, and wait until they looked away first.

Today, this lets me hold direct eye contact. But when I need to formulate a thought, I still look away. It's easier to think that way. And I still ask the people close to me not to look at me too often in everyday life. Even peripheral eye contact is hard.

It's like that with everything related to communication. I worked on my vocal intonation. Rehearsed different facial expressions in the mirror. Learned to pay close attention to whoever I was talking to. I'd notice various behavioral details and mirror them so I could learn to do the same. People who knew me always knew who I'd been talking to recently, because I'd inevitably end up carrying that person's mannerisms.

As a result of all this training, a human puppet took shape - one I operate. It comes out every time I talk to someone. This puppet has its own charm; it listens attentively and knows when to make which facial expressions. I know people like it. But it's not really me. It's a well-trained video game character.

Because the real me is autistic. A person completely closed off in his own world. Somewhere around age 12, I realized I live inside my head. My own thoughts were far more interesting than the world around me. Unfortunately, society tends to use the following terms to describe situations like this: egoism, egocentrism, narcissism, and other -isms. So I diagnosed my way of thinking as a big problem. And spent the next 20 years fighting it.

I learned to be attentive to people, to their lives and their feelings. Trained myself to ask questions. Tried to help those around me, putting their needs above my own. Tried to talk less about myself. Basically, I did everything I could to somehow offset how absorbed I was in my own world.

Unfortunately, my puppet picked up those healthy traits well, but at the core I didn't really change. I'm still just as wrapped up in myself and my thoughts. And there's nothing I can do about it. It's hard to explain how much more attractive the inner world is to me than the outer one.

Unfortunately, holding the puppet up consumes an unbelievable amount of resources. Autistic people avoid society because it's physically exhausting. While my puppet is operating, I'm right there behind it, going through overload. And overload is the other constant companion of my life.

Even after light socializing, I need to spend several hours alone to recover. And I just can't handle conflict, tense social situations, or difficult conversations at all. After a hard conversation, I can fall into an overload state for several days.

Overload feels something like this - you become incredibly sad and gloomy. Like being inside a deep depression. You can't do anything at all. It can last 3-4 days after just one conversation. And you don't even understand what's happening to you. You just feel bad. And then your strength comes back and you can keep living.

Unfortunately, life is made up of difficult situations. So overload is more of a baseline state for me than some kind of exception. It's not just communication that overloads me. Bright lights (the curtains in my room are almost always drawn), loud music, travel. What saves me in these moments is stimming.

Stimming is a favorite activity of autistic people. Repetition of the same familiar actions. Putting things in their places, sorting things, fiddling with things in your hands, shaking your foot, picking at your nails, and so on. In my case, the main stim is video games. But not just any games — the ones with a simple, clear algorithm of repeating actions.

For example, at some point I started drawing patterns. It started in school — I was always doodling in the margins of my notebooks. Later I'd draw while talking with people; my coworkers will easily remember this. And eventually I started painting patterns on canvas and even held my own exhibition. It helped me, and I decided to make a game about drawing patterns called Beat Brush. Working on this game is also a kind of stimming for me.

My whole experience with business looks pretty strange. But if you dig into it, everything falls into place there too. I can't fit into existing communities — it's a huge mental strain. The only communities where I'm comfortable are the ones I control. Ones built, one way or another, on the foundation of my own inner world.

I can't be a hired employee inside established structures; I can't carry out other people's tasks. So building companies is just an employment model that makes sense to me. But I never liked managing. I liked making things with my own hands. And having that grow into something big and meaningful. You can't pull that off alone — you need allies. That's how all my businesses came to be.

Being autistic is hard. On top of the problems I described, there's a whole pile of others. For example, I just can't function in a setting where someone is teaching me. It doesn't matter if it's a group or one-on-one. First, teacher-student is the most complex form of communication. Second, you can't learn while the puppet is active. It takes up most of the available cognitive resources. I can only learn things on my own. Easy to imagine how school went for me, then.

No matter how hard I try, I still trigger a slight uncanny valley feeling in people. Like CGI characters in movies. And the phrase "just be yourself" is completely meaningless to me. How can a made-up character "be themselves"?

I'm constantly torn between wanting to live this life fully somehow, and wanting to hide from it. But by some miracle, I got lucky. Recognizing the problems early, I started fighting them without even understanding what I was doing. Started looking for workarounds, ways to live with how I'm wired. In the end, I adapted, and at this point I've lived a life that I really like.

When I figured out the diagnosis, I started seeing how many people there are with similar problems. They're definitely among your acquaintances; you meet them every day on the street. I recognize them easily — by the characteristic facial expression, by speech tempo, by stimming, by being absorbed in their own thoughts.

If you recognize yourself in this post — take the online tests. If your score is high — go get a proper diagnosis. Understanding your particularities gives you a lot of clues for living more easily. And it gives a kind of relief — the realization that you never had a choice to live differently.

Are there upsides to all this? Of course. I'm smart. And it's a value I would never trade for another. It lets me see this world at great depth, to keep being amazed by it.

Intelligence isn't a built-in feature of this kind of brain. It's just that I endlessly assemble mental constructions in my head. Almost fanatically structuring information. This is another variety of stimming. The shortest path to calming down is to understand something. It doesn't matter whether what I understand is something practical or some philosophical construct detached from real life. The act of understanding itself is what calms me.

I wasn't planning to take this post anywhere outside of social media. But dozens of people wrote to me — people who, in one way or another, saw themselves, their kids, or their friends in the post. Knowing how this works helps you understand yourself and the people around you. And lets you find a way to handle it better. So it seemed important to write about it here. Thanks for reading.