My Adult Life with Autism Series - Part 1

Alright, this post is going to be different than my previous ones. Now that you have an idea about who I am and some of my interests/hobbies, it is time to get to the core content of why I created this blogging website in the first place. It is to give you a glimpse into my world of living with high-functioning autism. I don’t really want to focus on my childhood or youth, at least not in this post. I want to talk about what my life is like as an adult living on the spectrum. 

In the coming blog posts, I am going to share my adult life experiences. The good, the bad and the ugly. My life experiences over the course of my adult life have shaped me into who I am today and who I desire to become. I may swear on occasion, but I want to share some of my raw feelings as to how I feel. I will try to keep it minimal for those of you who don’t like it. 

One of the biggest hurdles in my life is the feeling of never amounting to anything. Throughout my life, I have had several people tell me that I will never amount to anything. I would never graduate high school, I would never complete a full-time mission for my church, I would never graduate college, I will get sent home from the Navy because I suck and can’t follow simple, basic instructions, and never find a woman that I could one day fall in love with and marry.

It is one thing to fight with my inner demons, and it is another thing for people to ridicule you and say those things to your face. Hearing this rejection and ridicule for 36 years of my life has definitely taken its toll on me. I have often thought to myself, “Why do you suck so much at so many things? Why even try something new when you know damn well you’re going to fail at it? What’s the point of living? You have nothing to offer to society. Or you should just give up and quit while you’re ahead.” I struggle with serious depression which has had a crippling effect on me, especially as an adult. If it wasn’t for my faith in God that I had to seriously work for, and the unconditional love and support of my family, I would have seriously considered committing suicide a long time ago.

Depression sucks. It literally damns you. You feel highly unmotivated, you feel like giving up and you get too deep into your head and fester feelings of self-loathing and self-sabotage. At least that's how I felt. For a long time, I lived in denial that I even had autism. I thought that since I wasn’t officially diagnosed, I didn’t have it.  It wasn’t until I got into the medical bay at the Navy’s basic training where they told me I had to get separated from the military due to having autism and sleep apnea that I finally came to terms with my condition. My depression kind of comes and goes, but I realize that the more I eat more healthy and work out that I have more control over my mental health. 

I want to share an experience going to college. For those of you who don’t know me, I am LDS or Mormon. I am not planning on going deep into my life as a member of the church unless I feel compelled to later down the road. Anyway, after I served a mission for my church, I went to school at BYU Idaho. During my time on campus, I had a mixed experience. I met some of my closest friends whom I still talk to regularly and I took some great classes. My issue was that I was highly unorganized and sucked at test-taking which really tanked my overall GPA. At the time, I was struggling with a career path that I wanted to pursue. I took a career exploration class, but didn’t really resonate with any of the careers that matched my personality. I always loved wildlife biology so I decided at the time to major in it and specialize in marine biology. I took an Intro to Biology course which was there to help people find viable careers in biology and other sciences. During that particular semester, my professor was away for most of it and unbeknownst to me, the classroom changed to a different time and room. I didn’t know what was going on. When the professor returned back a week before finals, he had me come to his room. He basically told me that based on my performance in the class a career path in biology was out of the question for me. He asked me what I thought a Biologist did and he told me that the things I wanted to do were basically minimum-wage work as a technician. So needless to say, I left that meeting feeling like a complete piece of trash. I had no ambition and I hated myself for not taking the initiative to find out when the class switched rooms and times. So this is what spiraled my life downward and ultimately got academically dismissed from the university.

My life was utter hell. I loathed myself. I lost all ambition for life. And I felt like I hit my personal “rock bottom”. I felt embarrassed that I got kicked out of school too. It was embarrassing to tell people that I wasn’t going to college for a while. I had so many people try to pry out of me why I wasn’t returning to school. Plus, my inner demons started to fester and poison my mind telling me how worthless I was. 

I lived with so much regret. I regretted that I didn’t do better in school and take my education more seriously. I regretted that I didn’t take advantage of the university’s accommodations because I thought I could handle school on my own and didn’t need help. It wasn’t an arrogance issue that you might assume. It was that I didn’t want to have special treatment or handouts. I didn’t want to be viewed as special needs by my peers. At that time, I was extremely self-conscious and really cared about what other people thought about me.

After coming to terms with that I wasn’t able to return to college, at least for a little while, I decided to move to Utah. I was working for In-N-Out Burger at the time and felt like I needed a change of scenery. After living in Utah for a little over a year, I realized that I didn’t want to work in fast food for the rest of my life. So, I decided that I wanted to continue my education and attended what was then called the LDS Business College in Salt Lake City. During this time, I grew a fairly decent-sized social media following for my video game photography and found a career path that was relevant to what I was already doing. I decided to pursue the college’s social media marketing degree. 

My experience there was nothing short of amazing. I had learned so much and flourished in my life by going to school part-time and working part-time. I on numerous occasions had my professors praise me for growing my personal brand on social media and I often shared what I was doing with my classmates. It was a great experience to learn everything there was to know about how to be successful in utilizing social media in business. 

Then the most amazing thing happened. After being diligent in school and learning from my past mistakes, I was able to boost my overall GPA and decided to shoot my shot in reapplying to BYU Idaho. After the course of nearly a year, they accepted my appeal and I was able to be readmitted to the university. It just so happened that I was taking classes from both BYU Idaho and the Business College at the same time, resulting in graduating from both institutions in the same semester in July 2019. I can’t adequately express in words how amazing this was for me. After all of the rejection, all of the ridicule, and years of self-inflicting hatred, I was able to hold my head high and be proud of myself for once in my life. All of the years of dwelling in the past and living with regret literally washed away the moment I received my Bachelor of Science and Associate of Applied Science degrees on the same day. I was on cloud nine and felt like I could conquer anything.

I share this with you today because all of us are capable of much greatness in their lives. No matter how bad life beats you into submission and yells at you telling you how worthless you are, you have one thing you have complete control of and that one thing is yourself. You have the capability and capacity to accomplish anything you set your mind and heart to do. Don’t get me wrong, life is not a cakewalk. Life isn’t handed to you on a silver platter. It takes hard work. It takes grit and courage to embark into the unknown and follow your own path. When you are bleeding on the floor and don’t feel like you have the strength to get up, get up anyway. That is the test of life, to get up no matter how many times you fall. If I can do it, then so can you.

Just because I was able to graduate from college, it doesn’t mean that my depression and fight against my inner demons magically went away. In fact, they are hard at work every single day. I  have gone through so many different career paths that didn’t work out that I want to talk about. But for the sake of the length of this particular post, I will save that for a future one. Anyway, thank you for taking the time to read this rather lengthy post and I hope what I have shared today will be of some benefit to those that read it.