While my experiences as an autistic woman primarily shape what I write on my blog, this is not the only form of neurodivergence I experience in my life. I have also experienced both general and social anxiety in my life, and it is safe for me to say that the latter can be far more overwhelming than the former, especially since I am also on the autistic spectrum. Social anxiety has made it difficult for me to try and open up and make connections with other people, as it negatively impacts the way I view myself and how I believe other people perceive me. I will commonly find myself evaluating and re-evaluating how a specific social interaction took place, criticising myself at what I believed to be a poor job of communicating, and feeling embarrassed for myself afterwards. While I am aware that the vast majority of people experience difficulties in communicating at some points in their lives, my social anxiety tricks me into believing I am the only person who is capable of messing up at social interactions, and that my socialization skills are among the absolute worst.
Finding a way to properly articulate these feelings is difficult enough, but to actually have these feelings be legitimized is especially challenging. As many neurodivergent and mentally ill people can attest, describing our experiences to neurotypical people is extremely difficult. This is probably because to neurotypicals our experiences are not “legitimate” concerns, because they are “all in the mind”, or we are “just over-exaggerating”, and if we just do a specific set of activities we’ll feel better in no time. So finding stories able to showcase our point of view, and present our experiences in a sympathetic light, is something extremely surprising and validating to find.