Content Warning: mentions of Anxiety, PTSD, and Depression contained therein. If you are not in a good place right now but still want to read sometime, save this post and come back to it when you feel better. When you do come back, I hope this series of posts comfort you while they tell you a little bit of what I have been through in my life.
Hey guys!
Mental health (and more importantly what to do when mental health is poor) is probably going to remain a fixture of my life and consequently the life of this blog for some time. Why? Because people are still mentally unwell, and I want to help them get to a better place. It’s really that simple.
That said, I think it’s important as a mental health guide (see last post for why I don’t call myself expert or Guru) that y’all know my story. It’s like, credibility, I imagine. I give y’all some serious mental health game (game is code for knowledge or skill, my beautifully literal, neurodivergent people!), y’all deserve to know where and from whom it’s coming from. That way, y’all know I’m speaking from actual experience instead of otherwise. I’m usually believed when I say to people “I’m not trying to trick you”, this is more for the people who need a guy (or guide) with street credit before they put any trust in me. 😄❤️👍🏾
So, let’s give you guys what you asked for!
Let’s start where it starts for me.
It was a Thursday afternoon in November of 1997. My parents were about to get a second surprise in the form of a Baby. The first one was my sister 3 years earlier. That second baby, was me.
I was born Evan Christopher Harris, to predominately black parents and a black sister in a city near Dallas, Texas.
I don’t put as much stock into my racial identity as I do to my Neurology, though. I was born Autistic. I describe the Autistic Experience as simply that: an experience. I see the world differently, I sense the world differently, and just experience the world differently than most other people. Different people who are not Autistic have their own beliefs, convictions, even, on what the Autistic Experience should or shouldn’t entail, regardless of what we as Autistic people tell them about the truth of each of our experiences (every autistic person is a little, or very, different than all the others). This generates misunderstanding, and it’s this misunderstanding that has generated the lion’s share of my trauma.
Autistic people are not accepted by the world on a grand scale. My differences tend to scare some people. These people have confined ideas about the world and how it should be and work. With my thinking differently, my ideas don’t often fit into their confined sense of reality. Now as an adult, it’s easier and more socially acceptable for me to just not associate with people who aren’t more open minded.
That’s not the case when you’re a kid.
At first, you don’t know how to stand up to people who try to change who you are. Then once you learn, it’s still socially unacceptable for adults to be, in their hurt eyes, “told off” by a kid just trying to defend themself from people trying to get them off their divine course. This falls under the umbrella of something called Ageism. It’s also a survival thing, ya’ know? As a kid, you’re relationally dependent on older people for life’s necessities. I mean, who’s gonna get your large fries as a snack from McDonald’s if you can’t drive? Parents don’t have resources to Home-School you? You still haven’t been taught how to drive to public school? You’re dependent on your parents or the bus driver. Get there on your own, You might as well forget it, Honey! 😂
All this, the misunderstanding of Autistic people and general Ageism, combined creates a dynamic. One where a child can begin to build a perspective on the world, their very own reality in a strong sense, only to have that reality invalidated, pushed to the side, and generally never honored.
That’s exactly what happened to me.
The first 3 years of my life, My parents had trouble decoding the software package known as Evan. I didn’t speak consistently until I was 2.5 years old, Things irritated me that didn’t seem to irritate other kids. Man, I was just running different programs than what my parents thought they were signing up for! In hindsight, I don’t blame them because it’s not like any of the few books on parenting Autistic Children that were out at the time conveyed any message beyond “Try to force them to be normal!” Not that those would’ve been there to help much at that time because they could see that I was different, but didn’t know I was autistic. I must include this, however, as I wish to be as honest and authentic as I can for y’all. my hope is to build trust with y’all, ya’ know?
Things got more complicated once I went to Preschool (here’s some time context, I entered preschool about 3 weeks before 9/11. I would turn 4 in November 2001).
Now there’s a plethora of issues I have with the reigning school system, and I will get into each of those with time. For now, all we need to know is the fact that school aims to put each person on a certain, conformist track that goes something like, Get educated —> Get a job —> get married —> have kids —> retire, and die. As morbid as that sounds, that’s what I see when I zoom out to see the whole thing. Also, it teaches you to niche down and focus on one thing to be when you grow up; they teach you that work and play should always be completely separated… And everything you learn from the first day of school, instills those particular ideas in the impressionable, receptive minds of kids. we’re not seen as diamonds in the rough so much as we are seen as blank, colorless clay to be molded into something useful to the workforce they’ll be thrusted into one day.
So, things got more complicated in the sense that all those issues I mentioned in that last paragraph, began to wreak havoc on the way my brain and personality were developing!
I wasn’t that easy for people at school to get, either! My hypersensitivities made it so I couldn’t eat most of the things that were served on the lunchline. If my classmates all started cheering and yelling at the same time, I would be covering my ears, physically immobilized and probably screaming too, for a whole different reason. 🤣 If a certain smell was in the toy area of the room, It’d b(other) me and I’d tell the teacher, and they would or would not do something about it. And sometimes, maybe they pretended to do something about it, just to try to make me feel heard. As an adult, I now know they do that to kids all the time! 👀
My constantly overstimulated mind made it harder for my thoughts to exit me to be heard, and people started saying I stuttered. And you always have people picking on you for that, thanks to classism and elitist mentality!
I gained my first special interest as an autistic person around this time: Titanic. I was learning so much about the great ship herself and sharing that info with friends and teachers that people at school started telling me I was “talking their ears off!” My literal mind did (and still does) envision an adult’s ear melting off of their head as I speak to them, but people often clarified by simply angrily telling me to “stop talking.” Pretty harsh looking back.
I’m not sure I knew what bullying was when I was a young kid, but maybe it’s because my neurology elicited different things from people who were annoyed at me that made it so I didn’t perceive it as bullying. but in hindsight, I think I was bullied. A lot, perhaps.
Despite my differences in neurology, surprisingly, I was bullied for the same reasons most other people are: for not fitting in to what people were reared to expect, basically.
I’m not writing any of this from a place of bitterness. I’ve done a lot of processing and therapy about these subjects in my life and if anything, I feel sorry for the Authority figures in my early life and what they were teaching us kids about how they thought the world should be. They thought they were doing their best, and no one was there to tell them they were hurting me and people like me. And if I tried to communicate that to them, their social wiring would compel them to deny my plea to stop and change their actions. It’s in this dynamic where I learned what a catch-22 is. 🤣😅
Bullying could knock any thick-skinned kid down with time. But it always seems to affect the ones who are more sensitive, in-tune as I prefer saying, the most. We become the ones who bear the more visceral share of scars from that time in their lives. I could go into more of the metaphysical side of what this does to a person, but I think I’d like to share that in its own post, or several!
I was never allowed to be myself entirely. Not at home, and certainly not at school. And unfortunately, my instincts were never given a chance to develop properly, which led to boundary issues along with an inability to realize that the things I was going through early in life were emotionally scarring me (I’m currently trying to make sure that these things don’t end up scarring me for life. 😄).
You might’ve been asking how does all this tie in with Evan’s mental health journey?
I believe that no mental health condition pops up or is genetically activated without early life trauma of some kind. I had to share what I have been through so that y’all may know that my conditions, at least, came from things that happened to me as a kid. I know because I was kinda fine before this stuff started happening en masse.
So, Anxiety has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember (and people at school told me they envy my memory abilities), but nowadays at least, I tell people that I’ve constantly been dealing with anxiety since 9/11. I think the whole world became more nervous after the attacks, honestly. Osmosis, maybe?
I think PTSD, or what I now know to be diagnosed as Complex PTSD (CPTSD) has been affecting my life since probably not long after after elementary school started, circa early to mid 2005. Teachers yelling across the room at us in the name of “disciplinary action” exacerbated many of the things that are tied to my flashbacks and attacks (I’m having some even as I type this out and recall those times).
I think my first bout with abandonment outside the house came in 4th grade when my best friend Dwayne had to move to a different state with his family. As hard as it was to feel and see such a strong and meaningful fixture of my life leave suddenly, I continue to applaud Dwayne for what he said to help me handle those feelings, and at such a young age! He told me to think of it as a long vacation where he’d come back to visit periodically (last time was in 2021 😊). I still rely on this analogy to this very day.
Those of you who know me well enough know that I am an avid musician among many other things. if I had to give you my number one favorite artist of all time, it would have to be Michael Jackson.
So… you can probably imagine what a detriment to my soul it was (and still is) to hear that the King of Pop had died from a Propofol overdose from his doctor.
Enter Depression!
And bear in mind, I still wasn’t consciously aware I was dealing with any of those things. All I knew is that my life seemed to be slowly falling apart around me (as most depressed people have felt).
The last thing I’ll share in this part (as this post is def getting long) is another discovery. I was in the latter half of 3rd grade when my parents first heard from a diagnostician that their son was Autistic. Long story short, I wouldn’t find out until the beginning of 6th grade not long after Michael died that I was (and continue to be) autistic.
Let’s just say… that this changed everything for me.
Thank you if you read all the way through to this part. 😄 Tune in for the next one coming real soon! 😁
Thank you for listening. I hope this helps someone out there.
Evan