🌀 The inner soundtrack of “Maybe I'm doing it wrong"
Reflections on neurodivergence and self-doubt
I have a guess that many autistic/neurodivergent people, especially those who grew up undiagnosed and “high-masking,” experience a constant background drone of self-doubt that goes “Maybe I’m doing it wrong.”
Raise your hand (figuratively) if that’s true for you. I’m raising mine!
I’m interested in this dynamic, and I have some guesses about how we developed this default soundtrack of “maybe I’m doing it wrong”:
We grew up straining to figure out the social rules that came naturally to others. This includes the implicit rules and expectations of our parents, as well as of the culture around us (like my fundamentalist evangelical culture).
--> So we developed the instinct that if something felt uncomfortable interpersonally, it must be our fault.
Other people treated us--and we learned to present ourselves--as though we were more capable of handling things than we really were.
--> So we developed a belief that we theoretically could handle/manage things, and it was our fault if we didn’t do it well enough.
We lacked clear awareness of our own feelings, physically and emotionally, due to our innate autistic struggles in that area combined with the external pressure to ignore our inner experience and conform to others’ expectations instead.
--> So when something felt bad, we didn’t have the capacity to understand that we were having feelings--much less to respond usefully to them; we just absorbed a sense that we had somehow caused this vague, all-encompassing awfulness.
What else do you think contributes?
Helping myself unlearn this core belief is a major theme of my healing journey, and I hope to write more about self-doubt specifically in the near future. Let me know if this is something that resonates with you. 💙
I’ll close with my “Serenity Splash” poem from yesterday on this topic:
🪷self-doubt fog
Like midsummer’s humid air,
my self-doubt fog is dense today.
Drops of shame stick to my skin;
worry vapor enervates
my mind. Have I screwed things up?
Is So-and-so displeased with me?
My spirit sags--I need a breeze
of fresh, cool rationality.
This all makes a lot of sense! For me, #2 rings the most true. A big contributor to that might be the fact that I'm the oldest of 3, so the expectation of handling things came with the responsibility of looking out for my siblings.