PS C:\> tar -xf Head_Spun_Around_MP4.zip
Application_Install.exe
A month ago I found out I am autistic. Every pattern I have spent this entire year identifying, naming, and trying to change, I identified through a neurotypical lens, because I did not know I had any other lens available to me. Now I have to go back through all of it. Every pattern. Every story. Every explanation I gave myself for who I am. None of it was wrong exactly, it was just measured against the wrong brain.
This is another identity death. I did not see it coming and I did not know it was even possible until a month ago. I thought I had already met myself underneath the mask. Turns out there was another mask under that one, and it was the biggest one of all.
I found a song by Kai Wachi that spoke the words I didn’t have and yesterday I let my body expressively dance to it.
That is the application. The rest is the source code.
Source_Code.txt
The open-source code below is free, for you to analyze, modify, and build your own application with.
> the years I measured myself against the wrong brain: default_startup.dll
For most of my life the mask was not a costume I put on in the morning. It was load bearing. It ran underneath every conversation, every job, every room, calculating in real time what version of me would be safest to show. I called that version me for over forty years, and I meant it. I thought I liked the rooms I was in. I did not know I was numbing myself through every single one of them, and I did not know I was doing it with a neurotypical script running on a neurodivergent operating system.
> the diagnosis that reopened the case on everything: faith_revoked.log
A month ago someone told me the word autistic and every pattern I had already worked so hard to name suddenly had a different shape underneath it. I had built an entire framework this year for understanding myself, and I trusted that framework the way you trust the ground under your feet. Then the ground moved.
You tell me that you’re sorry ’bout it
But it’s too late, it’s been decided
My head’s been spun around
Forgive me if my words all sound insane, insane, insane
Except no one did anything wrong. The diagnosis was not a betrayal. It was the truth arriving a few decades late. But it still felt like grief, because never in a million years did I expect the framework I had just finished building to need to be dismantled and rebuilt from a completely different foundation.
> what fight or flight feels like with nothing chasing me: false_alarm.exe
My body gears up for a dangerous event that isn’t happening. Adrenaline. My stomach dropping like something bad is about to happen, even when my mind is calm and nothing is wrong. That is what re-examining an entire identity actually feels like most days. Not enlightenment. Not peace. A scary feeling in my body that has no target, because the danger was never external. It was the exposure of finding out the operating system itself was different than I thought.
Maybe all giants fall
Maybe God does bleed
The mask was not the villain of this story. He was a protector, built by a kid who figured out early that his real neurology was not going to be welcomed in most rooms. He kept me alive long enough for me to find out he was never actually me. That does not make losing him painless. It makes it complicated, because he was the most convincing thing I ever built.
> reopening a case I thought I already closed: pattern_audit.exe
Every pattern I identified this year, the codependency, the rescuing, the fear of abandonment, all of it, I looked at through a neurotypical lens because that was the only lens I knew I had. Now I have to ask a harder question about every single one of them. How much of that pattern was actually me, and how much of it was a neurodivergent brain trying to force itself into a neurotypical shape and calling the friction a personality flaw?
A connection ended recently, five weeks after it began. I ended it about as fast as it started. I met her through an event where I was seeking, and being sought. I tried to show up the way I had always shown up, wearing a neurotypical mask, reading the connection through the only framework I had ever known how to use. I did not yet know that framework was never built for the brain actually running it.
Tell me, is it all my fault
Was it only me?
You were the only one I believed
I do not know yet how much of that ending was pattern and how much was wiring. That is the honest answer. I am not going to pretend I have already sorted the mask from the neurology, the trauma from the brain, the learned performance from the actual person. I am just now finding out those were ever separate questions, and that relationship may have been the first place my undiagnosed brain and my old patterns were both in the room at the same time, with no way for me to tell which one was actually driving.
The confusion and the abrupt change I made, rooted in what I am coming to understand as persistent demand for autonomy, stemmed from what many would say was a completely benign flirty text message followed up with a link to a love song. These two messages felt like an invisible trap. Every option felt like I was losing autonomy. If I responded in a way that they hoped for or at least matched them, it could mean abandoning myself with people-pleasing, a pattern I am working hard to eliminate. If I responded in a way that felt true to me in that exact moment, it felt like it was going to trigger an immediate conflict. My fight-or-flight nervous system response, rooted in what I am believing is autistic PDA, took over, and ending the connection immediately became the only way my neurodivergent brain could instantly regain freedom and safety.
You see, there was an expected response demand. The messages carried an unspoken social rule that I had to reciprocate with the same energy, and that expectation was a direct threat to my autonomy. Rationally minded, I was ready to run full steam ahead with the connection, but as I discovered that night, my nervous wasn’t there yet. I am finding I need much more time to develop physical attraction, even when the aesthetic attraction is already there. Without substances and alcohol lubricating and numbing how I exist in relationships, I am starting to wonder if I am deeply a demisexual—and that I also have been masking this side of me to prevent rejection and losing potential connections. When I feel confident and physically attracted in my rational mind, but my nervous system does not, I find myself trying to override it—something I am painfully learning to not do—because eventually my nervous system wins the war and overrides me.
The person I was connecting with was well ahead of me in that regard, and I couldn’t reconcile the difference. I felt pressure to match their exact physical and romantic state of attraction, and it felt like an impossible exam I hadn’t studied for. I didn’t choose the timing, the tone, or the topic, and I was suddenly put on the spot to perform at the same level they were.
It’s not their fault. They were speaking their truth. I didn’t even know what was happening for me until I started unpacking it in the days that followed. On the surface it looked like straight up avoidance, leading them on in the deep romantic feelings and emotional connection we had established (and I truly felt), and not being far enough into recovery and/or far enough away from my patterns.
Through that lens, the emotional whiplash, blindsiding, and hurt they experienced makes complete sense. It wasn’t malicious though, it definitely wasn’t old patterns of avoidance, and it certainly wasn’t me leading them on. It was a mismatch of the emotional/romantic feelings I truly had, the physical attraction my rational mind was feeling, and it trying to bully and override my nervous system that had not developed a similar level of physical attraction. A big internal conflict between the mind and body. This suddenly became a perceived threat to my autonomy, followed by my brain firing in ways I didn’t even know it could. Unfortunately it all became clear after I, ironically, blew everything up like the fireworks I watched later that night.
I am starting to understand more about what happened when I blew up a partnership last year. It very well could have been the same pattern of autistic PDA. Same with the IT career I walked away from and the event that lead to it. The autistic PDA pattern that may be underneath many abrupt decisions I have made, that have all been immediately following intense nervous system responses to perceived threats to my autonomy, is now something I am deeply examining in therapy and through research and educating myself.
Moving forward, I don’t actually have to choose between lying or devastating someone. I can build safety rails into my communication. I can pause instead of responding immediately, and reply later when the pressure drops. I can acknowledge the flirt without matching it. I can let future connections know that sometimes I freeze up with what feels like romantic pressure and may need a pass to not respond in a matching way. I can let them know that my emotional/romantic/physical feelings of attraction and intimacy often don’t match the physical attraction and intimacy that takes my nervous system far longer to build than it used to—even when my rational mind is already there waiting. And in other situations I can let them know that any kind of pressure in general, with just about anything, that feels like a loss of autonomy is very hard for my nervous system to handle.
Bottom line, my rational mind may feel ready for a relationship escalation, and my nervous system may still be catching up with it. I have spent the last six months of complete sobriety learning this the hard way, over and over again.
This is another layer of the mask coming off. It is a hard one, for me, and for anyone caught in the middle of me learning this lesson.
> the introversion I didn't choose and can't undo: settings_reset.cfg
I have a new aversion to the social settings I used to move through easily, and it caught me off guard because I thought I liked them. I didn’t. I was numbing myself through every single one, faithfully proving my worth in rooms that were never built for the way I actually process the world.
I followed you to the ends of the earth
Faithfully proven my worth
But now we’re laying six feet down
I don’t have the room, the conversation, or the day yet where I felt the mask fully gone and had something solid to replace it with. I wish I did. I am still standing in the part before that happens, except now the part I am standing in has a different name than I thought it did.
> what the body does when the mind has no words yet: motor_response.exe
I did not have language for any of this when I recorded this piece on Thursday. I just had a body that needed to move through it instead of think through it. Kai Wachi, the grief, my identity becoming unmasked, translated into movement because my mouth did not have the vocabulary yet and my nervous system was done waiting for it to catch up. Kai Wachi said it all in this hit “I Believed” featuring Nina Sung on vocals.
It starts slow, because that is where the mask lived for forty years, quiet and automatic and unquestioned. Then it breaks into something intense, because that is what it felt like the day I heard the word autistic and understood what it meant about everything I had already worked so hard to name. Then it goes slow again, because grief does not stay loud, it settles into a body that still flinches at rooms it used to walk into without thinking. And then it builds one more time, into the most intense place in the whole piece, because that is where I am right now. Still spinning. Still reopening every case I thought was closed.
Maybe all giants fall
Maybe God does bleed
‘Cause never in a million years
Never thought you would leave
Tell me, is it all my fault
Was it only me?
You were the only one I believed
> Display 202607: HEAD_SPUN_AROUND.MP4
I am Tukayote.
I am unrecognizable.
I am love.