Four Years Ago I Got Out of a Taxi and Something Weird Happened
Today is May the 4th, which, this being ECS at Southampton, means today is also the four-year anniversary of my visit day. May the 4th …. Electronics and Computer Science …. I’ll let you do the maths on that one!!!
Four years ago I got out of a taxi, walked into the building, met some people, had a wander round, and somewhere in the middle of all that my whole nervous system did something it had genuinely never done at work before, which was exhale. Not a polite “this seems alright” exhale either, a proper one, the kind where you didn’t even realise you’d been holding your breath until you stopped, and I remember thinking “…. oh, is this what it’s meant to feel like?” Apparently yes, who knew!
This place is the perfect place for me, which isn’t the same thing as it being perfect. There are still hard days, tricky conversations, stressed humans being stressed at each other, and sometimes just two different brains trying to talk and not quite landing in the same place, all of which is normal life stuff! I didn’t find somewhere flawless, I found somewhere that fits, and that turns out to be a wildly different thing.
What I didn’t know yet
If you’ve only ever worked in one kind of environment, you genuinely don’t have anything to compare it to, so you just assume the way you feel is how work feels for most people. If you’re struggling, you over-prepare for everything, you rehearse conversations before you have them, you build elaborate little workarounds for things other people seem to do without thinking about, and you go home and stare at the wall because your brain has been running 400 background processes all day and someone needs to please turn it off, and you think …. well, that’s just having a job! It is not just having a job, and I want to be properly clear about that, because I spent a long time thinking it was.
What I didn’t have words for
Before Southampton, for the majority of my life, I didn’t know I was autistic, so when people pointed out the things I found hardest … being “too emotional” (Autistic Meltdowns), being “a bit much”, the hair, the teddy bears, the everything … I didn’t think “that’s a difference in how my brain works”, I thought “that’s a flaw I need to fix”. So I tried to fix it, for years, really really hard. From the outside it probably looked like I was mostly coping, but from the inside it was a small tired person frantically translating themselves into a language they didn’t actually speak, while ALSO doing their actual job, while ALSO encountering some genuinely heavy material that I won’t get into here. The anxiety was constant, and the meltdowns were daily, although nobody called them that at the time, they called it being emotional.
The bit I want to be careful about saying, because it matters, is this …. I was already being incredibly hard on myself about all of those things, internally, every day, in ways no one could see. So when comments came in from outside, even the ones from people who genuinely thought they were helping, they didn’t land on a neutral surface, they landed right on top of everything I was already telling myself, and they reinforced it. Over and over and over …. and honestly, not all of it was well-meaning either, some of it was unconscious bias people hadn’t examined, some of it was just unkindness because that happens too, but even setting the worst of it aside, the well-meaning version still did damage, because the cumulative effect of being told the things you’re quietly already failing at are visible and wrong is genuinely corrosive. It eats at your self-esteem, it eats at your confidence, it eats at your physical health, it eats at your mental health, and you don’t notice it happening because each individual moment looks small and reasonable and possibly even helpful from the outside. Intention is real, I do believe that, but intention doesn’t cancel impact, and pretending otherwise has helped exactly nobody.
The annoying paradox
If I hadn’t hit the wall, I probably wouldn’t have been diagnosed, and if I hadn’t been diagnosed I wouldn’t understand myself the way I do now, and if I didn’t understand myself I probably wouldn’t have ended up here getting out of a taxi on May the 4th and accidentally exhaling, so yes …. mixed feelings about the journey!! Genuinely …. but also, and I want to say this part loudly, you shouldn’t have to break to find somewhere that fits!!!!!!, and the road to here being the road that it was isn’t romantic, it isn’t a redemption arc, it’s just what happened, and I think it happens to a lot of people and I don’t think it should. At this point, I really want to thank the people who, without meaning to, through their actions, gave me the life of my dreams …. because I am thriving now, and you made that possible in the early steps!
Some questions to reflect on ….
Not a checklist, not a quiz, just things worth sitting with for five quiet minutes if anything in this is starting to sound familiar.
- Do I actually feel safe being myself here, or am I performing a more palatable version of me?
- Where is my energy actually going, into the work, or into surviving the environment around the work?
- When I struggle, do people get curious, or do they get corrective?
- Is the feedback I get about what I do, or about who I am?
- And if literally nothing changed, how would I feel about this in a year, or two, or five?
If those questions make you a bit uncomfortable …. that’s information, not a decision, just information!
What the wrong place quietly does …
It’s rarely a single dramatic turning point (although those moments did happen), it’s more of a slow drip, where you’re tired in a way that sleep doesn’t fix, you rehearse small conversations before they happen, you feel “too much” or “not quite right” as your default setting, and the basics start slipping …. eating, resting, switching off … and you tell yourself you’ll sort it next week, you’ve just got to get through this week first.
Anxiety becomes background noise, like an appliance hum you’ve stopped noticing until someone unplugs it and you suddenly realise how loud it was! Your confidence and self-esteem don’t crash so much as quietly erode, until one day you look up and realise how much of yourself you’ve lost track of.
What the right place quietly does …
Also, not dramatic, weirdly (although again, those moments can happen). You can exhale, and you’re still you …. still emotional, still occasionally too much, still very much the person with the teddy bears …. but none of those things are the problem anymore. Your energy goes into ideas instead of self-correction, people get curious about how you think rather than mildly inconvenienced by it, and confidence builds quietly, on its own, without you having to manufacture it. You don’t become a different person; you stop having to be one!!!!
What I really wish someone had told me …
You can’t really picture a place that fits you until you’ve stood in one, and until then you’ll assume the discomfort is normal, you’ll assume you are the variable that needs adjusting, and you’ll work very, very hard at fixing the wrong thing. Sometimes it isn’t you, sometimes it’s the room, and sometimes … if you’re lucky and the universe has a sense of humour …. you’ll get out of a taxi on May the 4th, walk into a building full of strangers, and somewhere between the lift and a slightly underwhelming biscuit you’ll think …. oh, there I am.
