I'm still sorting out what my missing of the time I first joined social media is about. Watching how it has become all the things socializing in person (especially in groups) required that drains me, has me asking what I need to create and find again to close the loop my brain has been on for years.
I'm curious if not knowing I was autistic meant being perceived as others see me didn't happen, so I simply shared what I thought and felt happy for self expression? Did I not wait for recognition that my thoughts were understood or valued?
Or was it just that I then belonged to a high control/demand religion, was existing in a codependent, high-masking way, so my environment reinforced my compliance, reinforced my conditioned idea of myself that was then built on what I now see as a whyte-supremacist-Christian identity? So my ignorance of how arrogant my community was, how ethnocentric and homogeneous my interactions were meant I just saw what my limited worldview contained at the time, reflected back to me?
Is this why I've never felt the sense of belonging, the feeling of connectedness, the sense of safety I once believed I had again over the 9.5 years since my faith deconstruction journey?
It would definitely explain why adding a late diagnosis of #AuDHD and talking or listening to other neurodivergent people online didn't mean the return of the same womblike shelter my nervous system had come to expect prior to leaving church, faith groups, organized religion etc.
You'd think that 9.5 years would be plenty enough to redesign my understanding of how the world, life, people, connections form. And moving out of Christian Nationslist conversations and church meetings and attending gradschool for social work, doing reflexive work, 'the critical,
real-time examination of how a
person's own biases,
assumptions, and identity shape
their actions, decisions, and
relationships,' reading anti-racist books, listening to Black voices, Disability Justice authors and creators I'd have amplified my previously existing love of humanity.
When I first left religion I sounded like most every other newly deconstructing person stating chucking religion helped them love all people better. And for a time it really did.
But finding my way from 2016 into 2026, I'm now purposely disengaged from deconstruction social media spaces, and even neurodivergent and specifically ADHD/Autistic spaces don't bring that rooted, grounded, welcomed and held feeling I've realized I still miss.
I don't want that feeling in the form of exclusion, us vs them, superiority complexes. I may share values of justice and dignity and wellbeing for all, but my nervous system cannot produce energy for hours and days and weeks and months and years of rage and resistance. And right now, the voices who are speaking out all the time are the only voices that signal to my spiritual trauma and autistic trauma that they intend to not talk or connect in the old Christian Nationslist way... but it feels the same to my body.
Before I woke up to my religion's exceptionalim, I truly believed I had only love for all people, I saw us all as an eternal family needing reconciliation and reunification. I saw myself as part of a loving plan to bring everyone home.
I don't know how to engage socially without masking some part of myself anymore. But can only do it at work and then I collapse and scroll, searching for spaces that feel loving, spaces that feel welcoming but not like religious lovebombing felt.
I seem to only see glimpses in one person, in one post in the moment. But we never cross paths beyond a reaction or reply in that moment. I wanted to slowly heal from my burnout to get enough energy for doing more than the once a month in person outings outside my family I live with. It doesn't seem in today's world of war, corruption, crapitalism (not a typo), and panic driven desperation, that my desire for such safety and belonging outside my own home, will happen again.
🧵 to be contined. (1)
#audhd #autistic #recoveryfromreligion #deconstruction #recovery #autisticburnout #christiannationalism #unitymovement
@autistics