For the past 10 years, I’ve been slowly learning how being neurodivergent has affected the way I understand the world. I’m diagnosed ADHD, but a lot of the symptoms of Autism also fit my experience as well. Medication and therapy helped me get past the anxiety and depression that had arisen from this condition, and helped to stabilize me at work and home.

Stability wasn’t enough though. I was no longer drowning in my failure to meet the expectations I had of myself, but I wasn’t terribly happy with my state either. There were things missing from my life, that I couldn’t quite place a finger on. 

A couple of months ago, I started reading Unmasking Autism by Devon Price, and a lot in that book resonated with me, particularly the general concept of ‘masking.’ Whether or not I am also Autistic, or if I just have a lot of autistic traits, masking has absolutely been a core part of my experience as an adult. 

While I plan to later return to discuss more about neurodivergence, I wanted a first post to explain what I’m doing here. One of the most significant ways I mask is to hide things I’m ‘excessively’ interested in. Again, later maybe we’ll talk about the psychology behind it. But for now, in trying to learn how to be an authentic self, I want to have somewhere public to put thoughts that I have about things. And unlike previous attempts at blogs, I don’t really much care who reads. This is for me.

So what do I want to talk about? I’m not sure. I have always loved explaining physics on reddit (you can find me as reddit.com/user/shavera/ ); so I’m likely to start writing some of my most common ‘lessons’ down here. Physics is a part of a generally larger group of special interests of “How did everything come to be the way it is?” so evolutionary biology is also fascinating to me, as well as anthropology/sociology/linguistics/history. As a younger person, theology was fascinating to me, and I may write down some thoughts about some things that I hope are reasonably well articulated and minimize offense. But I’m not at all sure what may come. We shall see.