I Overcame My Autism and All I Got Was This Lousy Anxiety Disorder Quotes

“It's not like, as the term "masking" seems to evoke, there's a superficial layer of actions and appearances that I can remove and instantly improve my life. I don't have a mask I can remove; I have a multiheaded, deeply embedded parasite. It's probably killing me, but it's also kept me alive, and I don't know how much I can remove and still survive. I'm not completely sure where it ends and I begin at this point.”
― Sarah Kurchak, I Overcame My Autism and All I Got Was This Lousy Anxiety Disorder: A Memoir

“I am still, ten years later, very much a work in progress. But at least I know what I am working on now.”
― Sarah Kurchak, I Overcame My Autism and All I Got Was This Lousy Anxiety Disorder: A Memoir

“Effectively ruining oneself just to provide absence of annoyance or inconvenience to others in exchange for their allowance of your continued basic existence is not an optimal outcome for anyone involved.”
― Sarah Kurchak, I Overcame My Autism and All I Got Was This Lousy Anxiety Disorder: A Memoir

“people who aren’t marginalized love appointing themselves the authenticity police of those who are, often with a passion and confidence that’s inversely proportional to their actual knowledge.”
― Sarah Kurchak, I Overcame My Autism and All I Got Was This Lousy Anxiety Disorder: A Memoir

“The people who are trying to be on our side have reduced us to a mere calculation”
― Sarah Kurchak, I Overcame My Autism and All I Got Was This Lousy Anxiety Disorder: A Memoir

“Recicprocal conversation, for example, had always been a major stumbling block for me. It's not that I didn't care about what other people were doing or thinking, I just couldn't wrap my head around the necessity of asking them specific things to demonstrate that interest. My ideal conversation would be an exchange of interconnected statements. One person could initiate by bringing up an idea or point that they thought another person could be interested in. The second person could then relate their own ideas or points to those initial statements. The first person could bounce further sentences that were punctuated with periods and the occasional exclamation mark off of that, and so forth. As I have been repeatedly informed, though, this fails to convey proper investment to most other parties. Apparently it can make you sound self-absorbed and aloof. I tried to remedy my natural conversational style for years, but could not properly wrap my head around finding the right things to ask, putting them into the proper words and then making my voice appropriately rise at the end of those assembled words. My awkwardly crafted and even more awkwardly worded questions stopped conversations almost as dead as my lack of them had.”
― Sarah Kurchak, I Overcame My Autism and All I Got Was This Lousy Anxiety Disorder: A Memoir

“There was just nothing that I accomplished during my time there that gave me any indication that real life wasn't just as mercenary, scary and completely outside of my skill set as high school. I was still awkward and strange, still missing cues and feeling like I was on a thirty-second (or thirty-minute) delay from everyone around me. I still thought that tolerance might be the best I could hope for.”
― Sarah Kurchak, I Overcame My Autism and All I Got Was This Lousy Anxiety Disorder: A Memoir

“I wanted people I could cry and laugh with, share memories and inside jokes. I wanted to go to malls and movie theatres. I wanted to get invited to parties and maybe even work up the nerve to go once or twice.
To accomplish that, I was going to need a new plan to attack. Being myself was still. unfortunately, out. I was starting to like me, but I'd also established that I was a girl of obscure tastes, so I couldn't really count on anyone else being on board. My earlier method was also out now that I recognized its two glaring flaws: 1. No matter how hard I tried, the normals seemed to smell the not normal on me; and 2. I always seemed to hit a point where I resented the failing effort that I was putting into all of that bullshit and morphed into a snarky contrarian who wanted to set everything on fire.”
― Sarah Kurchak, I Overcame My Autism and All I Got Was This Lousy Anxiety Disorder: A Memoir

“I was almost as angry at the world as I was at myself. Everything felt hopeless. I'd worked so hard to be something less than hated for so many years and it had all fallen apart. And I just couldn't envision a future where this pattern wouldn't repeat itself until one of my haters - be it me or someone equally sick of me - put me out of my misery.”
― Sarah Kurchak, I Overcame My Autism and All I Got Was This Lousy Anxiety Disorder: A Memoir

“I restructured most of my outer life - and did my best to adjust pieces of my inner one - through variations of this process: Observe. Mimic. Overanalyze. Catastrophize. Observe some more. Try again. Resort to self-flagellation and self-torture as necessary. Repeat. My ares of focus included my tone of voice, body language, wardrobe and apprearance, and the music, stories and hobbies that I'd admit to liking in front of other people. Some attempts were painful. Some frustrating. Some still leave a bitter taste, while others have become amusing anecdotes. A few became second nature to me after my initial attack, but most require conctant effort to maintain.”
― Sarah Kurchak, I Overcame My Autism and All I Got Was This Lousy Anxiety Disorder: A Memoir

“I swore to myself that I would do everything in my power to protect myself from being hated and targeted again. The only problem was, I didn't have a clue how to do that, or where to start. When you're not on the same social wavelength as anyone in your general vicinity, figuring out when people stop liking you isn't the only challenge. You also don't know WHY the don't like you.
So I made the kind of desicions that make sense to a scared and rudderless eleven-year-old desperate to become less of a target: I obsessively studied people and characters who weren't social pariahs and tried to reproduce anything that might play a part in the way other people responded to them. Then I hepercitically overanalyzed every interaction I had for any hints that I might be screwing up again.”
― Sarah Kurchak, I Overcame My Autism and All I Got Was This Lousy Anxiety Disorder: A Memoir

“I ran all of the potential social suicides through my head the way autistic savants calculate math problems in TV shows.”
― Sarah Kurchak, I Overcame My Autism and All I Got Was This Lousy Anxiety Disorder: A Memoir

“The stealth suffering part came easily enough. I had developed a knack for hiding any outward signs of distress during my bullied phase, and those skills translated well to this new task.”
― Sarah Kurchak, I Overcame My Autism and All I Got Was This Lousy Anxiety Disorder: A Memoir

“I spent twenty-seven years trying to convince people that I was normal enough to accept, or at least leave alone, and no one ever fully bought it. When I finally knew why that experiment was such an ongoing failure, though, few believed that either. I was using it as an excuse. I was exaggerating. I was faking. I was not as autistic as someone else someone knew and was, therefore, not really autistic.”
― Sarah Kurchak, I Overcame My Autism and All I Got Was This Lousy Anxiety Disorder: A Memoir

“I would love to exist in a world where we could just be open about everything.”
― Sarah Kurchak, I Overcame My Autism and All I Got Was This Lousy Anxiety Disorder: A Memoir

“You can strip yourself bare and still be accused of faking — of lying. Why would anyone want to do that to themselves? Why would anyone want them to?”
― Sarah Kurchak, I Overcame My Autism and All I Got Was This Lousy Anxiety Disorder: A Memoir

“Life, love and lust would be so much easier if we were able to be frank about our feelings and intentions.”
― Sarah Kurchak, I Overcame My Autism and All I Got Was This Lousy Anxiety Disorder: A Memoir

“You can't stop or fix everything for your child. You won't always make the choices that are right for them. But there's power in trying, and in the love that fuelds those efforts. There's power in the act of being on their side.”
― Sarah Kurchak, I Overcame My Autism and All I Got Was This Lousy Anxiety Disorder: A Memoir

“Whatever advantages I might have as a verbal human being with a handy batch of coping and masking mechanisms in place, I am no better than anyone else on the spectrum. We are equals. When I say that autistic lives have value, I'm speaking for every single one of them.”
― Sarah Kurchak, I Overcame My Autism and All I Got Was This Lousy Anxiety Disorder: A Memoir

“This separation between real autistics and people who are "just quirky," "just awkward" or "almost too high-functioning to count" is a mental dance that non-autistics have to do whatever they're confronted with a 3-D autistic human being in the flesh. Otherwise everything they've ever thought, everything they've ever been told about us, starts to seem a little monstrous.”
― Sarah Kurchak, I Overcame My Autism and All I Got Was This Lousy Anxiety Disorder: A Memoir

“The only thing I will say about all autistic people is that we are all human beings and deserve to be treated as such. Everything else is as different and complicated and nuanced as we are.”
― Sarah Kurchak, I Overcame My Autism and All I Got Was This Lousy Anxiety Disorder: A Memoir

“In general terms provided to you by a person who let their fitness studies lapse years ago, it goes like this: You can be doing something that’s completely dysfunctional for years without noticing it. Something can be slightly off about the alignment of your knee, for example, in a way that causes no immediate or tangible pain. The movement just slightly tweaks something that’s not exactly where it should be. On its own, this could be no big deal, but that same pattern, repeated over and over again for a long period of time, can take its toll. A tendon or ligament can become weakened and strained as it’s brushed against the bone in a way it was never intended to, until one day, it can no longer withstand the wear and tear. That basic, simple movement you’ve done so many times before with no hint of a problem can suddenly shock you with a pop, a snap or a surge of pain. It will probably seem like a fluke injury. You just stepped off a curb and tore your MCL! But it took years of overcompensation and unwitting neglect to reach this surprise breaking point. At the time that I was obsessed with this phenomenon, I was woefully unaware that the same thing was about to happen to my brain.”
― Sarah Kurchak, I Overcame My Autism and All I Got Was This Lousy Anxiety Disorder: A Memoir

“By that point, though, I was already painfully aware that I was not the kind of girl who boys liked, which made me question whether I could be the kind of girl who could tell other girls about boys at all.”
― Sarah Kurchak, I Overcame My Autism and All I Got Was This Lousy Anxiety Disorder: A Memoir

“Formed in 1976 and disbanded in 1980 when lead singer Ian Curtis died by suicide, Joy Division were Manchester’s saddest post-punk goths. Which is saying a lot for a city that also produced The Smiths.”
― Sarah Kurchak, I Overcame My Autism and All I Got Was This Lousy Anxiety Disorder: A Memoir

“Formed in 1978, The Cure are an iconic British goth band whose music tackles sadness, loss, cats, the heartbreaking limits of interpersonal connection, fluctuations in affection over the course of a basic work week and the entirety of the human experience.”
― Sarah Kurchak, I Overcame My Autism and All I Got Was This Lousy Anxiety Disorder: A Memoir

“The more different you appear from other people, the more those people need to know why you’re not like them.”
― Sarah Kurchak, I Overcame My Autism and All I Got Was This Lousy Anxiety Disorder: A Memoir

“Being able to bang my favourite person and enjoy a few tax breaks because we signed some papers and had a party once are cool benefits and all, but I don’t think our relationship would be any less important or valid if those things weren’t on the table.”
― Sarah Kurchak, I Overcame My Autism and All I Got Was This Lousy Anxiety Disorder: A Memoir

“I don't want to die. I just don't feel like I can earn the right to exist at all.”
― Sarah Kurchak, I Overcame My Autism and All I Got Was This Lousy Anxiety Disorder: A Memoir