Thanks so much! I’m glad this post is helpful to you, too. 🙂 Take care!

I’m so very happy for you that you have escaped from your depression. I hope this lasts a long, long time for you 🙂 I have been dealing with my own since college, and it can be a beast. I remember a period a few years after it started when it mostly lifted, and I felt happy, calmer, saner. When I’m having a particularly rough period I hold on tightly to the memory of those days, hoping that someday I can find that again. Reading your post, that normalcy seems much more attainable. Thank you!

They’re probably not discussed because, while people are learning a lot about them, they’re still not all that well understood. Especially when it comes to concrete things like how best to do therapy with an autistic person … most (like, almost ALL) research/writing about autism assumes that the autistic person is a child. So, if anything, I’d expect ASDs to be addressed in family-therapy type courses. This sucks and is annoying, and we’re trying to change it, but that’s still very much the way it is.

Yes, exactly. I do still cry when I’m not depressed, but I always know why and I can always see that the feeling will pass.

When I’m not depressed, crying helps me feel better. It gets all the stuff out of my system and I feel much better afterward. But when I am depressed, it goes on for hours and hours and there are very few ways to put a stop to it.

Why don’t I read your blog? I should. I’m trying to learn more about autism because I’m going to be a therapist someday and I’ve noticed that ASDs really aren’t discussed much in any of my courses. :/

That’s a good question. I think it is a bit different, in that nothing “caused” it this time. This wasn’t triggered by antidepressants or by a ridiculously awesome thing happening to me (as has happened in the past), so it feels somehow more stable and permanent. If something really stressful were to happen to me right now, I would probably relapse, but if things remain stable, I probably will too.

It could definitely happen to you too. The way I felt a few weeks ago definitely wasn’t the very worst I’ve ever felt, but it was up there. Things just came together in just the right way at the right moment for me to snap out of it, and now that I’m feeling healthy–with all of the new sensitivity, self-awareness, motivation, and other stuff that that entails–I can get to work on making sure that I don’t go back to that place again. It’s much easier to do when you’re temporarily feeling better than when you’re in the midst of it. That’s why, if medication helps you, that’ll be the best time to try and figure out–hopefully with the help of a therapist–the sources of your troubles and how you might be able to overcome them.

Also, I’m so sorry to hear you’re having a hard time right now. I have no idea if I know you in real life since Michael is a freakishly common name, but if I do, please feel free to message me on Facebook or something if you ever need someone to talk to. I won’t mind. Ok? Promise? Good. 🙂

And I will never stop writing. That’s my promise.

Please don’t stop writing. Thanks.

I was sad like normal people are sad.

Yay for you!

(I’ve also made this distinction: I can even be in the middle of a cry (because I cry insanely easily; it’s my biggest masculinity-fail and the one I most wish I could change, but I can’t, so whatevs) and, if someone is with me, watching anxiously, wondering how long it will last, and if I’m having an episode, I can be like, “No, it’s okay, I know why I’m crying.” There *is* a reason, that’s what sets normal sadness apart for me. There is a reason, and it goes away.)

Yeah, I’m depressive too. I don’t write about this as much (at all, really) as I do about being autistic, because 1) I see it more as something I have to deal with than as part of me, and 2) my antidepressants have been working for years now, so I guess technically I don’t really have depression anymore (?).

Ahaha. Yes. Oh well.