For far too long I never knew who I wanted in life. I was often pressed to fit into societal norms and was made to follow into a neurotypical stereotypical way of life. This comes from the fact that I was diagnosed over 25 years ago when autism awareness was more a necessity than just the fact that I need to be accepted as the person that I am today, just as I am.

Five years ago, when I moved out on my own, I started the process of self-discovery. One of the greatest things that I ever regretted, but lived and learned from was the fact that I went off my medication regimen and continued that process until over a week ago when the necessity of taking my medication as prescribed finally set in with me. While I learned that medication helps make my challenges, including being autistic, more manageable, it does not prevent me from being who I authentically want to be.

For many years, I believed that the medication was preventing me from being who I wanted to be, but in fact it was making me a miserable person because my challenges were presenting themself or that even though I may have felt euphoric, in reality I was experiencing mania because of having bipolar disorder, something that I have known I’ve had for nearly 25 years, yet for nearly two decades I  have been taking medication for it, multiple psychiatric hospitalizations and even a nine-month residential placement in order to have the right “cocktail” in order to make my life a livable one, I disregarded the fact that medicine was a necessary caveat in my life in order to make me be able to navigate the world.

Yet, in the process of self-discovery, there were things that I did enjoy and in fact for most of my life before living independently, I enjoyed them. However, due to being forced to follow societal and neurotypical norms, I never was able to feel that the way that I was feeling about myself was validated. Additionally, these feelings were enhanced by being autistic and therefore because others seen them as excessive, the thoughts and feelings were discouraged. This in turn made me feel that I needed to follow neurotypical societal norms that cause me to experience things that I disliked because of autistic traits, thus making me very frustrated.

So, while I was on this rumspringa of sorts of the past five years, my feelings of who I really was became hyperfocused and sometimes even inappropriate on top of managing my other conditions which were untreated at the time, thus becoming frustrating for all of those that care about me. The trajectory towards getting into the right place happened nearly five months ago when I was in a manic episode as a reducing and eliminating medications over the summer. It caused quite the panic in many people and as a result I had to take time off work amid a work relocation and get everything back in order.

Through a majority of the last five months, I was never at peace that I could be my authentic self and was continuing at times to not be completely adherent to my medication until one day last week when it finally set in, and I realized that everything DOES work AND I can still be my authentic self. I can be who I want to be, but medication aids in managing the challenges that are brought forward by my challenges so that the challenges are not challenging as they have been, medication HELPS me!

There is never any shame in taking medication, no matter what it is for. Just because you take medication and experience side effects that prevent, or cause things doesn’t make you any less of a person or who you authentically are or who you want to be. Unfortunately, I had to learn that the hard way, but I know that I can never allow myself to get to that point because it does so much damage to not only myself but others as well. It means, putting my mental health a priority and caring for myself when I need to, because after all, if that is part of who I am and who I want to be, then it too needs to be a part of my authentic self.