As an autistic person with mental illnesses sometimes it can be hard to figure out who I am.
If you have diagnoses you might feel like you have to split up parts of yourself and your actions into boxes, like this part of you is autism and that part of you is anxiety, for example.
Or you might feel like your whole identity is your diagnoses.
Even without a diagnosis you might feel like parts of you are defined by the way you feel, split up and separate.
This can make us feel like we have to be ashamed of these parts of ourselves or like we are not really whole. It can be confusing to know who we are and find our identity in the midst of it all.
Then you add in other identity factors like sexuality, gender, and race which in many cases can complicate our mental health and understanding of ourselves even further – especially because it impacts how others see us, and this is even more prevalent for minority identities.
Rather than trying to see ourselves as a selection of different parts and separate ourselves into these parts, maybe we can start to think of it more like colours blended together and filters on the image of who we are.
Like my anxiety is red and it bleeds into my passion for theatre which is blue. They mix to create a purple in the middle, and that’s where stage fright lives. But all the colours are a part of me, blending together to make me who I am.
And my autism is a filter with a yellow tinge and that does affect how I view and interact with the whole world, but it isn’t my whole identity, nor is it separate to every other part of me. They all work together in different ways to make me who I am.
At the end of the day, you don’t have to have everything figured out about your life and who you are. No one does. It’s a journey and an ongoing process which can be really scary to think about. But it’s actually pretty amazing, all these colours that make up the rainbow of you, changing and growing each day. Remember – no one but you gets to define who you are; your identity is personal and you don’t owe it to anyone else, nor do you need to define who you are!
But you are wonderfully unique, allowed to take up space, and your rainbow is so much more than you could ever imagine.
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