Maybe You’ll Never be Happy. But You Can Be Interested.

Finding meaning in an ordinarily unhappy life.

Beneath the layers of pain and social conditioning, where is the you that remains? Photo of a wall covered in chipping paint by Marija Zaric on Unsplash.

Welcome back to Autistic Advice, a semi-regular advice column where I respond to reader questions about neurodiversity, accessibility, disability justice, and self-advocacy from my perspective as an Autistic psychologist.

You can submit questions or suggest future entries in the series via my Tumblr ask box, or you can email questions to askdevonprice at gmail.

Today’s questions come from neurodivergent people who, despite working hard at accepting themselves and unmasking, still find that they are riddled with shame, and unable to imagine a future in which they are happy.

Here’s our first anonymous question from Tumblr:

Anon, it does not surprise me to hear that there are layers upon layers of shame stacked all atop one another in your mind, like the uncountable coats of sticky white paint a landlord coats his units with instead of ever cleaning them. It gets confining, doesn’t it, being expected to do everything, while being denied so much? When you think on all of the societal rules that guide your…