Autism, Security, and Why I Can't Stop Reading Code

· 6 min read

Well, it turns out I have a touch of the ’tism. Took 36 years too long to figure that out. Decades of failed social interactions at work. Panic attacks that feel like fire on your skin. The inability to speak because it feels like physical pain. I was still functioning ok – getting to work on time, shipping code, and my bosses were always really happy with my work (when I was able to function). So I never really questioned anything.

Until I had kids.

My journey began when my children started putting words to things I’d felt my entire life but never knew how to say. They could articulate how awful they were feeling in certain situations and I was like – wow, I feel that too. I was raised to mask and deal with the discomfort of being in the world. Until I started researching autism, I never had the words for it.

Here’s the thing nobody tells you: my entire young life until my early thirties was hard and depressing and confusing and I just thought that was the deal. Everybody’s struggling, right? Turns out – not like that. The moment I started calling myself autistic and looking at my problems through that lens, everything changed. Not the problems themselves – those are still there, hi, hello – but my ability to actually solve them. My happiness and quality of life improved dramatically. The biggest hurdle wasn’t the autism. It was admitting it.

I’ve since learned that there’s a social stigma around that word. It comes up most when I’m asking for accommodations – I’ll tell a teammate or a manager what I need and why, and the response is often something like “oh yeah I’m ADHD too haha” and then the subject changes. I also have ADHD – it’s potentially a comorbidity with autism – but they’re not the same thing, and the accommodation I was asking for just got lost in the shuffle. ADHD has this broad social acceptance that autism still doesn’t, and that gap makes it harder to have the conversation at all. It’s tough, because I can see people around me struggling with things that look really familiar, and I want to help – but I also know it’s not my place to tell anyone what’s going on in their own head.

And look – everyone’s situation is different. But I know from my own experience what might be underneath that, and my heart breaks a little because I want to say “just look into it, it might change everything.” You can’t make people see what they’re not ready to see. All I can do is be open about my own experience and hope that someone searching for answers finds something useful here. If that’s you – hey. Welcome. It gets better once you stop pretending it’s fine.

One thing I’d gently encourage: try seeing if the shoe fits. You can do this completely on your own and nobody ever has to know. Next time you’re dealing with something that feels inexplicably hard – a meltdown after a long day, the inability to make a phone call, whatever it is – just google it and add autism site:reddit.com to the search. Read what comes back. See if strangers start describing your life back to you. That’s exactly how I figured it out – and it’s what gave me the confidence to actually go talk to a doctor, who looked at me for about five minutes and said “yeah, you’ve got autism, OCD, and ADHD” like she was reading my order back at a drive-through. That’s precisely why I’m writing all of this down. If my words can be that moment for someone else, then putting myself out here was worth it.

And here’s what “fine” looked like for me: I was “fine” but didn’t have the energy to feed myself. I was “fine” but couldn’t speak for hours after work. I was “fine” but never could muster up the energy to go out socially, and if I did, I had to spend hours working myself up to it.

The world outside my house has never felt like it was built with autistic people in mind – not in a dramatic way, just in the constant, low-grade way where everything is too loud, too bright, too unpredictable, and too full of people who expect you to perform normalcy on demand. Fun questions I’ve spent years chasing that turned out to be directly autism things:

  • Why does music always give me goosebumps? And the follow up: why does it take over my body when I hear it?
  • Why can I see colors when I hear things?
  • Why must clothes have tags?
  • Why does the sun hate me?
  • Why do patterns and rhythms feel so good?

I hope to dive into some of these here too, to help myself and maybe others understand what we’re experiencing.

Calling myself autistic has also made it easier to ask for accommodations – at work, in my relationships, with my family. Whether people respect them or think I’m a burden for asking is an entirely different thing. But the first place to start is by asking.

So what does that actually look like? Mostly small things. Adjustments to how I communicate, how I take in information, how I structure my workday. None of it is unreasonable. Most of it costs nothing. All of it makes the difference between a productive day and a day where I’m fighting to feel good instead of doing good work.

And that’s what leads me to my true passion: security research, which I do productively from home. It’s what I’m good at, it’s what my brain wants to do anyway, and honestly the internet is a lot more interesting when you’re looking at it from the inside out. This blog is where I’m documenting both – security and autism – because for me they’re the same story. The thing that makes the outside world overwhelming is the same thing that makes me good at pulling apart web applications, network infrastructure, and the critical networked systems that hold the modern world together. Two birds, one hyperfixation.

So now, without further ado: