Who sets the standards?

The never-ending struggle of measuring your life with rulers created by neurotypicals.

I’m struggling with what to write this week.

I’ve started this thing a good five or six times, only to lose steam a few paragraphs in and change course. Again. And again. And again.

And, man, is that frustrating. I’m a writer, after all. Isn’t this literally my job?

Yeah. It is. But I’m also a human. And this week, I’m a particularly tired one.

So I’m letting my grand plans go, and writing about not being able to write instead.

Giving myself grace like this is a relatively new thing for me. I spent most of my life—up until 2020, really—being immensely hard on myself and setting expectations that were damn near impossible to meet.

And the thing is, it sort of worked for a long time.

I got promoted, I got raises, I won awards, and I paid back $60,000+ in student loans less than 5 years after graduating. I worked with Fortune 100s, and I wrote books, and spoke on stages around the world. I even earned a dang Google Knowledge Panel, which at the time, felt like the pinnacle of “making it.”

But it wasn’t until mid-to-late 2020 that I realized the toll all that was taking on me, both physically and emotionally.

When, like everyone else, I was forced to slow down and sit still, it all started to come undone.

My book tour was canceled, and as retailers focused on shipping essential items, my book had an 8-week delivery estimate on launch day. When events around the world were postponed indefinitely, they took my next 10 months of income as a keynote speaker with them. When daycares closed, I lost the free time I could have used to rebuild some semblance of my business, and suddenly felt the pressure to be a skilled early childhood educator on top of it.

But I’d never let a challenge stop me before. I was capable, smart, motivated, and good at solving problems, right? I could figure this out… I had to figure this out… but why couldn’t I seem to figure this out?

I felt stunted and bitter. I was operating under the constant buzz of anxiety, with a soundtrack of repetitive negative self-talk. I was overwhelmed by everything and nothing, and I was exhausted on an existential level that I knew couldn’t be fixed with a few extra hours of sleep.

I returned to therapy, desperate to find a way back to “my old self.” I just needed the right journal prompt or the perfect guided meditation, and surely I’d be able to rebound, I thought. Gimme two weeks, I figured, and I could completely rebuild my business, while simultaneously administering Pinterest-worthy toddler activities, cooking three meals a day, doing yoga every morning, and thriving like never before. (LOL.)

It took a few weeks before my therapist shared the statement that has echoed in my mind almost daily since:

“You are measuring yourself with a ruler that was made in a different reality.”

🤯

(I know. She really earned her specialist co-pay with that one.)

I was measuring myself with a ruler made in a different reality.

I was taking this horrible situation the entire world found itself in, and expecting myself to somehow perform BETTER than I was before, while also doing MORE than I was doing before, all while completely ignoring the realities of the physical, emotional, and mental toll that the whole situation was taking on me.

I needed a new ruler. 📏

I can’t say it was an easy transition, because I don’t love change.

Or even like it that much.

Or at all.

But slowly, with lots of repetition, I started questioning the way I was measuring myself and my success, in small ways and large.

Once I accepted that there didn’t have to be anything moral about food preparation, I could just focus on us being healthy and fed, even if that meant some meals were ordered in, most vegetables were frozen, and some fruits were bought pre-cut.

Once I accepted that having toys strewn about the house and some mystery food stuck to the kitchen table was just the reality of having a toddler (and not, you know, a failure of me as a person, a mother, or a partner) I could accept more help, reduce the number of toys without feeling guilty, and actually enjoy the meal times and play times more.

Once I accepted that COVID had forever changed my business and the broader industry landscape, I could accept that allowing screen time didn’t make me a bad mother (just a busy one), and I could focus on finding more reasonable ways to bring in income in this “new normal” (🤮) and stop berating myself for “letting” my business fall apart.

All of this came before I was diagnosed as autistic, and before I learned about some of the other ways in which my ruler might need to be a little bit different, and some of the other kinds of supports I might need to de-stigmatize for myself.

So I’m still learning.

I regularly have to remind myself to question the origins of the ruler I’m using in life, and deconstruct my motivation for thinking things must, should or still need to be a certain way. And it turns out that neurotypicals make most of the rulers.

In retrospect, I can now see that a lot of the most “successful” periods of my life were peppered with or punctuated by periods of autistic burnout. So many times that I thought I was giving up or being lazy or just “feeling sick a lot lately,” my body was actually force-quitting for me, because I couldn’t see the need myself.

It’s easier to avoid now that I know the signs, but it’s also easier to head off because I’ve changed what “success” looks like for me, for my life, and in my reality.

I’m not really one for assigning homework, and I don’t want to be another “should” on your plate, but if you’re newly diagnosed as neurodiverse or going through the unmasking process, you may find it useful to do some similar reflection, to try to give yourself some of the grace you deserve.

You are likely measuring yourself and your life with rulers created by neurotypicals, and with rulers created in different realities. And knowing which rulers are no longer right for you can go a long way on the journey to giving yourself the grace you deserve.

Finding the wrong rulers in your life:

• Think of things that you feel guilty or ashamed for struggling to do (or not to do), and examine who told you that you need to feel that way. (Because you probably don’t.)

• Identify the things you consistently struggle with, dread, or avoid, and see if you can replace, work around, outsource, automate, or skip those things altogether. (Because you probably can.)

• If you’re describing yourself negatively, take a step back and consider whether there’s a more likely explanation than you being a complete and utter failure as a human being. (Because there probably is.)

• Honestly, most adjectives are a ruler of some kind, and they’re not usually our own: Start to question who decides what counts as easy, difficult, lazy, ready, etc. (Because it should be you. And it probably isn’t. )

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