Last Updated on February 3, 2025

The real reason I became a coach

[Trigger warning: violence, self-harm]

Here’s some unsolicited advice:

Never give people unsolicited advice.

I’m autistic and gifted.

I knew I was “gifted” as a kid because in 2nd grade I was put into the “gifted and talented education” program.

I hated it.

One day a week, I was taken out of class and bussed to a different school.

There, we were forced to do even harder things than in normal classes.

Yes, my regular classes were boring for me.

But now I had to do extra homework, and use my brain for hard things I wasn’t interested in.

I didn’t want to be “gifted,” I just wanted to be normal.

Too deep to connect

I didn’t know I was autistic though.

All I knew was that I was different.

And so did all the other kids.

As the joke goes, “The doctors couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me, but somehow my grade school bullies knew instantly.”

I had intense, complex emotions.

I still do, in fact.

Due to my hyper-sensitive nervous system and constant bullying, I often burst into tears in class.

Which of course just lead to more bullying!

I remember walking home one day from grade school contemplating the nature of life and death.

I was probably 7 or 8 years old.

So I had an existential crisis before I was 9. 😆

There was no one I could talk to about this stuff.

Other kids just wanted to play Super Mario Brothers.

I wanted to figure out the nature of God, The Universe, and Everything.

Unsolicited advice

The problem was I couldn’t find anyone to help me.

When people asked me how I was doing, I learned to lie and say I was fine.

Adults couldn’t deal with the fact that a young child didn’t want to be alive.

When I did work up the courage to ask for help with my emotions, people gave me terrible advice.

They didn’t offer the advice as “you might try this experiment,” but as “I’m an adult, and you must do this thing I tell you.”

I’m sure they meant well.

It’s just the advice didn’t fit for me.

It felt like another demand that I comply, that I conform to the norm.

So I argued with them.

And then they got mad at me for arguing with them!

Now I had two problems to deal with.

As a result, I never really learned to “co-regulate” with others.

Instead, what I learned was “Asking people for help threatens your relationship with them.”

Deal with it yourself

Every day for years I was kicked, punched, spat on, stolen from, and called names.

I tried ignoring it and pretending it didn’t bother me, but the abuse continued.

When I asked teachers to help me stop the bullying, they told me to “deal with it myself.”

So I did.

I started punching back.

Despite my bullies somehow never getting caught for years, I immediately got caught the first time I fought back.

This pacifist straight-A student then got punished by teachers for “fighting.”

And the bullying continued anyway.

So little me formulated the best plan I could come up with, given the limited resources I was working with.

I would sneak a kitchen knife into my backpack and stab them with it.

My mind thought “it’s the only way to stop this Hell.”

Luckily, I did not follow through with it.

I told my mom I was planning on committing murder and she thought that was probably not a wise decision.

Smart.

Instead, she helped me get into a private High School, which literally saved my life.

Fellowship of the nerds

There I met a group of fellow neurodivergent nerds.

We played Magic the Gathering and Dungeons and Dragons and smacked each other with foam swords.

And we had long, philosophical conversations about the nature of the Universe, and the mystery of why no girls were interested in us.

For the first time in my life, I felt I belonged somewhere.

It still took me years to open up and trust my friends.

But now I have many friends I love and who love me.

To be honest, I still struggle to open up when I’m feeling stressed though.

And when I do, I still get bad advice from the people who love me.

It must just be a human thing people do when they don’t know how to help.

Even so, I’m making progress in opening up to people.

I’m learning to share what I feel, even before I have “processed” it all with some technique.

Helping others like me

But yea, this is why I became a coach.

I didn’t feel like anyone in the world could help me.

I thought I was too weird, too intense, too broken.

So I figured it out myself.

I figured out how to transform my debilitating social anxiety.

I figured out how to transform my suicidal depression.

I tried every therapy, meditation technique, or weird trick someone said worked for them.

I even invented a bunch of my own methods.

Because for me, it was heal or die trying.

I’m glad I did, because even when life is hard now, it’s still better than it ever was growing up.

Most of my coaching clients are also gifted and neurodivergent, even if that’s not how they would self-identify.

Somehow I tend to attract people who have “impossible” problems.

I suppose that’s because I have been doing the impossible my whole life.

I believe progress is always possible, no matter how complex you are, no matter how many times you’ve tried and failed in the past.

There is always a way forward, if we’re willing to listen deeply instead of rushing to give advice.

Then we can begin to design a solution that might just work.

And we don’t have to do it alone either.

The truth is, I never really did it alone.

My transformation was made possible because of the people who supported me along the way.

If you could use some support in your journey, please reach out.

Take care,

 

 

 

~Duff
(they/them)