Becoming

On December 31, I had a telehealth appointment for a psychological evaluation I’d waited months to get. The psychologist read my old autism evaluation from TSBVI, the one from 2011 that had shaped how I understood myself for over a decade. And then she stopped. She told me they hadn’t really tested for autism. That there was likely neurological involvement. That she couldn’t tell me anything for sure without neuropsychological testing first. She said she didn’t want to do that to me, give me answers that might not even be right.

So I didn’t get answers. I got a referral and a door propped open to more questions.

By February, my gastrointestinal health collapsed. I was put on liquid medical food, and I mostly stayed on it for the next several months. Then the decline started. Not just the GI issues. Everything. My body began shutting down in ways I couldn’t predict or control. There were times this spring when we worried I was dying. Not in the abstract, dramatic way people say it. In the real way, where you’re lying in a bed and someone is watching your vitals and nobody is sure what comes next.

I didn’t die. But something else did.

For years, I had been fighting. Fighting to finish college, five attempts, each one derailed by a health crisis I couldn’t plan around. Fighting to hold onto a vision of independence that other people had given me. You know the one. The story where you push hard enough, accommodate enough, find the right tools, and then you live on your own and prove you don’t need help. That story. I clung to it like it was scripture.

It wasn’t. It was someone else’s dream for me, and it was killing me.

This month, I had to face something I’d been avoiding: my brain won’t let me do coding work anymore. Not the kind of sustained, deep technical work that a backend developer needs to do. The cognitive fatigue, the brain fog, the executive dysfunction, they don’t care about my skills or my interests. They don’t care about what I spent years learning. They show up when they show up, and I can’t code around them.

So I let it go. And here’s what I found when I did: I’m not sad about it. Because the tech was never the thing that lit me up. Creating was. Building was. Writing was. The moment I stopped clinging to the identity of “developer” and let myself be what I actually am, a writer, a builder, a person who makes things, everything shifted. I built an NVDA add-on from nothing to version 1.1.0 in two days. I’m building a game. I write essays that get published. I’ve been a builder all along. The code was just one material. Turns out words and stories and games are materials too.

This month, I also disowned my sisters. All three of them. I don’t say that lightly. I say it because it was the hardest peace I’ve made this year, and also the most necessary. I can’t keep carrying people who choose cruelty. I can’t keep watching what they do to my mom and pretending it’s okay. Letting them go didn’t fill me with relief. It filled me with grief. But it was a clean grief, the kind that comes when you finally stop pretending something isn’t broken.

And I embraced long-term care. Not as a failure. Not as the boogeyman I’d been told to fear. As what I probably needed all along. Someone else manages my medications now. Someone else handles the daily physical care that burned my mom out after 34 years. And I’m still here. I’m still creating. I’m still advocating. I’m still me. I just don’t have to run my body like a machine I can’t afford to repair anymore.

I think about faith a lot these days. I think about how God works. I’ve been a Christian my whole life, and I used to think following God’s plan meant pushing forward, accomplishing things, proving myself. But this year taught me something different. Maybe God needed my plans to fall away. Maybe He needed me to stop clinging to college and career ladders and the vision of independence that was never mine. Maybe He needed to clear the slate so He could shape me into something I wouldn’t have chosen for myself but can’t imagine being without now.

I’m not unhappy with who I’m becoming. That’s the thing I keep coming back to. This year took almost everything. My health. My sisters. My ability to code. My independence, or at least the version of it I was chasing. And what’s left is somehow more honest, more real, more me than anything I was before.

I want to be clear about one thing, though. I’m not at peace with all of it. I’m still in limbo with the neurology and autism questions. I still don’t have the neuropsychological testing I need. That door is still open, and standing in a doorway for seven months is its own kind of exhaustion. I can be at peace with the direction my life is going and still want answers about my own brain. Those two things coexist. Peace doesn’t mean every question is answered. It means I’ve stopped letting the unanswered ones control the rest of my life.

A lot has changed since December. It’s not what I would have chosen. But I think I’m finally becoming who I was supposed to be. And I think that’s been the point all along.