My last post is dated May 30th. Then, I shut this blog down, and I almost completely stopped sewing. Perhaps I should call it an identity crisis. But I love to write and sew. Why shoot myself in the foot? A lot happened in the last three months.

We often think that our experience is unique. We’re wrong, of course. Maybe I’m writing this hoping for insight. Maybe someone will comment and offer words of wisdom. Maybe I will discover my own wisdom as I type and allow the thoughts to unravel, shamelessly. Maybe someone will tell me I am not a bad person (wishful thinking, I confess). Maybe someone will gain insight. Then at least the crisis will have served a purpose.

I just quit my job, suddenly, after five years of showing up without fail, never requiring a single sick day, and only taking two three-day vacations a year. I was responsible for receiving merchandise and organizing storage for a 130-year old family-owned general store in a bustling tourist town. My workload defaulted to a colleague I care about. My timing was bad. This is a mess.

My time there was invigorating. Great teammates, always a project at hand, a well orchestrated machine from UPS drop off, to sales floor, to storage. I took it all to heart, as I always have with any job. I love to work. I love to make things work, create structure. And here lies the problem.

Five years ago, this job also allowed me to become distinctly aware of personal challenges in work settings. I sought and found a wonderful counselor and we began to peel the layers to uncover the truth. I am not fond of labels, but the words that ended up encapsulating this truth for me brought valued clarity and understanding. PTSD and Autism Spectrum Disorder. Well, I thought, that explains a lot!

Ha-ha moment for sure. So much suddenly made sense. And there was much work ahead, not only in the physical world of my job, but in the inner world as well. And this is the tricky part.

For five years, I applied great strategies suggested by my counselor to help me self-regulate in moments of overwhelm, navigate a crowded environment, and ground myself in daily routine that allowed me to function without being sideswiped by nearly unbearable disorientation and panic. I made it work. So much so that I am fairly certain that very few people around me noticed when I was in crisis. I just pushed through. I was an adult after all. I understood my circumstances after all. I had strategies to help me “be normal” after all.

After all… this daily regimen of self-regulation sapped the life-force out of me.

But I am not an autistic child, I thought. I am an aware, grown, autistic adult. It is reasonable and even responsible to make this work. Foliage and the Holiday Season are on the horizon. I’ve made it this long. I can at least be gracious enough to press on for a few more months. And then, when things slow down, surely I will realize that I made it worse than it actually was, and I’ll calmly resume being a normal little worker.

And it is in the midst of this inner turmoil that I shut down this blog. I think my reasoning was that I was desperate to shut down something, to simplify. I shot down what was easiest to drop. The blog and sewing are mine alone. No one could be disappointed in me, or angry. There would be no consequences for others.

I poured all my energy in the job. Someone relied on me to show up and get it done. I take this seriously. Surely a reasonable person would prioritize a work obligation over her own whimsical desire to sew and write.

This feels like a sort of public journal entry. Maybe it’s a confession. Maybe, as my wise counselor pointed out long ago, I am looking for permission to choose my own path, and to leave something behind that is no longer aligned with my most harmonious self.

That job was a great experience. I simply did not understand that even a good experience may not be forever, and certainly not at the expense of physical and mental health.

Depleted, I gave in. That was three weeks ago now. I’ve been sewing and noticing that for the first time in at least two years my mind is not caught in a whirlwind of self-regulating mechanisms all day. Today, I attended a writers’ group a friend suggested. It was a welcome experience to be surrounded by eight other people without feeling crowded or invaded.

These people write because they want to. They are called to the page. So they do it. The excerpts they read exuded a sort of calm flow. They allowed the words that live inside to spill out and tell their story. This is the sort of story I’ve been called to write too, since I could hold a pencil. That, and the story I tell with needle and thread. It’s about time!

Oddly, or not, I slipped into my new, more peaceful daily routine effortlessly. No sense of that loss of identity so often associated with the end of a long work-life. I seem to have slipped right back into a dormant identity instead, though at the moment it remains speckled with bouts of guilt for my sudden departure. It will pass, I think. Why do we so doubt our right to choose our own path?

In some respects, the labels that explain our respective mental or emotional struggles are irrelevant. The point, or the trick, is to recognize the struggle and realize when our thinking is in error. And our thinking is in error when we begin to believe that the struggle deserves our effort more than our own well-being does.