• It’s been on my mind lately and, as we know, nothing but writing down what’s on my mind to find it’s actually irrelevant. I don’t wish to keep thinking about it anymore, so here are my thoughts. I won’t write about autism again, that is the point of this exercise.
• I was diagnosed “unofficially” in 2019, meaning, my therapist at the time, after about 9 months of talking and assessing, came to this conclusion. She didn’t record it anywhere as it was her firm opinion that a formal diagnosis wouldn’t aid me, but, considering the climate back then, would more likely prove disadvantageous.
• Just before and after this happened, I spent months in an investigative frenzy. It was impossible to concentrate on anything else. My kid was fed and cared for. My kid was also fed and cared for when I was recovering from a stroke.
• I observed that the more time I spent thinking about my condition, the more my body seemed to act it out. I experienced an alarming amount of shutdowns during that year. This felt like I was making myself more autistic by thinking about my autisticness. On the other hand, I had an extremely emotional and needy toddler on my hands 24/7. No breaks, except sometimes a few hours on the weekend. It makes sense that my body refused to take in any more input at least once weekly. The shutdowns usually happened in open public spaces, often at bus stops, often accompanied, or triggered by toddler meltdowns. I don’t know if it’s possible to be any more disappointed in oneself as I was during those moments.
• My body is very sensitive and hypermobile on one side. Maybe I’m also autistic on one side.
• Sometimes, when I have many spoons, when my hormones are perfectly balanced, when I’ve had enough alone time lately, when my body feels good and I am neither hungry nor tired, I could easily pass for an extrovert. I say easily not just because it looks so uncanny when it happens, but because it feels like it too. Sometimes, socializing is effortless, even with people I neither like nor click with. When this happens, my internal monologue shuts down save for a few question marks. Who gave me these powers? How long do I have before they change their mind again?
• Most of the time, I am a shut-in. I avoid most human contact; anyone who is not 100% acquainted with my peculiarities, who has not proven over time they accept and gladly accommodate my needs without my having to defend them.
• About ten years ago, one of my childhood friends visited me in Berlin. We had chatted a little on Facebook before she asked to stay with me for a couple of days, and she turned out to be truly lovely in person. She apologized for her behavior toward me back then (which I would not have expected nor required) calling herself “an odd child.”
• This was very mature of her to say at that point; I would not have been able to do the same. When I look back at that time, it has the same blurry, echoing filter over it as do my childhood and youth. The same confused certainty vis a vis the way I took in myself and the world. My thoughts either seemed like the most real thing in the world while everything else was an illusion, or the other way around: I was fictional in a world that functioned a certain way no matter what I did.
• I was an odd child. I was extremely shy. I hid from everyone except immediate family and only started speaking in any situation when either only they were in the room or at most one outside person. Kindergarten in Germany seems to have worked more or less without a hitch, though there were movie-worthy scenes where I, standing at the top of a hill, looked down on the other kids playing, asked myself “how it works,” concluding they had been given instructions on a day I was absent.
• I spoke rarely during class. This continued till late high school, when I also spoke rarely, but only so that teachers were simply worried about my verbal grade instead of furious and indignant about my “refusal” to answer their questions.
• My favorite teachers were the ones that cheerfully refused to accept my silence as who I really was. I felt uniquely safe to speak up during their classes.
• In fifth grade, my friends conferred to drop me from their group while I was home sick. One of them called to tell me. I said ok. I didn’t tell my parents. It was big news to my mom when I mentioned it a couple years ago.
• I was an odd child. I don’t know what I did back then, but I’m almost sure there was something. I wasn’t talkative. Again, with more than one other person in the room, I would stop speaking entirely. I was silent, and that is fucking awkward if nobody knows why.
• My dad and my brother loved to playfight and tickle each other. They would also tickle me, till I cried. It was funny for about two seconds until it felt like torture. They never learned. It surprised them every time when I would start kicking and crying. My dad would say “oh no” and pat me on the shoulder, and my brother glower at me for spoiling the fun.
• I was very sensitive. I learned so early that suffering in silence was infinitely preferable to stating my needs that I have no memory of ever refusing food. I have no memory of not liking specific foods, ever, actually, which is weird considering I am very princess-on-the-pea about food these days.
• Perfectionism, however, was rewarded. I loved drawing as a kid. I’m not sure today how much of it was attention seeking, and how much was innate. I would throw fits of varying intensity, depending on the setting, when the end result didn’t match my expectation, which was every time. These were met with not entirely unfriendly bids to not be so hard on myself. “It’s perfect,” my mom or teachers or classmates would say. My ego would swell, and I would scowl and keep insisting on how bad it really was.
• When I started cooking, I was allowed control over the dinner table. I didn’t realize it at the time. I would tell everyone I learned to cook because I didn’t like my mom’s food, oblivious to how unfair that was to my mom, who both role modeled to me that cooking is just responding to what’s there, and endlessly irritated me with her what I perceived as an unyielding belief that following certain rules with no care for what is actually there is the only way to get good results.
• When I started cooking, I would study the recipe for days before touching anything. I studied every recipe I could get my hands on, even or especially those I wouldn’t try out. I learned what kinds of recipes I could trust. I didn’t like the kinds that left certain details of preparation up to the reader. I liked the ones that spelled everything out, so I fell in love with Deb Perelman’s and Ree Drummond’s blogs when I discovered them in 2008.
• I had no internal concept of the word fun until recent years. Everything my supposed peers talked about as being fun was an exercise in holding back crying to me. Until I miraculously had enough cool friends and felt old enough to drink alcohol.
• When I cook, I am a crowd pleaser. I started out wanting to make things as interesting and innovative as possible. Then I started smoking weed and realized the beautiful pleasures of familiarity, taken as far as possible. A penniless art student, I could not afford expensive ingredients. Shedding my disdain for doing things the normal way did my cooking so much good. One of the sous chefs at the hotel I apprenticed at said “you can’t make gold from shit ingredients.” I nodded like I appreciated his wisdom while internally acknowledging that our respective concepts of “shit” and “gold” diverged a little.
• In some ways, the kitchen was ideal for me. My meticulousness was regarded highly. Politeness was out the window most of the time; on the contrary — the fouler my mouth, the more I was respected. If someone said or did something weird to me, I would shoot them down and they loved it. If they didn’t, they weren’t cool and therefore irrelevant. Before I started my apprenticeship, I had a chef boyfriend who would talk about stress in the kitchen as something you don’t get in other jobs. I would say stuff like, yeah, but there are deadlines in other jobs too. He would shake his head, knowing there’s no point explaining. Anyway, the stress is great in that it dismantles inhibition in those that take it seriously. Those that don’t are immediately found out. You do not want to be on the bad side of the ire of stressed kitchen workers who actually want to do their jobs somewhat well. Anyway, this was made clear to me quickly. My anxiety wouldn’t get me anywhere in this job, so I had to shake it off. I remember telling myself to lean in every time I felt nervous or unqualified. I would just do things.
• I went from the frying pan into the fire. Kirchen work was unfathomably exhausting, but I wished those days back with a fury when I had my child and, after a year of both my boyfriend and I telling me he would come around to doing his part in time, realized I was alone in this. I had moved back home into my father’s house at his invitation, but due to never having learned that actively stating my needs or asking for help instead of waiting for people to insist would yield favorable results, I was still mostly alone. I dared not impose myself on the person caring for my grandma at the time, even though she was obviously great with kids, had loads of spare time, and was already getting paid to help around the house.

Last revised September 28, 2026.