The first part of my five-decade autistic journey.

Introduction: why I’m sharing this story

Hello! I’m about to take you on what might be the most honest tour of a neurodivergent brain you’ll read this week. Maybe this month. Possibly this year!

Before we dive in, let me explain why I’m sharing this deeply personal journey. I work with neurodivergent people who often feel like they’re the only ones struggling with a brain that seems to have come with the wrong instruction manual. They feel isolated, confused, and often convinced they’re fundamentally broken. I also work with organizations trying to understand how to truly support neurodivergent employees, not just check inclusion boxes.

This story – spanning five decades of confusion, masking, collapse, and eventual self-acceptance – isn’t just my story. It’s the story of millions of neurodivergent people who are walking their own paths, often without roadmaps or guides. Whether you’re discovering your neurodivergence at eight or eighty, whether you’re in the masking phase or just starting to suspect your brain works differently, this journey might feel familiar.

Think of this as a behind-the-scenes documentary spanning five decades, except instead of glamorous movie stars, you get me awkwardly avoiding eye contact while obsessively organizing spreadsheets. This isn’t a “look how quirky and charming autism is!” piece. This is real talk about the beautiful, frustrating, exhausting, and sometimes absolutely ridiculous reality of living with a brain that came with a completely different operating system – and taking almost fifty years to figure out I had the wrong user manual.

So buckle up. We’re going on a journey from childhood confusion through decades of exhausting performance art, culminating in what I lovingly call my “magnificent collapse.” Part 2 will cover the plot twist where I discover my autistic self is really a superpower.

Connecting with Like-Minded Souls on the Mat

Let’s start when I was blissfully unaware that my brain worked differently than that of most other people I met. Picture a kid growing up in Portugal in the 1970s and 1980s, who seemed perfectly normal to everyone around him – just one with some quirky habits and preferences.

The signs of autism were there, but they were subtle enough that nobody really thought twice about them. I had what we called “textile allergies” (translation: some clothing felt like sandpaper), possessed the athletic coordination of a newborn giraffe attempting ballet, and had the delightful hobby of memorizing license plate numbers for fun. I also had an early obsession with collecting and organizing – starting with the obvious childhood stuff like stamps and coins. To my family, I was just Marcus – the kid who had strong preferences about fabrics, wasn’t great at sports, had an unusual fascination with numbers, and liked to keep his collections very, very organized.

My mother still tells the funny story of my toddler-era war against butter. When given bread and butter, I would carefully turn the bread over and try to eat only the butter-free side! What seemed like adorable pickiness at the time is a common sensory and behavioral issue experienced by many autistic people – though of course, nobody knew that then.

Looking back, these seemingly unimportant differences gradually led to feelings of exclusion and isolation. I just couldn’t relate to what other children liked – the rough-and-tumble play, the sports, the casual physical interactions that seemed to come so naturally to everyone else. It wasn’t that I was being rejected exactly; it was more that I was living in a slightly different world, one where the things that brought other kids joy felt overwhelming or uncomfortable to me.

While I had a relatively normal life until the age of 10 or so, by age 12 I felt completely isolated.

The teenage reckoning (or “Houston, we have a problem”)

I started the grand tradition of “self-repression” – basically trying to stuff my square-peg brain into the round holes of normal teenage life. Spoiler alert: it didn’t work, but it did give me excellent training for the marathon masking session that would define the next two and a half decades of my life.

The physical stuff was getting more obvious too. Strong smells would literally make me flee rooms – perfumes didn’t just bother me, they made it difficult to breathe, and the smell of mushrooms sautéed in butter could make me instantly nauseous (goodbye, teenage parties with too much cologne and fancy dinner invitations). Strobe lights felt like assault weapons aimed directly at my brain. And don’t even get me started on trying to smile naturally for photographs – I always looked like someone had just explained quantum physics to me in ancient Sanskrit while I was trying to solve a Rubik’s cube (I excelled at the latter by the way).

Even animals seemed to pick up on something different about me. Household pets would approach me, but only for purely transactional purposes – they’d come to me for food, to open a door, or when they needed something practical. But they never sought me out to give or receive affection the way they did with other people. How did they know I was different? It was like they could sense I was broadcasting on a frequency they couldn’t quite tune into, and while they were happy to do business with me, emotional support was clearly off the table.

It was during this period that anxiety first crept into my life, essentially coming up as social anxiety. The growing awareness that I was fundamentally different from my peers, combined with the increasing complexity of teenage social dynamics, created a constant underlying worry about saying the wrong thing, doing something inappropriate, or simply not understanding the unspoken rules everyone else seemed to know intuitively.

The great masking marathon (or “fake it ‘til you… still feel fake”)

My twenties, thirties, and early forties were essentially one long, exhausting performance piece titled “How to human: a beginner’s guide to pretending you’re not completely overwhelmed by everything.”

I became a master of adaptation. Appropriate eye contact during professional meetings? I could do it, if I concentrated really hard, though it took up so much brain power I’d forget what we were discussing. Social chitchat? I developed scripts. Networking events? I treated them like anthropological field studies where I was the undercover researcher trying to understand this strange species called “neurotypicals.”

The corporate world became my masking playground. Twenty-five years in multinational companies, living in eight countries, leading large teams – all while running neurotypical software on autistic hardware. I was like a computer trying to run a different operating system from the one it had been designed for: technically functional but constantly overheating and requiring way too much processing power for basic tasks.

My collecting obsession had also evolved far beyond the stamps and coins of my childhood into more sophisticated territories. I was expanding into books, toys, model trains and soldiers, fans, information – you name it, I could organize it. The real passion wasn’t just having the collections; it was cataloguing them. And when I ran out of storage space? Obviously, the solution was to expand the storage space, not to control the collecting obsession!

My autism began to manifest itself in increasingly sophisticated ways. I absorbed other people’s emotions like a particularly aggressive sponge (by the way, until recently I thought everyone did that). If someone was upset with me about one specific thing, my brain translated it as “they obviously hate everything about me as a person.” In fact, I experienced emotions in a distinctly binary way – they were either completely on or completely off. This made relationships particularly interesting because I either felt nothing or I felt everything with overwhelming intensity. There was no middle ground, no casual affection or mild interest. It was either total indifference or all-consuming emotional investment.

And the emotional baggage? Oh boy, I was collecting and cataloguing it just as I did with my other collections. Every misunderstanding, every social mishap, every moment of feeling fundamentally different – I was storing it all in what I now realize was my “evidence I’m broken” file.

The social anxiety of my teenage years had evolved into full-blown generalized anxiety by this point. The constant masking, the endless adaptation, the mental gymnastics required to navigate every social and professional interaction – it all took a toll. What started as worry about specific social situations had expanded into a persistent undercurrent of anxiety about everything: work performance, relationships, whether I was doing anything “right” according to the mysterious neurotypical playbook I was still trying to decode.

The magnificent collapse (or “when the wheels finally came off”)

By my mid-forties, the masking marathon was taking its toll. I was living at an unsustainable pace, adapting constantly, giving everything to my career but nothing to myself. The emotional overload was becoming impossible to ignore, and my brain was basically screaming, “SYSTEM ERROR! SHUTDOWN IMMINENT!”

This was when everything started unraveling in the most beautiful (and excruciating) way. The perfectionist facade was cracking, the endless accommodation was exhausting me, and I couldn’t ignore the growing pile of evidence that my brain worked fundamentally differently from those of most other people I met.

The generalized anxiety of my masking years had morphed into something deeper and more concerning: depression. The weight of decades of trying to be someone I wasn’t had finally pushed my mental health beyond what I could manage on willpower alone.

And then came the diagnosis: high-functioning autism (now called Autism Spectrum Disorder, or ASD, Level 1). That moment wasn’t a disruption – it was recognition. Suddenly, everything made sense. The hypersensitivity to light, sound, smells and texture. The obsessive need for structure and patterns. The way I can spot a typo in a document faster than most people can find Waldo, but couldn’t navigate small talk without edging closer to an existential crisis. The extreme loyalty that made me overthink everyone’s problems. The paralyzing fear of asking anyone for help because I was convinced I was constantly in everyone’s way.

The diagnosis didn’t change who I was – it gave me the user manual I’d been missing for five decades.

This is where part 1 of my journey ends – with the collapse that was actually the beginning. In part 2: the great embracing, I’ll share how my breakdown became the foundation for the most authentic, purposeful period of my life. We’ll explore how I learned to harness my neurodivergent superpowers, found peace with my intensity, and built a life where I could finally thrive my way.

If you’re somewhere in the masking marathon or approaching your own magnificent collapse, know that you’re not alone. And if you’re ready to start building a life that works with your brain instead of against it, I’m here to help.