For the Birds: Intrusive thinking / magical thinking
In which I get curious about distinctions while speaking personally about mental health. Or, Against Manifestation.
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Unexpected thoughts + images of wildlife extinction.
A sudden jolt of anger I imagine unleashing toward a friend.
The image of my car veering off the cliffside and into the Columbia river.
There are certain words I reach for when trying to describe intrusive thinking.
Rash.
Harsh.
Rushed.
All those sh sounds that pretend they’re whispering.
They’re not whispering. They’re not even trying to.
Am I describing the words, or the thoughts?
Yes.
When I first sat down to begin today’s letter, I wrote: I’ve never been truly debilitated by my thinking. But seeing it in language I realize, almost immediately, how untrue that is.1
Of course I’ve been debilitated by my thinking! I am a weirdo-sensitive writer and only child who spent 0 to 12, and then 12 to 18, and then 18 to 36 lost in fantasy, masking her Autism, and playing / toiling in the depths of her creativity as both escape and fortification.
In an unpublished short story, one of the few pieces of really good fiction that I’ve ever written, the unnamed main character says: Everything inside my brain leaks back into my body, as if it were the most comfortable place to be.
Is she thinking, or talking?
Yes.
MAGICAL THINKING: I will receive my Autism diagnosis—finally, once and for all—and [ [ [ POOF! ] ] ]…my hardest of hard feelings will subside.
Internal monologuing, intrusive thoughts, and the general feeling of not being able to turn my brain off: where does neurodivergence end and anxiety begin? Trying to put my intrusive thoughts into language makes me sound less well or more monstrous than I really am, than I want anyone to think of me as.
So why put it into language at all? Because I want to make and hold neurodivergent time and space, not just in my own private experience of being a human on this planet, but in my role as mentor / guide to other creative humans.
And because what’s coming into sharp focus for me is the potent relationship that some of us, with certain kinds of brains, have with our creative channel.
Must have. Need to have.
Which means spending lots of time being curious about which parts of my thinking I can and can’t control (a grappling with discernment that, optimistically, I hope provides something for others when they read about it). Furthermore, it means noticing where mending is required, where a little more agency is due, and which aspects of my thinking are good and fine and maybe even worthy just as they are.
My curiosity is fiercest—most clarifying—on the page. So, here I am.
MAGICAL THINKING: OK, maybe subside was always going to be too strong of a word, no matter the diagnosis. But knowing something sturdy and true about how I am (who I am) and how I function will create some relief around my most disorienting emotional episodes. Right?
Before discovering my current neurodivergent therapist, my healing journey as an adult looked like this:
do “well” (-ish) for some period of time, until something builds up and I go back to therapy.
tell new therapist that I’m pretty sure I have OCD, a concern I trace back to high school.
new therapist tells me, sooner than later, that they’re pretty sure I don’t have OCD.
a bunch of stuff is discussed, including a lack of consistency in my reported symptoms and a general impression I get that the therapist thinks I’m too “high-functioning” to struggle in the ways that I say I do.
I guess I don’t have OCD, I think to myself, and continue on with the days / months / years.
the cycle repeats: new therapist, same assertion, same conclusion. maybe they mention mindfulness, or ACT. I don’t roll my eyes, though something inside me does turn.
Then, there’s the other stuff I’ve been told, both directly and through cultural osmosis.
Don’t make a decision based on fear!
…even when I carried no fear, only need and preference.
If you don’t crush your goal, you didn’t believe in it hard enough!
The clarifying gift of language: seeing that statement on the page, I’m inclined to modify what I was originally going to say.
What I was originally going to say was that, as a sensitive person who is both neurodivergent and the bearer of unique mental health needs and limitations, I’m not sure our popular manifestation tenets are designed for folks like me. I’m not sure they serve anyone well, to be honest, but I think they have really dangerous consequences for some of us. I know self-sabotage is real; if I become too convinced that my day is going to be bad, I might accidentally train my brain to notice only what reinforces just that.
But I’m also Autistic. And I’m also highly sensitive to the world’s constant suffering, which does not go away just because someone isn’t looking at it. And I also carry the consequences of trauma inside my brain, à la C-PTSD, consequences that may not ever fully subside. And all of this means that a thinner, more fragile sense of self, paired with a long-term relationship to self-doubt, are a true part of my world.
They don’t impede my “more successful” reality; they are my reality.
Manifest your dreams!
Have you watched The Secret?!
Fake it ‘till you make it!
What I was originally going to say was that I think belief can spoil, can turn into something more rotten and self-destructive than whatever it was supposed to be.
What I’m going to say now is this: A lot of that shit feels like gaslighting to me.
No more faking. No more pretending things are more real when they’re more impressive or, barf, more neurotypical.
I can no longer pretend that a neurodivergent experience is a lesser one, nor a fake one.
MAGICAL THINKING: I tell myself that something truly wonderful, maybe even life-changing, is going to happen on the day I finally get Wordle in one.
OCD is one of the most common misdiagnoses for adult women with undiagnosed Autism, but research indicates that the two also co-occur with some regularity.2
This makes so much emotional sense to me. The rigid thought patterns. The connection between safety and repetition. The difficulty in determining where routine ends and rumination begins.
Ironically, it is only since receiving my Autism diagnosis that my therapist and I have been able to dig into some of the deeper, more compulsive threads in my thinking and behavior. It’s as if I needed to first see this primary aspect of myself—my Autistic brain—in order to begin the journey toward understanding whatever else may or may not be going on.
I’m not rushing into the arms of additional diagnoses, but I am letting myself be near the diagnostics that speak to my reality, even when they belong to more challenging disorders.
And I am also letting my curiosity get bigger, weirder.
Like this: Sometimes I wonder if magical thinking can be its own kind of intrusion.
Or this: Sometimes I wonder if intrusive thinking is happening more often, and to more of us, than we know. Is the inner critic, for example, a source of intrusive thinking? What about anytime I’m being really specifically hard on myself in the form of unkind words? Are those my words? Where do they come from?
I don’t linger in this kind of space too long, because I don’t want to alienate real parts of me, even when they’re dark or judgmental. Nor do I want to make light of an experience that can be, for some, debilitating.
But I’m curious about the blurrier edges of our thinking, all of us, and the places where, if you zoom in close enough, you’ll see tangled roots of desire & synapse & intrusion & inspiration, all mingling as one.
Separate plants or not, there are things in my brain that are bonded, bound to each other, which means they can only be tended to in unison.
No more trying to make myself feel better about myself. No more pretending that whatever makes me great—a great mentor, a great partner, a great friend, a great writer—is somehow different than whatever makes me clumsy or inadequate or unwell.
And what about this:
It’s raining outside, and I’m walking from the car—parked up on the hill so I could avoid tending to the meter all day—down to the library, a half-full cup of coffee in my right hand and an orange juice propped between my ribs and my forearm, my backpack full of books and journals and pens and snacks and markers and stickers and anything I might want or need on this long day of working from somewhere other than home. I’m walking, and I’m also holding, and I’m also balancing, and the crosswalk right in front of the library, despite its frantic pedestrian lights, is still a danger zone, terrible drivers everywhere.
That’s when I start to hear them, the sentences. Poetry? Prose? I hear them in a specific order, which means I remember the later ones best, which means I pick up my pace so I can get to my laptop soon enough to capture what’s already here. Except it’s hard for me to move any faster than I already am, because there’s something glittery on the ground that I want to lean down and touch, and there’s a perfect leaf that the rain has laminated against the concrete that I really want to take a picture of, and I wish I could squeeze my eyes shut like I’m hitting “pause” on my brain-machine so I don’t get piled beneath more good sentences that I won’t be capable of remembering, but I can’t squeeze my eyes shut because of the cars and all this treasure on the ground.
When I’m navigating reality and internal data (reality) and the creative channel (also reality) and the heightened sensitivity that resides at the edge of my skin where I constantly greet the world (real, real, real), where does magical thinking end and intrusive thinking begin?
MAGICAL THINKING: If my first, or my second, or my nth therapist would have taken me seriously, maybe they would have agreed with me. You’re right, Sarah: you do have OCD, they might have said. Then they’d diagnose me, a series of obvious check marks falling down the clinical page, and we’d be off: in a world of compulsions and obsessions, of DBT, maybe of medication.
And my Autism, this quieter, cellular aspect of me, would have remained beneath the mask, undetected. For how long?
The most liberating parts of me unseen. Everything swallowed up by the loudest, most disruptive stuff.
Forever?
Let me say it again, and directly: When I imagine receiving validation sooner, I imagine, as a result, a world wherein I do not get to experience the liberating, insightful, authentic pleasure of discovering that I am Autistic. I imagine a world where the other parts of me, once recognized and externally acknowledged, are too good at expressing themselves to let anything else be noticed.
I don’t like this image.
MAGICAL THINKING: Turns out, I have been right about every single observation I have ever made about myself. The compassionate ones. The judgmental ones. The assumptions, conditioning, and self-doubt…all of it, turns out, has contained kernels of truth.
All those times I claimed to not have intuition and was met with reassurance from others that I do? BAM: here’s my Autistic, highly analytical mind, needing quantities of information before it can come to a decision. (“Intuitive hits” are very rare for me, and it turns out that’s not a bad thing, just a thing).
Or when I talk about my wavering, unsteady capacity?? Cue: Autistic burnout, a very real and common experience for folks like me. The ebbing and flowing of my energy and ability is quite different than that of a neurotypical person.
The more I head down this path, the less I’m convinced that the best way to take care of oneself is to cultivate pie-in-the-sky self-belief, that unshakeable level of self regard that every contestant on Shark Tank seems to have, the one that equates your sense of worth with your ability to manifest every single part of your dreams.
What if the hardest things I’ve ever thought about myself was just my brain doing the best it could to point me in the direction of a truth?
The more I head down this path, the more I think neutrality is the real key. My ability to look at my thoughts, and my feelings, and my hunches and my worries and my needs and the filmy, almost non-existent boundaries between any given two of them, and to just…be there. To be with whatever’s inside of me in that moment, for however long it takes. No more trying to make myself feel better about myself. No more pretending that whatever makes me great—a great mentor, a great partner, a great friend, a great writer—is somehow different than whatever makes me clumsy or inadequate or unwell.
MAGICAL THINKING: That it’s okay to be something other than exceptional.
MAGICAL THINKING: That I might be grateful—not without grief, not without anger—but grateful.
Grateful for the way things have unfolded.
Grateful for how long I had to go without knowing certain things. How it awkwardly protected this little space in which I now can, and do, know many.
What are all the non-writers walking around & perpetually mistaking as truths about themselves? I’m serious: How do people not write?
One study, looking specifically at young people with Autism, found that up to 17% of participants also had OCD. Dr. Megan Anna Neff’s “Misdiagnosis Monday” is an incredibly rich resource on this topic.
What I realized early on, is that "the others" don't have this-- this intense self-analytical, poetic, intrusive, always on, sometimes confused, sometimes sheer clarity. I decided early on I must be a poet, an artist, a creative genius, an outcast, one that walks to the beat of a different drummer.
So I recognize so much in your writing, and thanks for expressing it all with such intensity.
Thank you for this wealth of vulnerability & *reality* lol. I often wonder about neutrality and its place in reality, where creativity and curiosity form and its ~greater meaning~ . Being a late diagnosed neurodivergent as well, with some lingering religious trauma, this essay also really spoke to parts of me that needed to be listened to a bit more closely. Thanks for the reminder to check in 💜