I mean, I can see that we had our “angry ranting” phase, for instance, and one phase where we were seriously echolalic of another plural group we met online (in writing as well as speech), partly because they’d inadvertently managed to trip some of our “perceived authority figure” signals. (In the sense that an authority figure, to us at the time, was someone whom you’d better agree with or there will be problems, not someone who is necessarily right.) But both of those *were* stepping stones to getting where we are now. We started with crude approximations that borrowed big chunks of other paradigms; we slowly refined them to be less and less crude over the years, getting (we hope) closer and closer to a depiction of how we actually work through successive approximations. There’s more of our own stuff in what we write now, less stuff that was borrowed from others as a kind of stopgap measure in our desperation for reference points. But at the time, we had no choice but to use either others’ paradigms or very crude vague approximations; the understanding we have of ourselves now just wasn’t there, and time and a lot of small details of day-to-day living had to take place for that understanding to start happening.

(As for the angry ranting phase, I think that also was important because it was our… formal declaration of throwing out the ideas that hadn’t worked for us and had caused us harm. If we had to rant about the same things over and over to loosen their hold on our mind, then that’s what we had to do.)

Something we’ve been talking about with a few other people lately is the concept of memory as personal narrative. My experience is that people in general have a tendency towards coming up with a sort of “story” about their life, and autistic people aren’t immune to this. The fact that it’s a story doesn’t mean that it’s all false: but as I think we mentioned elsewhere recently, it *does* result in a tendency towards oversimplification when the truth may be much more complex, or attributing motivations and thoughts to your past self which may not have been so.

We’ve had a lot of different “stories” of our life competing with each other at various points, all of which we believed partly or entirely at some time. Some of them were entirely the illusions of others, some started with others’ illusions that we actually abetted them in and helped to create because those illusions gave a picture of ourselves that we at one time wanted to believe in, some of them were illusions constructed by ourselves out of confusion and flailing around for reference points and grabbing what seemed like “the closest thing.”

One of the main things we’ve learned along the way is how many things *aren’t* concrete and can’t be pinned down to words. But we’re also much more comfortable about having those grey areas and unexplainables in our life than we used to be. We used to operate under the impression that we had to be able to “fit everything into the story,” to be able to quickly explain it in words that most people would grasp, because we’d had a track record of people demanding those story-explanations from us, whether family, psychiatry, or even well-intentioned friends, and would get anxious when something didn’t reduce to words and assume it meant something was wrong with us.

I don’t think we, or anyone else, will ever achieve The Perfect Understanding, but to have one that works enough for you, at any given time in your life, to allow you to mostly predict your own reactions to things, is good enough, I think.