Three Therapists Asked Me the Same Question

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Because the diagnosis wasn't the beginning of this story. Rock bottom was.

After I ran those two marathons in back-to-back weekends, I thought I had figured it out. I had transformed my body. I had done the impossible thing. The weight was gone, the fitness was real, and life was supposed to feel like the reward I had worked so hard for.

It didn't.

Almost immediately after finishing those races, I fell out of love with running. The goal that had carried me through everything — through surgery, through my divorce, through the rebuilding — was gone. And with it went the thing that had been keeping me moving. I lost my identity completely. I became increasingly unsatisfied with life and I didn't understand why. I had everything I thought I wanted.

I was trying to go at a pace that wasn't sustainable, doing things to fill the void — travel, new experiences, chasing the next high — but nothing stuck. And then I discovered something that actually worked, at least for a while: alcohol.

Here's what I want you to understand about that, because I think it's important. I didn't start drinking because I wanted to self-destruct. I started because alcohol did something I had never experienced before: it made me feel normal.

I had spent my entire life feeling like I didn't quite fit. Like there was a frequency everyone else was tuned to that I just couldn't find. In social situations, I felt wrong in ways I couldn't explain. And then alcohol turned that off. Suddenly I could be in a room and not feel like I was performing. I felt like I was finally living the life I was meant to live. I didn't realize I was only just flirting with danger, walking on ice that was getting thinner and thinner with every passing day.

I won't share every detail of what rock bottom looked like for me. Some of it isn't mine alone to tell. But I will tell you this: I did things I never thought I would do. I became someone I didn't recognize. And I got so low that I couldn't believe that the point I had reached in my life was real — because I had everything I had ever hoped for, and I was destroying it.

I had always relied on my intelligence to solve problems. My whole life, I could think my way out of anything. But you can't think yourself out of alcoholism. You can't think yourself out of depression. You have to take action. And action was the one thing I couldn't figure out how to take.

What finally broke the cycle wasn't a sudden realization. It was exhaustion. I couldn't believe I had gotten to this point. I didn't want to keep getting worse — the same feeling I'd had when I was 353 pounds and knew I had to do something drastic. I had to give up that lifestyle and be willing to fully leave it behind me. No halfway. No moderation. Just done.

My wife Madalyn stayed through all of it. My family, though I was living far from them, believed in me. And I kept going back to therapy, because I knew it worked — I just had to keep going. Keep going. Keep going.

And somewhere in the middle of all that therapy, something unexpected happened.

One therapist looked at me and asked: "Have you ever been evaluated for autism?"

I blew them off completely. I didn't think that applied to me. I was intelligent, functional, successful in many areas of my life. I didn't fit whatever image I had in my head.

Then a second therapist asked the same question. This time I paused. Why do you say that? Because another therapist mentioned it too. She explained her thinking, and I started to listen.

The third therapist didn't even make it a big moment. They just kind of knew, and we proceeded as if it were already established. And so I finally asked the question I should have asked the first time: Okay. So what does that mean? How do I think differently? And how do I turn this into a strength?

What the therapist helped me see was this: I had spent my entire life creating rigid rules — for myself, for others, for how the world was supposed to work. And when reality didn't match those rules, I couldn't process it. The greater the gap between my expectations and what actually happened, the greater the depression, the setback, the pain.

I had to learn to accept the world as it actually is, not as I expected it to be. To accept people for their mistakes. To accept myself for mine. To understand that life is genuinely, actually, unavoidably messy — and that wasn't a failure of the world. It was just reality.

The diagnosis didn't fix everything. But it changed everything about how I understood myself. Things that had confused me my entire life suddenly had an explanation. The disconnection in social situations. The intensity. The way certain things felt unbearable that seemed fine to everyone else. It wasn't weakness. It was just how my brain worked.

And once I understood how it worked, I could stop fighting it and start working with it.

My wife became my partner in seeing the world clearly. In situations where my rigidity would show up — where I'd be interpreting something wrong, where my stubbornness was really just autism talking — she learned to give me a signal. A squeeze of the leg under the table. Her way of saying: Relax. I've got this. Back off, politely.

I trusted her. And that trust — being able to lean on another person to help me see reality as it actually was — was something I had never allowed myself before. I had always thought I had to figure everything out alone. That needing help was weakness.

It isn't. It's just human.

Three therapists asked me the same question. The first time, I wasn't ready. The second time, I got curious. The third time, I was finally willing to hear the answer. And the answer didn't break me. It set me free.