PART 4: Finding Your Place-Meaning, Mortality, and the Courage to Be Yourself in a World That Wasn't Built for You
The Question Underneath All the Others
You've read about the diagnosis, the comorbidities, the treatments, the accommodations. You understand your neurology better than you did before. You have strategies, or at least you know what strategies exist.
And still, there's a question that won't go away:
Why go through the exhausting work of unmasking, of advocating for accommodations, of navigating a healthcare system that barely understands you, of fighting for employment in a world that doesn't value your contributions-when the statistics say you're three times more likely to die by suicide, twice as likely to die prematurely, and significantly less likely to have stable employment, relationships, or financial security than your neurotypical peers?
Why does any of this matter when your very existence seems to be treated as a problem to be solved rather than a life to be lived?
This is the existential question. And it's the one that medication, therapy, and accommodations alone cannot answer.
But it can be answered. Not with platitudes. Not with toxic positivity. But with something deeper and more durable: the recognition that your life has inherent worth, that your perspective matters, and that meaning is not something you find-it's something you create.
The Existential Realities You Can't Escape
Existential psychotherapist Irvin Yalom identified four inescapable realities of human existence[8]:
- Death - we are all going to die
- Freedom - we are responsible for our own choices
- Isolation - we are fundamentally alone in our subjective experience
- Meaninglessness - there is no inherent purpose written into the universe
These are true for everyone. But for autistic people, they land differently:
- Death feels more immediate when suicide statistics are what they are, when you've lost autistic friends to suicide, when you've had those thoughts yourself.
- Freedom feels like a cruel joke when your choices are constrained by unemployment, poverty, inaccessible healthcare, and a society that punishes difference.
- Isolation is not just philosophical-it's your lived reality when you struggle to connect, when masking has severed you from your authentic self, when you're surrounded by people and still utterly alone.
- Meaninglessness hits harder when you've been told your whole life that the way you naturally exist is wrong, that your interests are "obsessions," that your needs are "too much."
So how do you respond to these realities without despair?
Viktor Frankl and the Will to Meaning
Viktor Frankl, a psychiatrist who survived the Nazi concentration camps, built an entire therapeutic framework-logotherapy-on one radical premise:
Frankl discovered that even in the most horrific circumstances imaginable, individuals who found meaning in their suffering-through love, through values, through purpose, through the commitment to survive in order to tell their story-were far more likely to survive, both psychologically and physically.
His conclusion: you cannot always control what happens to you. But you can always control how you respond. And that response, that attitude, is where meaning lives.
Frankl identified four sources of meaning[10][11]:
Meaningful memories, relationships, traditions, the legacy you carry and the legacy you create.
How you face limitations, suffering, and mortality with dignity and purpose.
Engaging with life through work, art, projects, contributions.
Connecting with life through love, beauty, humour, nature, awe.
For autistic people, these sources may need to be discovered-or rediscovered-for the first time:
Your historical sources might be complicated by trauma, bullying, and years of masking. But they also might include the autistic community you've found, the online spaces where you finally felt understood, the special interests that have sustained you.
Your creative sources might have been buried because they weren't "productive" or "practical." But they're still there: the hyperfocus that allows deep mastery, the pattern recognition that leads to innovation, the intense interest that becomes expertise.
Your experiential sources might have been dulled by sensory overwhelm and dissociation. But they can be reclaimed: the specific texture that brings comfort, the particular sound that brings joy, the deep connection with an animal or a place or a piece of music that neurotypical people might find odd but that feels like coming home to you.
Your attitudinal source is the most powerful: the choice to respond to your autism, not as a tragedy, but as a form of being that has value. To face the challenges with honesty, to grieve what's been lost, and still to choose to live with intention.
The Death That Makes Life Precious
Let's not avoid the hardest truth: you are going to die. Your body will decay. Everyone you love will die. The universe will eventually end.
This isn't nihilism. It's reality.
But here's the paradox that nihilists miss and that Frankl understood:
It is precisely because life is finite that it has meaning.
An infinite existence would have no stakes, no urgency, no moments that are irreplaceable. It's the fact that time is running out that makes your choices meaningful. It's the fact that you won't get another chance that makes this life matter.
The philosopher Martin Heidegger called this Sein-zum-Tode (Being-toward-death): the recognition that awareness of mortality is not a pathology to be treated but a reality to be integrated. It's the awareness that gives life its urgency and its preciousness.
For the autistic person who has spent decades living someone else's life, masking to survive, the awareness of mortality can be the catalyst for transformation:
The clock is ticking. And that's not depressing-it's motivating. Because every day you spend pretending to be someone you're not is a day you can't get back.
You Are Not Separate From the Universe
Carl Jung proposed something radical: the collective unconscious, a layer of the psyche shared by all humanity, containing universal patterns of human experience (the Hero, the Mother, the Shadow, Death, Rebirth)[4].
This offers profound consolation for the autistic person who feels fundamentally alien:
You are not separate from the universe, observing it from outside like some kind of cosmic exile. You are the universe becoming conscious of itself. You are the part of existence that woke up and started noticing patterns, asking questions, experiencing beauty and suffering and connection in your own particular way.
Your unique perspective, your particular way of processing information, your intense interests and deep focus-these are not bugs in the system. They're features. You are an irreplaceable piece of the whole.
When you mask, when you suppress your authentic self, you diminish not only yourself but the collective-you deprive the world of your unique contribution, your particular angle of vision on reality.
When you individuate, when you become fully who you are, you give the universe something no one else can give.
Finding Your Place: The Practice
So how do you actually do this? How do you find your place in a world that wasn't built for you?
Not through a single decision, but through a practice. A daily, sometimes hourly, choice to:
Your brain works differently. The world wasn't designed for you. This creates challenges. These are facts, not moral judgments. Acceptance doesn't mean resignation-it means seeing clearly so you can respond effectively.
Not what you were told to value. Not what would make you look "successful" to neurotypical standards. What you genuinely care about. What brings you alive. What you would do even if no one ever knew or approved.
Even when it's uncomfortable. Even when you're anxious. Even when the ADHD makes initiation nearly impossible. Even when the autism makes change terrifying. Small steps. Imperfect steps. But steps toward a life that actually reflects who you are.
Community (often autistic community, where you can finally be yourself without translation). Creativity. Nature. Spirituality. Service. The collective project of being human. You are not alone. You are part of a web of existence that is richer for including you.
You will mask sometimes. You will burn out. You will make mistakes. You will struggle. This doesn't mean you're failing. It means you're human. Autistic, yes. Struggling, yes. But also worthy of kindness-from others and from yourself.
The Courage to Begin (Which Is Really Just the Courage to Continue)
The journey from the false self to the real, from meaninglessness to meaning, from isolation to connection-it begins with a single act of courage:
Asking the question: Who am I, really?
Not who you should be. Not who you've been pretending to be. Not who would be easiest or safest or most acceptable.
The answer is waiting. It's been waiting your whole life.
And the world-that vast, strange, indifferent, magnificent, interconnected web of existence that you're part of-is waiting for you to become it. Not a neurotypical version of yourself. Not a "recovered" or "fixed" version.
You. Fully, authentically, unapologetically you.
There's still time. And that time matters.
So what are you waiting for?
- Dr. Matko Pavlovic, Consultant Psychiatrist
If you're ready to explore what it means to live authentically as an autistic person, our Cork clinic offers neurodiversity-affirming assessment, treatment, and psychotherapy. Contact us to begin.
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