The Puzzle Finally Fits, WTF Happened To Me?

In this episode I open the vault on the last three years of my life. If you knew me before 2022, you probably remember the version of me who posted photos, shared milestones, and looked like he had everything figured out. Then I disappeared. No warnings. No explanations. Just gone.

Well, here is the deal.

This episode is the real story. The whole story. From a childhood shaped by a traumatic brain injury and undiagnosed autism, to years of masking, to the culture shock of leaving Detroit for a Texas evangelical school, to a long detour into cannabis that triggered sleep loss, mania, and psychosis, to losing my dad, to losing my marriage while I was still in the hospital, to rebuilding my life from zero. I also talk about the brain scans I received at the Amen Clinic that revealed the truth about my neurology and helped me understand who I actually am.

It is a story about collapse and clarity. Trauma and healing. Hitting bottom and then learning how to climb out with a map I never had before. It is a story about discovering I am on the autism spectrum and finally understanding why life always felt a step off. It is a story about finding love again and building a life that finally fits.

If you have ever wondered what happened to me, this episode answers the question.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

The puzzle finally fits. This is a story about a brain that took the scenic route. A story about a Detroit kid who grew up thinking he was broken when really he was working with a wiring diagram nobody around him knew how to read. A story about trauma, survival, masking, reinvention, and finally learning the truth about who I am. This is my story. It's a story about being on the spectrum. Level one without intellectual impairment. A story about old traumatic brain injuries. A story about cannabis pushing a fragile system off the ledge. A story about grief and divorce and rebuilding from nothing. And most of all, it's a story about finally putting together the puzzle I've been carrying since childhood. The early years. I grew up in Detroit in the early eighties. Autism wasn't something people discussed. There was no spectrum in the school handbook. You were either normal or you were a problem. I was neither. I was a quiet kid with a busy brain. I picked up patterns quickly, I memorized details. I watched people more than I spoke. And no one had any idea that I'd already survived a traumatic brain injury as a toddler. When I was 18 months old, my mom slipped down the basement steps while holding me. I hit the concrete and came up with two black eyes. Everyone thought I was fine. No scans, no follow-up. This is 1970s medicine we're talking about. Life moved on. Decades later, I learned that injury was in the first chapter of a story and no one had the vocabulary to tell. I was the youngest of four, the only boy. My dad worked days and my mom worked nights. My dad was my anchor. He cooked, he cleaned, he tucked us in. He was like Mr. Mom. My mom was loving, but came from a family shaped by the Great Depression and World War II. Displays of affection were rare. I wanted something that she did not know how to give. That longing shaped the way I learned to survive. At seven years old, I was already forming subconscious patterns. Keep the peace, keep quiet, don't be a burden and figure it out yourself. Detroit to Texas. The first great mask. In 1984, my family moved to Fort Worth and I was thrown into a Southern Baptist Christian school. I had never prayed out loud. I never heard anyone talk about being saved or walking with Jesus. Suddenly, this was the center of the curriculum. The kids were not bullies in the way Detroit taught me to recognize. They were intense in a way that I couldn't process. They asked personal questions about my relationship with God like we were doing spiritual audits in the hallway. I became an actor at nine, full time. I studied their tone, their behavior, their social rules. I copied them back because that was how you stayed safe. What I didn't know then, and only learned decades later, is that masking is one of the biggest signs of being on the spectrum. Especially level one autism, especially without intellectual impairment. Especially when you're a kid who learns fast and doesn't want to be singled out. That school taught me skepticism. I could see through the performance because I was too busy performing myself. Then came more injuries. At 14, I was hit in the head with two baseballs at the same time. YMCA baseball practice one afternoon. Concussions were brushed off in those days. My brain was already carrying damage from that early fall when I was a toddler. The symptoms stacked over time. Sensory overload, memory issues, difficulty switching tasks, intense hyperfocus. None of those things fit the labels adults tried sticking on me. Eccentric, hyperactive, antisocial. None of it matched. But the truth was always there just under the surface. I was on the spectrum, and no one saw it because I masked through everything. Decades later, I needed answers, real answers, not guesses, not labels. I went to the Eamon Clinic in Dallas and later in LA. I did full brain imaging, SPECT scans, cognitive testing, the whole workup. And for the first time in my life, I saw the truth and color. There it was. Traumatic brain injury patterns, old damage. Evidence of what happened before I could speak. It explained the memory issues, the emotional regulation struggles, the sensory sensitivity. It filled in the missing page between trauma and neurodivergence. My brain had been running on an older version of the operating system while the world expected me to run the latest update. The Eamon Clinic helped me understand that this was not my fault. This was not character. This was not laziness or stubbornness. This was neurology. It gave me a blueprint for healing, supplements, behavioral tools, sleep protection, spillover effects on mood and energy. For the first time, I had the data I needed to stop blaming myself. I didn't use cannabis until my 30s. I was a responsible adult. I held a job, I paid my bills, I masked my way through every social situation. Cannabis felt harmless, even helpful at first. All the guys I worked with in Silicon Valley were stoners. It seemed like a great alternative to alcohol, which I never enjoyed and always made me sick, so I was never much of a drinker. But cannabis seemed like a nice recreational activity. For 15 years, I was what people call a functional stoner, but my brain chemistry didn't get the memo. Cannabis disrupted my sleep. Cannabis disrupted my sleep. And sleep is the fragile line that keeps my brain stable. Over time, I fell into a cycle. Insomnia, then mania, then sometimes psychosis. I was hospitalized four separate times under protective custody. Doctors threw diagnosis at me like darts: bipolar, major depressive disorder, anxiety disorder. Each one explained a piece, but not the picture. It was not until I quit cannabis that I'm finally stabilized. No more psychosis. No more mania. My sleep repaired itself, my mind cleared, and the noise stopped. But then, real life hit harder than anything I had ever experienced. In 2022, my dad died. The one person who always understood me. I was hospitalized again during that period of grief. And while I was still inside, my marriage ended. My wife at the time handed me a divorce agreement and a check for 25 grand. She changed the locks and moved everything I owned into a storage building and rented me a little terrible, depressing ghetto apartment. I walked out of the hospital and found the world had moved on without me. 2023 was the lowest point in my life. No cannabis, no nicotine, no caffeine, and no home. No marriage, no sense of self. I had to rebuild from the ground up. Grief hit me so hard that I couldn't even recognize the person in the mirror. But slowly, piece by piece, I came back. I bought a house, I restarted my life, and then when I least expected it, I found a partner who loves the real me. Not the mask, not the performance, the actual me. And she's a therapist herself. I couldn't slip anything by this girl. The biggest shift in my life came from finally understanding that I am autistic. On the spectrum. Level one. No intellectual or language impairment. The version of autism that hides behind social camouflage. The version people miss because they only recognize autism when it looks like profound disability. I respect those experiences deeply. I have friends raising kids with profound autism. I understand why people hear my story and say that's not autism. The spectrum is large, and I am a part of it. I masked for decades, which made me look typical. But inside, I was burning out again and again. Knowing the truth gave me freedom. It gave me compassion for my younger self. It gave me the context I needed to heal. It helped me stop fighting my own brain and start working with it. My family story shaped all of this. There was love, but there was instability. There was tragedy and resilience. There were big moments like my parents going through bankruptcy after the Great Recession, and the way that shaped how we handled stress and silence. The way adults kept secrets because they thought they were protecting us. The way we all learned to read each other from the smallest signals because that's how you stayed safe. That became my operating system. Hypervigilance, independence, self-reliance to the point of isolation. Those habits helped me survive, but later they held me back. Therapy added to the final chapter in this arc. I learned how to identify burnout before it arrived. I learned how to unmask in safe places. I learned how to separate who I am from what happened to me. I learned how to recognize emotions that I had been avoiding for decades. Most importantly, most importantly, I learned how to build relationships that are healthy and stable. Today I'm in a relationship with someone who sees me, understands me, and holds space for the version of me that doesn't have to perform. That's something the younger me believed was never possible. So here I am, the Gen X slacker on the spectrum without intellectual impairment. Living with the after effects of an old TBI. Someone who masked like a pro for decades. Someone who thought he had to hold everything together alone. Someone who finally learned that he didn't have to anymore. And here's the ending. It's a good one. I have a partner I love. I have a life I built with intention. I have the tools, the therapy, the brain data, and the insight to keep growing. I have a whole new story now, not just the edited version I used to tell everybody. This podcast is part of that process. It's me reading the missing pages out loud. It's me saying that life can be complicated and still work out. It's me offering the reminder that knowing yourself is not the end of the story. It's the beginning. I learned to let go of the shame of making mistakes and bad choices in my life because of what was going on with my brain. I learned to stop being ashamed of being different. Even if some of my loved ones and siblings judged me from afar and only saw me from my mistakes, I had to learn to let that go. I am who I am. I've done what I've done. I've got a couple of regrets. But mostly, I know exactly who I am right now. I know where I've been, and with the clearest head I've ever had in my life, I know exactly where I'm going, and it's going to be one hell of a ride. Thanks for tuning in. Thanks for listening to Confessions of a Gen X Mind. I'm George Tenike, and we'll talk to you soon.