The Year I Quit my Day Job and Accidentally Learned About my Nervous System (and Shame)

I am a middle-aged woman who was diagnosed with autism late in life, which means I spent decades thinking I was just “bad at being a person.” Loud places made me want to flee into the woods. Ethical compromises made my skin itch. And if my sensory balance was off—even slightly—I would become what professionals might describe as disregulated and what my family might describe as extremely done.

At the time, I didn’t know any of this. I just knew that my life had become unbearably noisy.

I had two small children. I had a stable, well-paying day job. I had a constant feeling that I was betraying my values at work and betraying my nervous system everywhere else. Every day felt like standing under fluorescent lights while someone rattled a jar of coins next to my head and asked me to “circle back.”

So I did the most reasonable thing possible.

I quit my job and started a jewellery business.

On paper, this sounds like a romantic “follow your dreams” story. In reality, it was more of a “my nervous system is on fire and I need to stim with metal immediately” situation. Crafting has always been my biggest regulator—the activity that makes my brain quiet and my body exhale. It’s my favourite nervous-system-calming stim, and at that point in my life, I needed a lot more of it.

I withdrew from the world and leaned hard into making things. Very hard. So hard that I opened a brick-and-mortar store in about a month and ran the entire business by myself. Because nothing says “regulated” like signing a lease while already overwhelmed.

The experience was a whirlwind. There was some success, some lovely customers, and many hours of standing alone in a quiet shop, wondering if this was bravery or a slow-motion meltdown with a business license.

Financially and personally, it wasn’t realistic. After nine months, I shut the store down.

At the time, it felt like a failure—capital F. But, during those long, silent days in the shop, I had the opportunity to read. A lot. And that’s when I stumbled into Brené Brown’s work on shame.

This was… unsettling.

I realized that shame wasn’t just something that showed up during big moments. It was always there. Sometimes loud, sometimes humming quietly in the background, like a refrigerator you don’t notice until it breaks. Shame was the water I was swimming in, and I had no idea other people weren’t soaked all the time.

I also began to notice something else: I had an incredibly hard time identifying what I was feeling. Not managing emotions—finding them. Naming them. Locating them in my body. Apparently, this is common in autistic people and has a name: alexithymia, or emotional blindness. Which is a bit rude, frankly, but accurate.

At the time, I didn’t know any of that. I just knew I was perpetually upset, overstimulated, overwhelmed, and possessed by a constant urge to run away. From what? Unclear. Possibly everything.

It took years to reframe that chapter of my life. Years to understand that the store wasn’t a failure—it was a necessary detour. A pressure-release valve. A crash course in my own nervous system. A quiet room where I finally noticed how much shame I carried and how little access I had to my own emotions.

I didn’t “fail” at business. I learned that my brain requires alignment—with my values, my sensory needs, and my limits—or it will pull the emergency brake with zero warning.

Romantic? Not exactly. Useful? Incredibly.

And now, when I need to regulate, I still make things. I still choose quiet. I still avoid fluorescent lighting like I owe it money and I no longer see that season as the time I messed everything up.

It was the time I accidentally started understanding myself.

Which, honestly, is the most autistic origin story imaginable.