Carol;s Lobby

06/04/2026

🌼📣

I spent thirty years trying to be perfect. Then I realized: no one I admired was. The people I love most are messy. They lose their tempers. They say the wrong thing. They show up late. They have cellulite and self-doubt and closets they don't open when company comes over. I don't love them despite these things. I love them because of them. Their imperfections make them real. Their realness makes them safe. And yet.

And yet I spent decades trying to be the opposite. Controlled. Polished. Unflappable. The kind of person who has a matching dish set and never raises her voice and definitely does not cry at work. I thought perfection was the goal. I thought perfection was the armor. I thought if I could just be flawless enough, no one would ever leave. No one would ever criticize. No one would ever see the mess underneath and walk away.

Brené Brown wrote I Thought It Was Just Me (but it isn't) long before she became a household name. This is early Brown. Rawer. Less polished. Before the TED talks and the Netflix specials and the millions of followers. She was just a researcher trying to understand shame. And what she found changed everything.

The book is built on hundreds of interviews. Brown talked to women (and some men) about the things they were most ashamed of. Their bodies. Their parenting. Their careers. Their finances. Their secret failures. The things they would never, ever tell a soul. And she discovered something remarkable: almost everyone felt this way. Almost everyone was hiding. Almost everyone thought they were the only one.

The shame is not the problem. The silence is.

When we hide our struggles, we feel alone. When we feel alone, we feel broken. When we feel broken, we try harder to be perfect. The perfectionism is not the solution. It is the symptom. It is the exhausting, endless attempt to earn our way out of shame.

Brown's alternative is radical in its simplicity: courage. Not the courage to be perfect. The courage to be seen. To tell someone the truth about your struggle. To say "I am not okay" and let them stay. To risk rejection in exchange for connection. The people who do this, she found, are not the ones with the least shame. They are the ones with the most resilience. They have learned that shame dies when spoken. That connection is the antidote. That you cannot belong to anyone if you refuse to be known.

Five Lessons from I Thought It Was Just Me:

1. Shame needs three things to survive: secrecy, silence, and judgment.
Take away any one of those, and shame begins to die. Tell someone. Break the silence. Refuse to judge yourself (and others) for being human. Shame cannot survive in the light. Bring it there.

2. Perfectionism is not the same as healthy striving.
Healthy striving says: I want to do better because I value excellence. Perfectionism says: I need to be perfect because if I am not, I will be rejected. One is about growth. The other is about fear. One leads to joy. The other leads to exhaustion. Learn the difference.

3. Empathy is the antidote to shame. But empathy requires vulnerability.
You cannot offer empathy to someone else if you cannot tolerate your own pain. You cannot receive empathy if you refuse to let anyone see you struggle. The courage to be vulnerable is the courage to be human. It is also the courage to connect.

4. The people who love you want to see you. Not the edited version.
Brown's research found that the most shame-resilient people were not the ones who had the least to be ashamed of. They were the ones who believed, deeply, that they were worthy of connection. Not because they were perfect. Because they were human. You do not have to earn love. You just have to let it in.

5. "I thought it was just me" are the most powerful words in the world.
When you say them, you give someone permission to say them back. You build a bridge. You end the isolation. The shame that felt so personal, so unique, so damning, turns out, it is just the human condition. You are not alone. You never were. You just thought you were.

Remember:
"If you put shame in a petri dish, it needs three things to grow exponentially: secrecy, silence, and judgment. If you put the same amount of shame in a petri dish and douse it with empathy, it can't survive."

BOOK: https://amzn.to/3RMEP8e

05/08/2026

04/28/2026

You were never meant to carry this kind of contradiction.

To “co-parent” with someone who created life with you, and then turned around and made that very role heavier, lonelier, and more painful than it ever needed to be.

Who actually robbed you of the joy and peace that parenthood should’ve been, and could’ve been, had you had a supportive partner and co-parent and not the active counter parent you had, and have.

The expectation that you should just “understand,” “be the bigger person,” or “forgive and move on” ignores a very real truth:

You’re not dealing with conflict.
You’re dealing with intentional, strategic and relentless harm.

And there is a difference.

Being a protective parent often means holding boundaries that other people don’t understand.
It means choosing your child’s emotional safety over keeping the peace.
It means accepting that forgiveness is personal, not performative.

You don’t owe access to someone who created damage.

You don’t owe silence to make others comfortable.

And you don’t have to minimize what you’ve lived through just to fit someone else’s narrative.

You are allowed to be both:

A parent who loves deeply and a person who refuses to tolerate harm.

If this resonates, you’re not alone and you don’t have to navigate this dynamic without support.

✨ Join The Collective, where protective parents learn how to stay grounded, empowered, and clear, even in the most difficult of “co-parenting” dynamics, which is really just post separation abuse under the guise of co-parenting.

04/24/2026

autistic regression and burnout in adults can look like⬇️

◾️ Being unable to go places by yourself

◾️ Being unable to drive

◾️experiencing perimenopause or menopause •editing to add• these can make autism hard to mask, it makes autistic traits prominent.

◾️Slowly becoming unable to cook full balanced meals, starting to rely on ready made or easy to make meals because of this loss of skill

◾️All signs of depression, anxiety, paranoia can become increasingly prominent during autistic regression and burnout.

◾️You might have children that are diagnosed with Autism. Many parents experience self discovery of their diagnosis through relating to a lot of what their children experience and some clinicians even tell you that it’s genetic in the education given at the time of diagnosis.

◾️Forgetting to eat, or being unable to eat from overstimulation.

◾️An increased need for sameness that becomes pervasive and pathological in nature

◾️Feeling the need to use accommodating devices like headphones or sunglasses - especially while grocery shopping. Forgetting can make you feel physically ill or even in a full blown panic attack by the time the activity or task is done.

◾️Emotional outbursts that stem directly from overstimulation from lights, sounds, too many people, food not tasting or feeling good, being touched too much, overwhelming smells.

◾️Depending on fast food, food delivery services, spending extra for services that allow you to avoid doing the task or have the least minimal social interaction to get the task done - (cleaning services, laundry services, etc)
Even if it’s at an unreasonable price.

◾️Cleaning and organizing become tasks that seem unimaginable to tackle. With children, the need for it is constant and your body starts struggling to keep up with this demand with no support.

◾️Never wearing uncomfortable clothes no matter how Adam Sandler you look

◾️Change in speech - (I cannot speak like I used to. I stutter a lot now.)

◾️Talking a lot less, or even having verbal shutdowns where you can’t speak at all (especially during periods of overstimulation) unless it’s to communicate or play with your children.

◾️Depending more on your partner to help complete tasks for the family

◾️Withdrawing from family / friend gatherings early - or ceasing to attend at all.

◾️Slowly starting to neglect your own hygiene - while focusing all of your energy on maintaining your children’s

◾️Slowly becoming less and less tolerant, and getting overstimulated more easily when it comes to the “normal sounds” of adulthood/motherhood.

◾️Stimming more frequently out of intense need for regulation

◾️Extracurricular activities become harder and harder to get through without having a meltdown or panic attack

Late in life Autism diagnosis for adults are starting to become common because of increased awareness, research and acceptance.

Autistic regression and burnout in an adult looks different, especially if you also have autistic children with unique needs too.

If you’ve read all of these and can relate - you may also feel intense shame regarding your loss of skill.

People around you may have started criticizing you.

The reality is there are little to no resources for autistic parents or adults in regression. (I will post any sources i do have below and if you can add to it please do!)

Regression and burnout can last for years if changes aren’t put in place to accommodate the disabled person.

Many who are unsupported lose their livelihoods, and their families, and may turn to substance use to cope resulting inevitably in even more severe issues

Many of them do not know they are autistic due to the lack of awareness and knowledge during their childhood, or told they “grew out” of their diagnosis so they never felt a need to prepare them in any other way.

You are always enough, just as you are.

You are not broken.

You just need someone to see you and understand where you need help and how to help you.

Autistic regressions can happen at any age - and having the knowledge of what is happening to your body vs receiving aimless shame will result in less severe mental health crisis incidents.

The blame belongs on the world and this insidious system. Not you.

Hang in there 🫂 im going through this too and so many others are. You aren’t alone

**disclaimer**

these are my personal experiences, i was diagnosed at 31 with level 1 autism and combined type ADHD - I just wanted to share my raw experiences that started affecting me way before my official diagnosis. I’m still working on climbing out of this rut too 💔💔💔