The Art and Anguish of Living with Uncertainty (as an Autistic Therapist)

I am always torn with how honest I can be about this topic as a "professional", someone who people pay because of the knowledge and expertise I supposedly have. And clearly I have some knowledge and expertise from education, experience, etc, it's not like I just woke up from a coma and began practicing psychotherapy. But, as an autistic person, I feel like my brain has trouble grasping the slippery concept of knowledge and what it means to know something.

This may be due to the binary black and white way my brain processes and categorizes information. It could be because my brain perceives so much information and has difficulty paring it down to something worthy of certainty. I am not 100% sure, in fact, that is the point, I have trouble being 100% sure about anything.

This lack of certainty used to lead me into OCD spirals and sheer terror at the fact that I couldn't predict life and therefore, make proper plans. I see both of my autistic children grappling with that inevitable struggle that all autistic people must deal with; that life is inherently uncertain.

So as an autistic professional tasked with helping people with real issues and provide some level of reliable support and services, I am amused by the fact that I will grapple with the same problems all autistic people do.

I will always wish I had certainty, be baffled by the overwhelming amount of data that is thrown at me day in and day out. I will never have all the answers and that bothers me. The issues I have to deal with will never stop no matter how much I learn and grow as a person.

I once saw a therapy practice called Grey Area Therapy or something like that and I thought it was so clever. Because, especially for us autistic folks, isn't a lot of therapy learning to tolerate and survive the nebulous grey area that life perpetually forces us to live in? With a brain that screams in pain every second it realizes that everything is some shade of grey, there is no ultimate measure that will provide objective certainty and we must live like this forever?

Our work is to tolerate this somehow. This is a road we walk every day. How can I have decisions I can live with? How can I forgive myself for doing the best I could? How can I settle on "enough" certainty, "enough" faith in myself and my opinions, "enough" knowledge? Although it is hard to live in some level of uncertainty, there is also some liberation, some relief to know that there is no ultimate arrival in certainty, it isn't that we just don't know enough or didn't try hard enough, this world was and is imperfect and we are simply a part of it.