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Life Through Lynsey's Lens
A blog about travel, photography, and all the life in between
Life Through Lynsey's Lens
A blog about travel, photography, and all the life in between
A blog about travel, photography, and all the life in between
A blog about travel, photography, and all the life in between
Transition, Turbulence, and Triumph
A candid reflection on major life changes, struggles with mental health, and making it through to the other side.
Hello, dear readers! I know it’s been a minute since I’ve written anything here. It’s been a pretty hectic few months two years—I know I do start most of my posts with that disclaimer, but I really mean it this time! Things have calmed down a bit now and I’m trying to jump back into working on my website and blog, but before I dive into writing about my photography escapades (I promise, there have been a lot) I thought I’d provide a big ol’ life update to catch you up on everything that’s been going on.
Today is World Mental Health Day, and in the spirit of mental health awareness I’ve decided to be pretty candid here. I typically struggle with vulnerability, especially in a public forum like this, but I do think that awareness and advocacy are so important because mental health issues still have stigma that is really unwarranted. It’s important to remember that even the people you least expect might be suffering in silence, like people who travel the world sharing amazing photos on social media.
I’m going to start in 2021, because I feel that there is important context and I want to keep my facts straight. And honestly I’m writing this for me just as much as for my handful of readers. We all remember 2021: a global community perched on the edges of our seats waiting for things to go back to normal as, one by one, restrictions began to lift. The vaccines came, so did the variants. By April I was finally able to have my gastric bypass surgery that I had been preparing for for almost a year, and my life began to change pretty drastically. (There’s a whole separate post about that, so I won’t go into detail here.) By the summer I was a very different person than I was just a few months prior: new eating habits, new routines, new hobbies. On top of the “new normal” that had already come about in the wake of a global pandemic.
As I was working through all of that, things were changing at work too. You may know (if you know me or have perused my “About Me” page) that I do have a day job beyond photography: I am an aerospace engineer. It’s what brought me to Tucson in the first place, an exciting job opportunity at Raytheon with my Master’s degree fresh in hand. I won’t bore you with the details of my career—if you’re curious what I do beyond the camera, you can find me on LinkedIn. In the spring of 2021 the project that I had been working on and the team that I had been leading for almost four years lost its funding, and I transitioned to a new role on a new team working on a whole new system. All while the company was trying to figure out its own “new normal” as the state of Arizona declared the pandemic to be over. Plus, a huge corporate merger and the culture and benefits changes that come with that. The job I returned to after my medical leave looked a heck of a lot different.
That summer I started Taekwon-Do. I continued to lose weight and try new things that I never thought I’d be able to do. We (accidentally) got two kittens that I love to pieces. My mom and step-dad moved to Tucson and I was getting to spend a lot of time with them after living on opposite ends of the country for ten years.
Also that summer, my best friend passed away suddenly and unexpectedly.
That’s a lot of change. Some good, some bad, some devastating. I didn’t really know it at the time, but I don’t do great with change—more on that later—and it was really wearing on me.
I’m not exactly sure when it started, but somewhere at the tail end of 2021 I just… broke. There was no dramatic explosion or even a single moment that pushed things over the edge that I can really pinpoint, just a realization one day that I was not okay. It was getting harder and harder to get up in the morning and go about my day. I hadn’t picked up my camera in months, or if I did, the effort to sit down at my desk and edit photos seemed insurmountable. I couldn’t remember the last time I felt joy. I did my best to just keep pushing through, getting through one day at a time. Because that’s what I do. It was hard. Some days it seemed almost impossible. I was diagnosed with depression and started working with a therapist. It took months to get my head above the water.
The new year rolled in, Steven and I headed off on our trip to Kenya and came home engaged (spoiler alert I guess, since I haven’t finished writing about that trip). The trip was amazing, and I remembered what joy felt like. Unfortunately, there were also moments to remind me that I was not through it.
The next few months are honestly kind of a blur. We returned to the office full-time at work, which my mental health was not ready to tackle. I wasn’t happy on my new project. I was exhausted and numb, I pulled away from things and people that I love. I was able to find solace in hiking—time spent in nature is always good for the soul.
By March or April or so, I started on some medication and got the depression more or less under control. I was enjoying things again, but at the same time I still felt like I had no energy or motivation to do anything that I should have wanted to do. My camera continued to sit on my shelf. I sat out both Milky Way season and storm chasing for pretty much all of 2022. I traveled a lot and enjoyed it in the moment, but I still wasn’t really okay. I’ve later realized that I was extremely burned out, running on empty. Not depressed exactly, but the end result is the same. I told my boss that I wasn’t happy and was moved to another new project at work but never did find what I was looking for, so for the first time in six years I polished up my resume and set out on a job hunt. My career at Raytheon had run its course and I needed to find something new.
Fast forward to July, when I turned in my laptop and badge with a new job offer in hand from a promising and exciting New Space startup called Cognitive Space. With two weeks off between jobs, I rented a car and ran away to Utah to spend some alone time in the desert. I visited five national parks, woke up for sunrises and chased sunsets, explored the desert in the middle of the night, and hiked a ton. It was SO cathartic. It was exactly what I needed, and I felt like myself again for the first time in a really long time.
I returned from Utah and hopped on a flight to Houston for my first day at my new job. The first new job I’d had since graduating from college. The job would be full-time work from home, but the team periodically got together at the office in Houston for team-building, in-person working groups, etc. I met my new colleagues, sat through onboarding presentations, ate tasty food from a Vietnamese place that became my usual spot when I went out there, and soaked up startup culture. I was employee number twenty-seven. This job was as different from Raytheon as it could possibly be, and I loved it. I was genuinely excited about what I was doing. It didn’t feel like work at all, it felt like I was working on a cool project with some friends. Everyone at the company was both great to work with and really smart and good at their jobs. We had our meetings in a virtual space station. I met some cool people and learned a ton about satellites and coding in Python. And I was finally working in the space industry, which I had always wanted to do. I was over the moon: I’d found my dream job.
The next few months were genuinely great. I dove deep into my work and gave 120%. I spent my weekends hiking and my evenings climbing the ranks in Taekwon-Do. I got into rock climbing. Steven and I started planning our wedding. I crossed a few more states off my list, inching ever closer to achieving my goal of visiting all 50 before my 30th birthday, which was looming. I truly had no complaints.
Unfortunately, mental health doesn’t actually care if things are going well. Depression isn’t always situational. And when I was at my highest, I started to slide back down for no discernible reason. The excitement about my cool new job pretty quickly became anxiety that I was underperforming or not fitting in with the group. My weekend hikes began to feel like an obligation and a chore. Things got hard again. I continued to work with my therapist and psychiatrist, adjusted my meds, and by the end of the year things had more or less stabilized.
And in the course of that second bout of depression and burnout, I was diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder.
My whole life I’ve made jokes (as have people around me) that I’m “probably on the spectrum,” and honestly I never really knew what that meant. To me it just meant I was like Sheldon from the Big Bang Theory: I have to sit in my spot, I like my volume in multiples of 5, I don’t like my foods touching, I point out patterns in license plates that others apparently don’t notice… I fit the “quirky, eccentric, nerdy engineer” trope quite well. And I’ve taken that identity and run with it because it means I can be comfortable and open about these abnormal things that my brain does and nobody gives it a second thought.
So naturally, in a fairly benign conversation with my therapist about true crime podcasts, we got talking about eye contact, I don’t remember the exact segue (I think it was something about serial killers). But if you’ve met me, you may have noticed that I don’t really make much eye contact. I made a joke along the lines of, “yeah I don’t like to make eye contact, but I’m probably just on the spectrum or something.” To which she replied, “I’ve actually thought that — do you want to talk about that now?” Oh.
Even though I’ve always suspected that I’m “a bit on the spectrum” (disclaimer: I now know that that’s not how the spectrum works), what I always failed to link — and I think most people do — is that “on the spectrum” and “autistic” mean exactly the same thing. Colloquially, the former is generally used to label somebody as quirky and/or rigid, while the latter is, technically, a disorder and disability. And I’m a successful person, by most objective societal standards, it’s never occurred to me that I could be disabled. Life is hard, but I just assumed it was for everybody, and that maybe others just have a better handle on adulting than I do. Doesn’t everyone get overwhelmed at the grocery store and get upset if their favorite spoon is dirty? There’s a huge sense of relief now that I have a signed letter from a psychiatrist that explains exactly why I’ve felt like an alien my whole life. My brain is wired differently—it’s as simple as that.
I will say, I am very, very thankful to have found a therapist that recognizes and understands autism and got me started on that journey, because from what I’ve read that tends to be pretty rare. People tend to think that getting a diagnosis like that is a bad thing or is upsetting, but it has been one of the most positive things to have happened to me in my entire life. To get that kind of validation and understanding after 30 years of feeling different and struggling with things that others didn’t seem to struggle with—and not understanding why—is so incredibly life-changing.
I have a lot to say on this topic, as it’s been pretty dang revolutionary. As most newly-diagnosed autistics do, I dove hardcore into research mode to learn everything there is to know about autism. But I think for the purposes of this post I’ve said what I need to say.
Anyway.
As 2022 came to a close I finished off my 49th state with a whirlwind solo trip to Indiana via Chicago, and on January 26, six days shy of my 30th birthday, I stepped off the plane in the Kona Airport and officially completed my “50 by 30” goal. It was a great feeling, and I still think it’s so cool to be able to say I’ve been to every state. We spent a fantastic 8 days on the Big Island and Maui exploring volcanos, photographing sea turtles and waterfalls, hiking through rainforest, snorkeling, zip lining, watching the sunrise from the top of Haleakalā, and eating lots of spam musubi. I do intend to write a more detailed post about that trip because we did so much and I want to tell you all about it.
But for this post, the most important part of that trip was the call I got at 9 am on Friday, the last day of the trip. The prior afternoon I got a meeting invite to my work email (which I have on my personal phone and continue to check regularly when I travel because I am bad at work/life balance) for a meeting titled “Quick sync” with my manager, his boss, and the HR lady. No description. I sent an email reminding them that I was on PTO and asking if it could wait until Monday, and was told they “really need to talk to me [today].” I was mortified, because nothing that’s good can’t wait until Monday. It was scheduled while we were driving to get to a tour, so I called into the Zoom meeting from the car, in my Hawaiian shirt, letting them watch the views of coastal Maui go by in the background. And, of course, it was exactly as I’d feared.
I was told that the team had gotten too big too fast and that I was being let go, effective immediately. Only 193 days from when I got on that plane to Houston. I was in total shock. Right before leaving on the trip I checked in with my manager to make sure that all of my work was in a good place, I had a six-month performance review and was told that I was doing great. In our biweekly all-hands meetings we kept being told how well the company was doing and how good our future looked. So I didn’t understand where this was coming from, and I didn’t really get a chance to find out, as I was told pretty much right after they broke the news that she was ending the call and I would not get to discuss it.
The layoff didn’t bother me in the sense of being unemployed as much as that I didn’t get to finish up the work I was doing. I was right in the middle of several things that I was really enjoying working on, and to just leave them hanging like that absolutely crushed me. I also didn’t get to say goodbye to my co-workers. The worst part was the abruptness and the loose ends. When I left Raytheon I gave three weeks notice and worked overtime making sure that all of my projects were wrapped up or left in capable hands, but when I left Cognitive a lot of my work was just lost to the void.
The first Monday after we got home from our trip and I should have been getting up for work, it hit me really, really hard. I went to see my therapist and she asked me what I was planning to do the rest of the day and I said I didn’t know. She told me that I’m not allowed to sit around at home and suggested I go hike, which seemed as good a plan as any. It definitely helped.
I had recently seen an article about the 1996 book series Animorphs making a comeback with the latest wave of 90s nostalgia. I was obsessed with Animorphs as a kid, it was a huge part of my childhood. I even pretended that I was an andalite (one of the alien species in the series) for about a year and a half in middle school (in retrospect, I really wonder why it took me 30 years to get the autism diagnosis). I was constantly reading them, and the only reason I ever stopped was that one of my seventh grade teachers told me that they were below my level and she didn’t want to see me with them anymore. The obsession faded away after that and I haven’t given much thought to Animorphs since then (other than any mention of red-tailed hawks, thermals, or remembering an obscure animal fact that I know I learned from those books). So when I saw that all of them had been recently re-released as audiobooks, and I needed a distraction, I decided that it was worth re-visiting. I downloaded Animorphs #1: The Invasion, popped in my earbuds, and spent over 3 hours wandering around the Catalina State Park trails while MacCleod Andrews read me my childhood.
Let me tell you, you might expect that a book series written for middle school kids wouldn’t be enjoyable as an adult, but they really hold up. I have enjoyed re-connecting with Animorphs so much. I even got to meet the author, Katherine Applegate, at a book festival this spring. She is such a delight—I told her all about re-discovering the books and how much I related to Ax (the alien character) as a kid and finding out I’m autistic at age 29… she seemed genuinely happy to hear all of that and gave me a big hug.
The next several weeks were pretty rough, but I picked myself up, dusted myself off, and looked for a new job. My therapist told me not to sit at home, so I would get up in the morning, drive Steven to work (we only had one car for a while), and go work on my laptop at a coffee shop or library until it was time to pick him up. I applied to jobs, worked on photography, planned my wedding, and, in retrospect, did do a good job of passing the time because that period of my life feels like a blur. I did a ton of interviews, reached out to connections, and had several promising hits. I also spent a lot of time hiking alone, listening to Animorphs. All-in-all, it was a great time of year to be unemployed because February and March are pretty much the best months here in Tucson. I even got to play in the snow.
Four weeks after getting that call in Hawaii I accepted an offer from a small satellite imaging company for the position of “Senior Constellation Systems Engineer”, which is pretty much the coolest title ever. They aren’t a startup, but they aren’t a big company either; I call it my “goldilocks job”. My new boss and team seemed great, I was going to get a Mac laptop, and the work sounded really cool. I was definitely excited. I couldn’t start for two weeks, so I spent most of that time outside hiking, trying to get my mental health back on track. I hiked Wasson Peak, the highest peak in the Tucson Mountains, while listening to Animorphs #6: The Capture. I sat up on that mountain, looking out over Tucson, and felt like things were going to be okay.
As of a couple weeks ago, I’ve now been employed at my new job longer than I was at Cognitive Space, and it’s definitely been a situation of “all’s well that ends well” because I really love it. I love what I’m working on, I love my team, and I love that I feel like the company both values and cares about me. I still have a lot of bitter feelings and hurt about how things went down, but I do know that it all worked out for the best. Plus, I’d much rather travel to Seattle for work than Houston.
So things have been pretty good lately. Steven and I got married at the end of April. The wedding was great, everything pretty much went off without a hitch. The summer flew by. My parents moved back to Minnesota to be closer to my new niece, their first grandchild. I had a bilateral brachioplasty in June, which is surgery to remove the extra skin from my arms after my weight loss, and made it through that recovery fairly painlessly. I’ve gotten back into my hobbies, done some traveling (I definitely owe you posts about a few of those trips), and knocked out some photography bucket list items. I’ve really stepped up my hiking and am training for a trip to summit Mount Kilimanjaro in February. I recently hiked to the summit of Humphreys Peak, the highest point in Arizona! I’ve earned my Black Belt Recommended and will be officially testing for First Degree in December. My mental health has been in a good place for the most part, but there have definitely been episodes of a few weeks here and there that the depression cloud comes back, seemingly for no reason. I’m continuing to work with my therapist, learn more about burnout and autism, and find ways to make the hard things easier. I’m figuring out how to be myself the way I am supposed to be, not the way I thought everyone expected. One step at a time, I suppose.
And there we go, I think we’re caught up. That was a lot, and kudos to those of you who read the whole thing—I do appreciate you letting me pour my brain out on the internet.
Want to chat more about mental health, autism, Animorphs, anything? Leave a comment, shoot me an email, DM me on social media… I’m an open book, and I’m pretty passionate about all of this.
Thanks for reading. I do have some great travel and photography content lined up, so stay tuned.
