What do we really mean when we say we’ve had an ‘aha’ moment?

The ‘aha’ moment. Lot’s of people seem to have had one, or at least claim to. What does it really mean though. Sudden clarity? Is it really reasonable to think we suddenly have ideas complete and formed just pop into our heads, complete and ready to be acted on?

I don’t actually think so. Well maybe in minor things, like ideas about what to wear, or ideas about a chair we want to buy for our home and, you know, minor things like that. Things that don’t have hugely important impact, on ourselves, our identity, our security or safety and what not.

I saw an article posted somewhere in the last couple of days, and I confess I didn’t read it through, I did skim it, I can’t recall what site it was on, other than it was shared within my social media feeds somewhere. The article was titled with something along the lines of when “I had that ‘aha’ moment in that I was abusing my husband”

The parts of the article I read don’t really talk about an aha moment as though it was a complete idea, in and of itself, but something of a culmination of thinking, reflecting, reacting and responding to stuff in her relationship. And that’s what I think an ‘aha’ moment actually is. It’s our conscious minds getting a bit of a handle on how we have been processing stuff internally, often with minimal awareness of that processing.

What we describe as the ‘aha’ moment really does feel unique, it certainly has a sense of suddenly realising a thing and suddenly being clear about a thing. It’s actually, well for me anyway, a little bit euphoric, a bit of a high.

The two most important ‘aha’ moments I have had in my life, are to do with my identity, and it stands to reason that moments of realisation and crystallisation on something as important as how we see ourselves are indeed going to be moments in which we do have a sense of a high, a sense of the euphoric.

The first of these moments was the day I sat in the rooms of the clinical psychologist who diagnosed me as Autistic. It really was a moment of clarity, a moment of understanding myself, a confirmation that I wasn’t actually imagining the way things were for me over all the years.

But to see this moment as a one off moment would be a mistake. In reality I had been moving to this moment for several years. I can track the first written thoughts about this to about 5 years prior to that moment. The fact that I had written even those few words of ‘maybe I’m autistic too’ in a little note on Evernote, likely indicates quite a bit of internal processing prior to that.

I have three offspring, both the eldest and the youngest are diagnosed autistic, and always have I been able to see elements of myself in them. My former partner had made this clear to me too, and even at times referred to things as I did as ‘your Aspie stuff’. This was long before I really thought about it for myself in any deliberate way.

A strange thing started to happen, I kept meeting adults autistic people. I kept seeing myself in them and the wondering kept niggling at me. Eventually I headed to google, and did some searching and reading. I already had a fair idea about things, through both being a teacher in the education system and being a parent of autistics.

Once I found some online tests, such as ‘The Aspie Quiz’ and ‘The AQ’ it seemed more than just likely that, yes, I really was Autistic, and no, it’s not just you imagining things.

Of course, though, me being me, wasn’t satisfied with the idea of being self identification, I wanted, and in a sense, needed, a professional to confirm it. So began the process that eventually led me to be sitting in those rooms with that psychologist and having that ‘aha’ moment about myself as I received the official confirmation of what I really already knew.

It wasn’t really an ‘aha’ moment so much as a whole bunch of moments coming to a fruition that made real clarity suddenly possible.

Another ‘aha’ moment, was the ‘aha’ moment of knowing I am a trans woman. It’s a kind of similar journey in a way. Almost as though, when I was ready to move beyond the repression of this identity and an understanding that was strongly influenced by a bigoted upbringing within a conservative evangelical Christian family.

I mean I never really got the whole man thing anyway, I never really got the whole boy thing, I would always prefer to be around the girls, I as a pre-teen would love to get the chance to hold and cuddle babies.

My childhood outworkings of my gender were very much pushed deep down inside never to be looked at, whilst I pretended to be the boy and man I was supposed to be. For the longest time, I tried and failed and tried again. It was never going to work though, it was, destined to fail.

Over the last two or three years, I kept meeting trans people, mainly online, but also in person too. I seemed to keep getting myself into conversations with a whole spectrum of gender divergent people. My understandings of what it was to be trans, what it meant, were being challenged, and pulled apart little by little.

Then about a year ago, I sat in a coffee shop, with my former partner and had a conversation with her about how I was questioning what my gender was. It was a hard conversation, and to say it was an ‘aha’ moment wouldn’t be reasonable, the ‘aha’ moment seemed to be over a bit of time. I had already, by this time, realised that I was definitely not a man, and I think this was, a kind of dipping my toe into the water and feeling the temperature sort of experience.

Some time went past, my partner went on a holiday, I experimented with some of her things, I joined forums, I asked questions, and I kept coming to the idea, the question, that, actually it is a bit more than just not being a man.

I distinctly remember the moment I actually came to believe and accept the truth of my gender as a trans woman, that I had actually always been a woman. It was a moment in front of the bathroom mirror. It really did feel like an ‘aha’ moment in that case, but again, I can’t simply isolate that as single moment either, because so much had to come before to get to that moment of clarity. And certainly there was more to come.

My wife come back from holidays and we had another conversation in another coffee shop. Then we didn’t talk about it, she was, to be honest, absolutely thrown by the whole thing. I tried to discuss things with her, but she was not at a place, she really just wanted it to all go away and stop.

We didn’t totally ignore it, we were having some therapy already, and so the focus of that shifted, and with the support of that therapy an understanding was reached.

And so whilst I can point to a point in time of realisation and acceptance in regard to both my neurodivergent identity and my transgender identity, they were both, very definitely culminations of things, events, thoughts, feeling, upbringing, and of course relationships.

As I have got to this point, I am left with the question rolling around my head, is there really any such thing as an actual ‘aha’ moment or is it just a thing we’ve come up with to explain our sense of clarity at a turning point or conclusion of journey of discovery.