The final weeks of December are the coldest, darkest weeks of the year, with the longest nights (if one lives in the Northern Hemisphere and outside the tropics, that is). There is something about that last week of the year, between Christmas and the New Year, in which the traditional notion of self-reflection and resolution holds great appeal.

I like New Year’s Resolutions. I know most people don’t “stick with it,” and that the gyms will empty out and the baked goods aisles will pick up in a couple of weeks, followed a couple of weeks later by the beer aisles and the liquor stores when “Dry January” comes to its inevitable end. The fact that most people try to make changes and fail almost doesn’t matter, in a way, because it’s the motivation—self-reflection, self-improvement, and “cleaning up the mess,” that matters. If you try to make a change enough times, it’s because you want (or need) to; eventually thinking it through and trying different things is more likely to lead to a successful effort toward enduring change.

It wasn’t until very recently, when I got around to taking assessments like the one that got me the results below, that the other pieces seemed to fit together. Survey self-reporting, as I well know, is not perfect, and I am not an expert in psychology or mental health, so I take the results with a grain of salt. Multiple tests have put me on the autism spectrum. My own biases and ignorance may be misleading me, and so my next step will be finding people who know more than I do about this, and whom I can trust to help figure things out. I didn’t even consider this possibility, so I never bothered to take the assessments until now. But the other results led to new questions, and somehow knowing this makes a lot of other things make more sense, too.