For me, it’s this invisible wall…
the inside is where I feel safe. I feel confident. I have all my precious things, and there is only one way in, and one way out.
When I learn to love someone, I give them a key. They can come in. They can see me, unfettered, unmasked, as I really am, as chaotic or settled as I may be. This is a place of no excuses, no fear.
Then there is what exists outside.
I pack carefully before I go outside my walls. I bring costumes and masks, guide books reminding me what I have to do just as if I were going to a foreign land. Don’t say that, don’t do this… watch out, be careful.
I watch the natives, carefully, trying to figure out what they know, follow what they know, and try to blend in. but ultimately, it fails and I am recognised as an outsider.
I try to show them… I am real, I have feelings… I mean no harm, but, I have committed some sin that I can’t even see. The tone of my voice, my turn of phrase, something has betrayed me. It means one thing to me, but something else entirely to the natives here, and I am outcast.
Sometimes, I can hold my head up and make it through. Sometimes, I know more than others, and they respect my knowledge if not my person, and I show I have value… and they accept me as an eccentric.
Other times, I am chased away, figurative rocks thrown at me until I escape inside the walls.
I look out of the walls, and wish I knew the rules that everyone else knows.
I wish I could understand what it is so wrong with me that it is so easy for others to chase me away.
I wish I could answer the question in my heart since I was a child “what’s wrong with me that I have no friends, that I am so flawed, so weird, so… wrong?
But then, I get distracted by something wonderful and beautiful and I chase it, I just have to understand it and learn everything I can and I dance in absolute ecstasy as I learn, explore, and submerge myself in this wonderful knowledge that invigorates me. I have to know it all, I cannot leave a crumb, I must contain it… and I do. How can those outside the wall not want to do this?
I put up displays inside my secret safespace, all the things that fascinate and interest me, and those few I let in are always amazed. Sometimes I make the mistake of sharing all I know with others, and always find they denigrate me because they believe I think it makes me better than them… when all I am trying to do is offer the only meagre things I have, things that pale and cannot compare to all they know.
I may know much, many things, how to make, how things work, what things are called… but… I do not know how to make friends. I do not know how to be amongst those who are unlike me.
And that’s what Autism is, to me.
I cannot be who you are, but I wish you would just accept me as I do you, as you are. I don’t ask you to be different… I understand, difference is what makes us who we are… why are those who are seen as “normal” so keen to take away, to pour acid on, what makes me who I am?
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