Autism, For Me

Autism for me is everything.

Autism intrinsically makes up every aspect of my daily life. I cannot separate autism from my being any more than I can change my eye color. I feel it down to my soul.

Autism means sensory assault in un/expected places. Beeping sounds, construction noise outside of my work, lights humming, and the pitch of people's voices.

I hold myself together until I cannot any longer.

Autism means that my fingers and hands dance along surfaces, teasing out the textures, finding solace in silk and shying away from slimy satin. It tells a tale through those hands. Autism tells people if I'm agitated, happy, or at peace.

Being autistic means that I feel as if everyone in the world who isn't me was handed a guidebook to life that isn't written in scribbles, hieroglyph, and all of their chapters are intact.

It means that if I watch someones face while talking, I miss the entire conversation. "Look me in the eyes if you're telling the truth," is a phrase which has terrified me from toddlerhood.

Autism means that I have decent intuition, but I rarely trust it. If my gut feeling is so different from how people are reacting to something, doesn't that mean I'm wrong? No, it does not.

Being autistic and not being diagnosed until later in life means that I've gone most of my life feeling like a foreigner in a non native land. Like I speak their language, but I don't comprehend 80% of it.

Being autistic is wonderful and awful, all at the same times. I have co-morbids along with my diagnosis that impair the hell out of me.

Autism means that I appear social until I cannot any longer. I get social hangovers from working retail. This means that I choose not to socialize on my days off, content to stay with my family and be quiet.

Being autistic means I'm shit with relationships. I'm loyal to a fault, but once someone violates my trust, I cut them off. I can compromise, but begrudgingly. I have a hard time relating to other people, and, in my experience, when the friendship ends, I'm usually stumped. Normally, it's something I said or did not say. As I've grown older, I've become okay with this. Either people like me for who I am, or they can back off.

Autism means that I can see the details before I see the big picture. It's all the little pieces before the comprehensive idea.

Being an undiagnosed autistic for most of my life meant that I became used to role playing, putting on masks of how I thought people wanted me to be. I still do that, because it's become such a coping mechanism and it works really well. People usually think I'm "social," at work, and incredibly type-A personality. They don't see or hear the inner dialogue I have running through my head at all times.

Autism means my brain never really shuts off. I'll wake up at 3am, intent on solving a problem that won't happen for years.

Autism is... me.

me 

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