Into Myself

I stayed quiet for a long time. I always wanted to become infinite. Still, I held my breath. Still, it did not feel like home. I escaped into myself, growing inwards, but far from imploding. I sank.

            I convinced myself solitude was necessary, healing, purifying. I kept myself occupied learning, only sneaking out to test my knowledge, to bounce off ideas of something more than the walls of my skull. I became an expert in all things human but I forgot how to live.

            I did not know how to engage any of my new abilities born in the dark. I was scared and worthless under the sun. I was reborn with my skin tender and blooded, fearing and craving another human to hold me tightly. I could only wait.

            The pain started to pay off. My little interactions intensified. Conversations became unhinged. I felt free. I cleansed myself of the social rules and expectations and started relying on empathy; I refined my sensitivity and trusted my instincts. Everything I believed was wrong because I was said so turned to my advantage.

            I wasn’t sure where this new sense of self would take me, so I decided to pull the oars back in and float down the river. I would lie down and look at the sky: the world slowly gliding past me, the water murmuring into my ears, the idea of a waterfall expanding in my mind. Would I be ready? I asked myself.

            Then, I fought the impulse to veer towards the bank of the river to gain more time, to feel ready. I closed my eyes and sighed, reassuring myself that sometimes, in this life, doing nothing takes you closer to where you want to be. Patience is the virtue of the dead; I learned it during those still hours of the night; when everything was lost and I did not have a name.

Liquid Ego

For thirty seconds, maybe a minute, my existence made complete sense. My body was hyperventilating, but it wasn’t panicking. It was resetting the system, shutting out external stimulation, tuning in with the inner universe. My rational brain took a step back, but it used the human language to feel connected to my primal essence. I knew exactly what it all meant and I let it happen.

I was nothing. A nothing composed of everything I’ve seen, learned and felt through my entire life. Time dissolved. It was only my body suspended in space and my mind flickering in the dark. My moans of despair and compassion were the new-born child I cradled with my breath. The love I felt ripped my ribcage open and welcomed the light of inspiration.

My sensitivity, the pain, the density of my flesh became my home again. My one and only real friend. A wonderful vessel, the thinnest line between what I am and what I do. What I need to do. The ecstasy I felt in knowing I don’t need a place in this world, because I occupy all the space necessary to thread the abstract. Yet, I can only do it here, in the physical world. That takes courage, but it leaves no choice.

When the world will liquefy again, I won’t be scared. When the waves of information will try to wash me off the surface of the planet, I will merge with them and see what is left after the storm. I will pick up the twigs and draw words in the sand, I will smear debris into my skin to fill up the wounds and be whole again. I will rebuild the world through my body.

I imagine that is how Leopardi died. Still writing. His body dissipating into the air. Words floating in the empty room. The last words. A gift to humankind: La Ginestra.

Bodies in the dark - ADHD & Autism

I’ve been wanting to write to you for so long, my dear reader.

I’ve been putting this off because all the scattered ideas I had in my mind didn’t seem like enough to fill up an entire page in a coherent way. Then I remembered that this is my journal, it’s a place for all the bad ideas, a space in which they can float and mingle, they can evolve, they can die out; I can fish them out and transform them. There is no other place like this if not the mind itself.

Oh but it’s busy in here, other people’s voices that I am lucky enough to recognise as acquired. There are dissociated bits of myself that scratch and pull and scream, that both please me and torture me and I don’t know which way to go and there is no one to lead me.

But linearity and written words are soothing, they’re grounding because the limits are the barriers of my linguistic knowledge. I choose them and convey a sentence in a future direction, and someone on the other end will catch me in an abstract yet tangible way.

I want to talk about my autism and ADHD, I want to do it without fear of judgement and without allowing these labels to define me too much, I don’t want to feel too trapped in my diagnosis, I don’t want to talk about it in terms of symptoms. I just want to give words to some of my characteristics as a human being with certain patterns of behaviour. I want to share my own understanding of the world and I hope this could be of help to someone, or maybe it’s just a way to say that you are not alone. And when we are together, it’s fucking rad and the best the maddest the most beautiful creative ideas come to life.

There is a very common misconception about autistic people lacking empathy, or not feeling the, well, feelings. It’s not like I don’t feel, I just feel differently. I feel. I feel everything. I feel everyone from the inside by observing and studying every little detail. I process income information constantly and actively. The tone of your voice, slight vibration in your pitch; what your hands are doing, in which direction your legs and feet are pointing, how much eye contact you need to feel comfortable around me; I know if you want to leave or stay way before you’ve registered, and I may facilitate that for you and spend more energies on your comfort instead of my own. I don’t know why I do that. How can I ignore your entire body telling me you want something that is not happening yet? Once I’ve learned something, I can’t unlearn it, I can only decide to ignore it.

I certainly empathise, to the point of risking emotional co-dependency. I feel your feelings and it’s tough to get out of there and do my own thing. I might not understand your emotions right away, but if you give me a little bit of time, my empathy and compassion for you will become unbreakable, they’ll go deep and they will be real, and natural. Just because something is consciously and actively acquired, it doesn’t become less natural. What is natural nowadays anyway?

Sometimes I misread you, or… sometimes you deny that I saw something you didn’t know you wanted to hide. I’m learning how to let go because everyone is responsible for their own emotions and needs, unless I’m asked to provide support, but for that, I need words because non-verbal language with someone who uses it more to hide rather than to open up is exhausting.

And I get tired.

I often cry in the morning or at the end of the day just to let it out, just to let go of the stress in a physical outlet. After a day of hyper-analysing everyone I care and do not care about, I lose a sense of self, I become a combination of bits and pieces of other personalities. I need to shake it off. Mornings are tough because sometimes I am still tired from the previous day, or week, or the entire month.

Sometimes I have little hallucinations, and I don’t really know why they happen but I assume my brain just gets a bit funny under stress; other times I am so overloaded in my senses that my perception of the physical reality gets distorted, I think it’s called derealisation, or depersonalisation when I don’t know if I am really there or really myself anymore. It can be very scary, it’s like I’m floating and the gravity ceases to work, I become some sort of pure consciousness without a human body to support it. The spookiest bit is not knowing if I’ll ever come back, then I desperately try to grasp the physical world but the more I try the more abstract it becomes.
I’m getting better at it, I am getting better at letting go. My friend Lucy once asked me what would happen if I just surrendered to the sense of loss, so I tried and I realised that the less I fought myself, the faster I came back to earth. It doesn’t work all the time.

In social situations, everything is at 500% for me. Noise, colours, intentions, shifts in people’s mood, a sudden change of plans. It used to be a big problem and I developed strong social anxiety, I would literally panic all the time. Then I got fed up with it and thought to myself “If I cannot rewire my brain with such good observatory skills, then who can?” And it all changed. I now go to a social gathering as a blank slate instead of prepping for any possible scenario. I step into a space with a few people, I introduce myself and I listen and I look, I absorb and process and I see what comes out of me at the end of it. I answer questions in a direct and honest way, and I’ve learned the hard way what’s not appropriate to say, even if sugar-coating truth out of politeness feels like violence to me. I make mistakes, I sometimes talk too much or not enough just because I overthink my inadequacy.   

But don’t we all make mistakes?
What makes it hard are judgement, lack of compassion, social punishment, ignorance.
Also, sometimes I’m just fucking bored because I find the majority of people and small talk boring, and that has nothing to do with my neurodivergence. Superficial interactions are just not for me, I get enough of that when it’s time to pay for my groceries at the automatic pay point. Frivolousness and light-heartedness are not the same thing, by the way, not everything has to be deep and intense all the time, but it has to have a meaning to me.

Nothing in our lives is innate, definitely not our social skills or the way we externalise feelings; our ways of communicating are a result of a long process, it just happens to be that autistic people have the gear of that process exposed so they constantly fumble with it, sometimes they are incredibly good at fixing it for themselves, sometimes they fuck it up and the whole system stops… That’s usually when you’ll see me stare into the void past you. Give me time. Bake a cake. Give me cake.

I also have ADHD. I’m not a defective toy, I just have a lot going on in my mind which is constantly grabbing some random shit, whether is important or not, and bringing it to my attention. Think of it as a six-year-old child who won’t stop calling your name in the middle of a conversation. You either keep getting distracted or you learn how to bypass the world around you to focus on one thing. ADHD meds sometimes help with that. Today I am not on meds because they make me quite tired, it’s like I am pushed underwater and I can only swim because I’ve forgotten that I’m a bird.

There are days that I need to let my brain run loose like a hunting dog, and oh fuck if it feels great. Sometimes I am even able to get in the flow with my writing and my procrastination monkey and we just vibe, we feel invincible. On days like that, I realise that the “symptoms” of ADHD are in the way only because there is a lot of superficial clutter in my life as a social creature surviving capitalism in 2021. This fucking pandemic surely didn’t help.

My autistic self and my ADHD brain don’t always get along, which is another bizarre combination and it is literally like two dudes fighting all the time. The autistic guy wants to stay home and do something soothing and controlled, pleasant and slow; the ADHD guy is either under-stimulated or overstimulated and needs to ride it off, it’s constantly after high adrenaline activities. This is one of the reasons I love BDSM and shibari specifically, I become “one”, everyone in my mind shuts the fuck up and we go into a high-intensity survival mode. It’s all defined as a scene in which I feel safe but challenged. I can communicate non-verbally and someone will understand me. Everything just makes sense.

It’s a little bit like sex, or like dancing, or like making music. These activities for me are like bodies in the dark. We are all neutral and we can crawl through the experience on a purely intuitive level, there are no rules that could hold, and it’s hard to get upset if someone touches you in the wrong way because no one can see shit. Get over it.

There is so much more I could say about myself and my silly amazing brain, but I’d need to write a book. And I am! It’s a fiction book and I know many people will love it, I just need to get my procrastination monkey to vibe.
I will write more on autism, and ADHD, on sexuality and my life in general. I may or may not resume my YouTube channel. Drop me a line if you have something to say. Be kind. I will always reply.

The objective truth in our feelings

This started as a sad morning, but I’m trying to change things.

I don’t want to burn to light other people’s way anymore. That fire is for me, but there’s barely any left by the time I realise that I am lost too.

It’s very hard to find metaphors and analogies for something that is still hurting, it comes out raw because I still feel sorry for myself. The fact is that it is never about those two or three times you see someone and realise your needs aren’t met or your feelings are not taken care of, it’s about everything that the person unlocks with their presence, it’s your whole universe enclosed in a fraction of a second. They don’t see it or they don’t allow you to show it, but you don’t stop being you.

It’s often through others that I reveal the emotions I have been brewing for another person. Something amazing happens, someone incredible steps into my face space and I feel suddenly drunk and joyful; nourished, I flourish into the best version of myself, I bloom into the other person so freely. I heal.
I walk home smiling like an idiot, and I want to tell everyone I know that I had a good day, but most of all, selfishly, I want to show how happy I can be, how bright I can shine, I want to share the light. I am the fire.

Then, something strange happens, like this morning. I realised two things.
The first is that I’ve given most of my fire away on my way home from the date, I channelled it into supporting others, I extinguished it by the time my head touched the pillow to sleep, and my idiotic smile faded into a night filled with restlessness and nightmares.
The second thing that added to my sadness was my ability to create and compare patterns, it’s a skill all humans have. Yesterday’s kisses and caresses, lovely talks and giggles, eye contact and intimacy, openness and vulnerability, mine and my date’s capacity to create a third dynamic, a new safe space to share but not to get enmeshed in, made me see why I’ve been hurting over someone else, or to which degree, how deep I’ve fallen… And the more I’ve tried to hide that from myself, the deeper I sank.

And all this is driving me insane, because I’m so fucking tired of not knowing my own boundaries, not feeling them until they’ve been broken. It is infuriating that my desires and pleasures are stained by my inability to say fuck you. Look, I know you’re struggling, but fuck you. Hey, I know that there’s good in you, but I can’t see it. Dear, I know you (Kinda? Probably? Maybe?) want me, but I can’t feel it.

All the thank yous and I understand yous and I felt likes instead of a metaphorical big fuck you, you’ve screwed up, what are YOU going to do about this before WE can even start thinking about a solution together?

Conor once told me that I often justify myself when I meet him with an issue and he wasn’t wrong, he then said one of the best things anyone has ever told me in any kind of relationship: “when you feel a certain way, just tell me, there is no need to back it up, it’s valuable the way it is.”

And way before any of these thoughts crossed my mind, there was a day when Hoss and I had a fight, we stood in the middle of the living room of a place we both grew to hate and our brains couldn’t fish for any more constructive words. “Fuck you,” I said all of a sudden, and he smiled even though he didn’t like it. Something true and not sugar-coated came out of my mouth for the first time in a very long time. Of course, it is not nice, of course, it is not my favourite way of solving issues, but fuck it felt good, and he knew what it meant.

We all grew so scared of saying what we really think, what we really feel; we started to use ethics as an excuse to hide and take less accountability over our own thoughts and actions, we are depriving ourselves and our friends and partners and family members from taking responsibility, from learning something new and important. We are depriving others of their right to fuck up and pull their shit together to become a better person, and we do it so well by filtering and diluting our words in what we think is sensitivity, empathy and love. In reality, all that is just fear: fear of rejection, fear of abandonment and whatever other linear and pigeonholed ways we have of defining our emotions.

Everyone has the right to work through their own shit… How are they supposed to do that if we take all the space with our fears and anxieties? They’re only going to see themselves in the form they know because we are not giving them the multifaceted feedback. As humans, we grow and evolve thanks to other humans around us, but what happens when all the people around us decide to hide? It becomes a dark forest, an invisible game in the universe, and someone (perhaps me) is stupid enough to show themselves.

The thing is, we can still say how we feel and that we think the person we like or love fucked up without being an asshole. And then, when the silence deposits itself like dust on the floor of a flat not taken care of, we start seeing people’s real colours… And that’s a gift we do to our future selves when we do everything in our power to let the objective truth prevail.

This started as a sad morning, but I’m changing things.