Biochemistry

            I was lying on the cold tiles of the bathroom floor in my mother’s flat. We still lived together, although that day she was away; Andreino and Andrea were with me instead. We spent every breathing day together, it did not matter if it was dark or bright outside as we shone our own light. We were friends.

            That night, something in me snapped, as it did many times before. I locked myself in and could only whisper “help” as I was, in reality, screaming at the top of my lungs. It is bizarre how we absorb our experience as indisputable truth when we are drowning; we will tell ourselves whatever it takes to stay afloat. There was nothing my friends could do and I can only imagine the distress I put them through: a locked door between us, a cry for help, and the confusion following the inexplicable emotional eruption provoked by something only I could see which was not physically there.

            The neighbours called the police, who arrived only once the waters calmed down. They knocked on the door in the middle of the night and I looked through the peephole and saw two men, one trying to hide behind the turn of the stairs. I opened and let them in, explained what happened the best I could, although there was no manner of translating into words what only existed in the abstract of my broken mind. One policeman asked to talk to me privately, so we did. He wanted to make sure I was alright and not raped by one of the boys waiting in the living room. I told him over and over again that I just had a mental breakdown. I don’t think he believed me but there was nothing more we had to say to each other. He only asked what the smell was all about and I showed him a candle on my desk, smoke slowly rising, quietly reassuring us. I wished time could stop then and I could be alone, but I also knew I couldn’t be trusted to go unsupervised.

            It is fascinating how we, as humans, can desire diametrically opposing realities. Help me, help me behind this door I locked because I was afraid. I was afraid to be alone after you hurt me. The conundrum of the perennial act of balance of our mental health.

            What happened to me that night? What triggered such a reaction? All I know is that I was deeply traumatised by so many overlapping events: some mild but perpetual; others more typical of the media representation of a one-off violent traumatic occurrence; the majority a combination of both. What is mild in the eyes of a child anyway? I think I spent the majority of my adult life trying to figure it out. Not just that one night, but many more before and beyond. I destroyed myself in the process because I thought I could rebuild a better functioning version of myself. Each time I completed the job, something felt off. I did not understand at the time that nothing is permanent. It was like doing a puzzle with the images constantly shifting.

            The stagnant helplessness dissipated over time, through hard work in therapy, trying not to beat myself down for over-intellectualising my feelings – I now love that about myself because I can understand why I love it. I turned my weaknesses into superpowers. I accepted trauma and turned the emotional memories into sensitivity to pattern recognition in people’s behaviour towards me. I know when something is bad for me, when someone is not being honest. Now that I can discern between ADHD and PTSD, I have no reason to not trust my gut feeling regardless. On a good day, my brain and body don’t always understand each other but they trust the process, and I patiently observe the conflict, the tension, I take the information in to analyse later. Sometimes, I forget it happened. On a bad day, like today, I cry on the bus and I am depressed. It is the restless kind of sadness and it feels synthetic and my thoughts are racing so fast there is barely any time to generate emotion and I get stuck in this flat affect limbo, a fight rippling under my skin. At least I know I am not giving up.

            Recently I started studying biochemistry because I don’t want to destroy myself anymore. I want to see what I am made of on the atomic level. I need to see what is happening when I think my life is not worth it. When I cannot trust myself, it helps to look at what the molecules and compounds are doing in collaboration so that I can even begin to feel miserable about myself. They will keep doing it regardless of how I feel, although their efficiency is directly linked to my mood – which breaks my heart, metaphorically speaking, and the humbleness of it all gives me the energy to eat at least one decent meal that day to prevent oxidative stress. Did you know that your body is constantly producing free radicals? Molecules with unpaired electrons that disrupt other molecules by trying to connect because electrons have to come in pairs! Antioxidants (the famous superfoods, but then, actually, not so super at all) donate electrons to the unpaired molecules and stabilise the system. Too many free radicals create oxidative stress that can lead to chronic inflammation, and chronic inflammation can lead to degenerative diseases and chronic illnesses.

            I digress.

           I do not want to feel whole anymore, I want to accept all of my parts by understanding how they interact with each other, how everything is connected but nothing is bound together forever. In that impermanence, I feel safe. Most of the cells in my body that were present during the deeply traumatising events of my life are not only dead and gone, but they generated a new life - the one worth living now.

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.