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.