Right now, there’s a young boy excited for his big first day of school tomorrow. He’s playing Xbox in his pyjamas, laughing, loved, safe. He doesn’t know any different. He doesn’t know he’s living the last truly happy days of his life.
Soon, the real world will come for him. It will bulldoze his mind, crush his spirit, and pack him into a neat little neurotypical box: quiet, compliant, acceptable, suffocated.
He won’t know why people don’t like him. He just knows they do, and feels maybe he shouldn’t like himself either. He will try and fail and try again to fix himself, to complete himself, to be normal, so he can return to feeling of love and safety ripped away by the jaws of fate.
On his journey, the teachers talk to him in a disappointed tone. People become his friend and abandon him soon after. Sometimes he makes it into friend groups, but he feels like the “pet”. One thing they all tell him is to “act more normal”. His parents try to get him outside for his own good, but it makes him feel worse.
The world will tell him he’s not owed the Love, Safety and Acceptance he needs, and has to earn the right to feel human again, with a price tag his mind can never pay.
He tries, but something’s always too bright, too loud, too scratchy, or too crowded. He learns to bury this and suffer. The rules of any interaction are unclear and he is punished for asking what they are. He stops asking.
One day he becomes sick of feeling like a loser and decides to become the best version of himself he can be. His drive and his will to complete this mission will consume the rest of his days.
He will come close to the dream, but never touch it. After years of hollowing out the spark that makes him unique, he may find affection, it may be greater affection than he ever expected, but it never fulfils him because it slides off the mask he wore to obtain it, missing the real human inside.
Where he once asked “what’s wrong with me?” when he wasn’t accepted, he now asks “what’s wrong with me?” because he cannot feel happiness or understand why.
The doctor tells him he is depressed and gives him a pill that makes it sting less, but the problem only grows. He wants to go home. His real home, a place where he belonged.
He starts lingering around ledges, driving a bit too relaxed, and looks aimlessly at rope when he sees it. For some reason, this makes the pain quieter and the darkness feel like home.
But right now, he’s playing Xbox in his pyjamas before his big first day of school. This is the last time he is ever truly happy.
This is why we must fight for total acceptance.
Across the board. We’re not even close. We have a few supports and rights and a joke called awareness month that accomplishes nothing.
We still have to go back to the Stares, Judgement, Alienation and Self Doubt.
We still have to go back to who we pretend to be.
We still have to carve the sparks out of our eyes to make neurotypicals comfortable.
They bullied us into it. The authority figures who were supposed to make us feel safe participated in it. We were wronged into thinking it’s better to pretend to be “normal”.
The Real Normal is being loved, accepted and safe as you are. It’s walking the street as your real self without fear. This is what we need.
Neurotypical does not mean superior. They just outnumber us, and most of them are decent people, capable of understanding and compassion.
If we make it impossible to ignore us. If we decide we’re done being quiet. If we stop trying to fit in and start forcing the world to make space to be our real selves…
We can accomplish what Pride and BLM did.
Total acceptance of difference across the board.
We’re tired, and we’re comfortably suffering as we always have and will, until it’s time to act.
If we decide this is what we need, and took it seriously, it wouldn’t happen today, tomorrow, or this year, but the Autistic children putting on a brave little mask for school will have something to look forward to. They’ll look forward to never knowing firsthand the pain we went through, not experiencing why we fought so hard for it. And then, maybe, we can be ourselves too.
We could give the 30,000,000 little versions of ourself across the world the gift no one gave us.
The right to be seen and heard.
LGBTQ did it. BLM did it. We can too. Don’t let another child go through what we did. Stand up and Speak up.
If this shook you up, good.
If you cried, I’m sorry.
If you’re scared, I am too.
If you’re done with the way things are, I see you.
And I see the cycle living on. I see you all.
These boys and girls don’t know yet, but we do.
When was your last truly happy moment?
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