I’ll never be one of them. I’ll never be normal. I can wear the skin of normal, talk normal, walk normal and even… in short bursts… think normal (I assume) but in my bones I will always be who I am.
And when I look towards the people who are what I am, I still don’t get the feeling I’m really allowed to feel like one of them.
Too normal to be autistic. Too autistic to be normal.
In Green Book (2018) when Doc Shirley gets out of the car in his tuxedo and gazes silently at the farm hands and they silently gawk back… Not a word is said, but everything is said.
He’s holding onto his mask for dear life, barely containing his sorrow for them and the desolation of belonging for himself. He wishes for a better world and he wishes he wasn’t an alien cosplaying as a showman.
When my mask fit onto my face just right for the first time, I felt like Django in the silky blue suit on a horse riding into NT Candyland as if I conquered something.
Now I feel like Doc Shirley with one foot in one world, the other foot in another, and a place to belong in neither.
Now that I’m trying to reclaim my identity, with the mask hanging halfway off my face, the fiery emotional toll that must be paid at the crossroads of “who am I” is seeping back into my chest.
It literally feels like a cosy log fire warming the contents of my ribcage, but with an undeniable sharp sting in the heart. It is not enjoyable.
This is not the first time I felt this. I felt it almost a decade ago, and I ran so fast and far from this feeling that the mask fused to my skull semi-permanently.
A brush with soul vertigo
In the late 2010’s, a few months after my diagnosis at 21, while I was deep in denial, I happened to pass a hotel that had an autism charity event going on.
Autism was not on my radar. I didn’t think they even did things like this. I tried to leave it, to pretend I didn’t see it but I couldn’t help myself and was dragged by my feet to the lobby door.
I second-guessed, held my breath, and went in.
The trail of jigsaw piece stickers led me to the function room. A young man not much older than myself was running the show. Somehow I was shaking his hand before I had time to take in the room I walked into.
He was energetic and passionate about this charity, his charity, and started telling me about all the great work they do, but what I felt was his genuine happiness that I was there.
That I had come to his thing with an open mind. I wondered why I was so special. The function room had about 100 people, huddled up at kiosks and tables playing with what looked like board games and fidget toys. Kids were running around. Autistic kids.
As I reigned the ADD in my overstimulated brain, I caught him asking me why I came, to which I told the truth: that I saw the sign, I have a diagnosis, and I didn’t know much else.
I saw how happy the kids were. These were Level 3’s who needed extensive support. They looked happier than I had been in years. I wanted to cry but I didn’t know why. My ‘real man’ mask came back and I asked him how I could help.
He set me up with my own kiosk, explained the rules of some board game on the table, and happily I ran this game for the kids for about half an hour. When I smiled, it wasn’t masking, but I didn’t feel happy.
I saw something in them I didn’t want to see: myself. I remembered who I was before I cared what people thought, when all I needed was a Lego set and a hot chocolate. A person I can’t go back to. A person who felt like they belonged.
And I saw something in myself I didn’t want to see in them: the pain that awaits them if the day comes where they realise how different they are, and try hopelessly to fix it like it’s a problem.
I didn’t know what “high functioning” or “low functioning” meant or what the support levels were, but some insidious creature in my head, a mask variant with its own thoughts, clocked the difference between me and the kids, then offered me an out for this uncomfortable but necessary moment of growth.
After half an hour, a lady running a parents group started speaking on stage and the games were done. I grabbed a seat, tuned her out and tuned in to my mask.
It told me this entire experience was proof that I am not autistic, because what I just saw was real autism, and what I have is just called being a weirdo.
In the car ride home, that aching, painful fire of character growth in my chest subsided. This feeling only ever comes to me from staring down both barrels of a hard truth.
Then, right on schedule, my thoughts and feeings were replaced by the regularly scheduled self-bullying and self-hatred that fuelled my misguided self-improvement.
In other words, what should have been the moment of my liberation was in fact the moment my mask superglued itself to me for years to come, suffocating whatever I had left of a soul.
I returned to the dimly lit home gym, to pay for my sins through the ritual of bloodletting my anxieties and hatred into bench presses, squats, cleans and curls, where the hard calluses on my heart could at least be used as jet fuel to put hard muscle on my body.
The muscles were a shield I could hide behind and project a different persona with. The persona fed the lie, the lie fed the pain, and the pain fed the workouts.
I believe I ran out of lies to tell about 2 years ago. I just can’t move my mouth and make bullshit come out like I used to. I’m spent.
When I went to work, I carried myself with a fraudulent energy, but my words were always true. Now the false energy is gone too… and all I have left is the crossroads of identity I ran from all those years ago.
I’m not strong enough to run from myself anymore. But when you’re too autistic to be normal, and too normal to be autistic, who can you ask for help?
Bleeding on the page has helped me get it out.
Thanks for reading.
-Patient Zero