Published on 12, July, 2020
By the time I was 13 years old I knew that I would forever be alone--- no spouse, no "girlfriends," no hope for romance, and no hope for love. This was obvious because I knew I was the only orange monkey in the monkey cage, and I was brutalized because I was (and am) "strange."
If I were capable of feeling hate I would write "I hate being autistic."
I do, however, utterly detest being autistic: autism has robbed me of my life. Autism took from me the chance of finding a woman who found me worthy of standing by her side, as two equal partners. What autism left for me in exchange was 61 years of a loneliness so suffocating, so ravenous, so crushing of spirit that I longed for death --- only my brother's compassion stayed my hand.
I loathe my inability speak nouns and pronouns when I am talking with people face to face: the Anomic Aphasia kicks in and I struggle to say the names of objects (that includes humans) , nor the names of places. My mind knows the word but I cannot speak it: try having a successful job interview when the evaluator believes you are on drugs--- I sound like I am choking because I am.
I abhor my inability to remember something that I heard mere seconds ago.
I deplore the way I rock side to side when I sit; rock on my feet side to side when standing in line at the grocery store; spinning on my heals to release some of the anxiety I collect when I am among the humans.
A few days ago (Monday June 14, 2021) my councilor (via telephone) told me that I "still have around twenty years left; there is still time to find love." I shivered with dread. I do not want to live another twenty years with painful eyes because I am required to look at people's eyes (it is agony for me). Twenty more years of strangers insisting that I must "shake hands." Twenty more years of strangers calling me by my first name--- as if we were already intimate.
Twenty more years of being macerated in the vicious jaws of loneliness.
It is a wonder that I have not been driven insane. Yet.
This breaks my heart to read David. And I can see myself writing something similar in another 30 or 40 years.
It does feel like everything is more difficult for us. I have put so much effort into appearing normal in order to obtain the most basic of things that come easily to others. But relationships is the final mountain that I don't know if I will ever be able to conquer. And sometimes I don't know if I even want to, because it's me that's the problem. I'm the one that's not normal. I wish I could be like everyone else.
Alas, I grieve for you. You must be utterly exhausted trying to "be normal:" but that is, I have found, a path to mental illness. One cannot be what one is not (ask any homosexual who tried to "be heterosexual:" it maims the sense of self, and the sense of self-respect.
It is difficult and painful to be inflamed with desire for someone, burning with passion and adore just to be around that person, and keeping the craving secret, unspoken, and unexpressed--- suppressing and hiding one's feelings because one knows not have any idea how to express them in ways that are considered appropriate.