I was just reading about ‘sonder’ - that sudden feeling of existential weirdness that hits when you realise your own complex life is one of eight billion similarly intricate ones, and that the tiny subset we will cross paths with we’ll do so as the human equivalent of dust motes - just another piece of the peripheral debis field passing fleetingly through a momentarily intersecting orbit.
Most of the time i can handle that, its even deeply consoling as it reminds me of the very positive side of the ‘no one cares’ coin. But where it hurts profoundly is when a very deep (and therefore extremely rare, for an autist anyway) bond is unexpectedly removed, and -despite the stages of intense inner grief over that continuing to cycle- you’re left with the awfulness of now just being an NPC to them - just part of the overall indifferent background to their life - your existence only remembered, maybe obliquely, if you happen to pass them momentarily or say hello briefly during the painful blessing of the briefest encounter. Anyone else recognise this feeling. I almost at times wish i could be one of those non-feeling, ultra-pragmatic autists that just impose the logic of ‘that was then, this is now’ (a kind of easy inbuilt stoicism i suppose) but i clearly got the opposite extreme. And it burns at the soul.
