After a few positive changes, and a bit of time to begin processing those changes, I’m feeling in a much brighter place than I have for a little while.
I’ve even started to laugh again.
I’m autistic. Always have been, always will be. Increasingly I am beginning to feel proud of this fact. But there are moments, where, when relaxing or with friends, I sort of forget this. Well, it’s probably not so much about forgetting, but more to do with the thought not being at the forefront of my mind. But then something happens and that realisation zooms back into reality. I’m referring to lighter, more comical moments in this instance, rather than areas of difficulty (which certainly exist too).
Recent examples include playing a party game where our answers had to match the rest of the group. In this moment we had to say the first thing someone would notice when looking at someone’s face for the first time. Everyone, of course, said eyes. I on the other hand was the only person to have a different answer, which was nose. Why on earth would you look at someone’s eyes? That got a laugh.
More recently, when my wife and I were watching tv she asked “Shall we watch this?” She didn’t elaborate on what, so try as I might I could not answer. There were no clues as to what ‘this’ was. This went on for a few minutes, both of us getting more frustrated with one another’s inability to communicate with each other. In the end, she got up and pointed at the screen. Where I’d been looking for some sort of box around the title of the selected show to answer the question with, she’d assumed the giant picture of David Mitchell’s face that took over the entire screen would be enough of a clue. I didn’t even see it! We laughed after, because it was another example of me avoiding looking at someone’s face.
Does anyone else experience funny moments like these? I quite like to laugh about this stuff, as it’s who I am. Why not enjoy it when in the right frame of mind. These moments don’t happen all that often but it’s quite nice to reflect on something, that I probably would have felt embarrassed about pre-diagnosis, in a positive way.
