My son...you know...a little bit...ne ge...自闭
For Aiden and Dechen
I know it can be unhelpful and hivemindy to pathologize, and yet I'm constantly baffled thinking about how I went (and still go) through life brash and mostly unmasked for so long without even a whiff of a diagnosis. I mean, in this economy, most people don't notice if it only affects you and not your employer. (Or school, aka the employee factory). But it, and the knowledge of it, grips you all the same.
For me, it was like not knowing that it's air that you breathe or dirt that you walk on. Because autism not only affects everything. It is everything. Every morning and the minimum two hours it takes me to get out of bed, every night and the minimum two hours to get back in, and between then, every action, inaction, thought, and verbalized curveball I hurtle through the glass ceiling of human interaction. Sense and skin and stim and social compass. All perception going local.
I can't picture being without it. Not that I would want to get rid of it. Maybe some parts. Like the actual things that cause discomfort or trouble: constant itchiness, having to practice a script before every phone call, the hopeless circadian rhythm. Otherwise, never. Because I would be a hollow. And that - the all-encompassing nature, the finality of it - carries its own sense of doom.
But there's comfort in knowing autism is guaranteed. More permanent than any memory or kindred soul or limb. No operating procedure, conversion camp, or ABA can remove it. Killing tool to the flesh and they'll still never take it from us. With the body to the end. Eternally our self is closed.