The Autistic Experience

“I stood there waiting but you never held my hand, you let me go.”

Things most autistic people can understand that we give everything to belong. We have grown our entire lives wanting to fit into the right puzzle and when we find pieces that complete us, we connect them and piece by piece we make sense of what we want our life to look like. There are a million pieces and few of us are lucky to find pieces that attach right to us. We find companionship in other neurodivergent people. People who are like us and understand us better. There is no continuous struggle to understand if the other’s intentions are true. No struggle to know if they too play the game of life and will deceive you into thinking that they care about you just as much as you do for them.

We must understand, growing up different we attach to the first person we think is like us, and while neurodivergent people may be like us, they too can be bad people. I have no agenda against the normotypic world. It is the normalization of toxic traits and using others for getting what you want, and survival-at-any-cost philosophy, that I am against. Growing up in an estranged world we often fall prey to narcissistic people. The classic move of a narcissist to love bomb someone who has felt unloved, unaccepted, and detached leads to an undying loyalty by us. When they have our loyalty, they control us and love bomb only on the times when we try to escape. Like a bird when it tries to fly free you give it food. We get greedy for the love and get scared that the outside world is a scary place, it has shown us only darkness, misunderstanding and pain, while here we have nurture, homeliness, and safety. We accept all the abuse. It is all I have known. The family I loved bullied me, discriminated my sexuality openly telling me queer people should burn in hell (knowing I am one), and struck me. But still the only place I knew free from the unacceptance, harassment and sexualization of the world, was the place of safety I called home. We grow up normalizing abuse and when we have endured such pain from a young age it is nothing atypical to accept abuse throughout life. We accept and only expect abuse from caregivers and lovers. And normalize the world being a darker place than what we have.

While we love immensely, breaking free from each cage chips our wings, and burns our feathers. But like the phoenix, we rise. Alas only to burn again. People admire the phoenix rising against adversity, but they never empathize with the suffering it endures. They don’t imagine the abuse that led the poor soul to burn its entire existence, melt skin and bones, turn to ash it’s soul. Only to be born again and start anew with a hope that perhaps this time it will be a better life. It never is and this loop of insanity is perpetual.