The Autistic Experience

My mind becomes numb and my body shuts. I do not know what my emotions are, and I have spent my entire life learning to navigate the emotional burden passed on to me. With generational wisdom of emotions that does not aid me, I am left on my own. We are alienated by our genetics and abandoned by our ancestral love. Years of education and knowledge to express emotions like everyone else. I have always been different, and I am still learning to navigate my emotions.

Autistic people are born in a society that teaches us to express emotions on a normotypic spectrum. Love, happiness, joy, pain, sadness, and anger, all emotions are expressed a certain way. Social sophistications, words, and context. We do not communicate with words and are never taught how to express emotions through our language. People struggle to understand that we speak another language. We do not lack emotions or empathy but our ways of expressing emotions is different. We grow as birds in deep waters and use our wings to swim. We can only drown. Our feathers dampen and the weight pulls us down. Most of us spend our lives trying to pretend that our wings are fins and we can breathe under water. We suffocate and in moments of extreme emotions we make movements. Our fatigued wings propel an emotionally dysregulated body so society can understand us. Sadly, they only see us in extremes of emotions and as we harm ourselves screaming, asking for help, showing our scars on our broken feathers, they see us and try to support us in swimming.

We our drowning in this world of sorrow, suffocating without air, departed from our life in the skies. I find myself struggling and I must remind myself that I have been taught to swim all my life. I may be a good swimmer, but I am a bird that is meant to fly, and I can never reach my potential burdened by the emotional depth of the sea. I need to learn how to fly. I need to navigate my own way. As a bird born to a family of fish, I need to acknowledge my difference and even though I choose to swim on the surface of water, I am alienated from my emotions. I am unable to show my beauty and express my language because my family does not know how to fly. My flight departs me from my loved ones and underwater I drown not knowing who I am. I must reach the surface, dry my feathers, and take flight to recognize myself. Flying helps me understand my emotions but alas I dive again. I am disabled and unheard because I cannot speak underwater, drowning as I see my dancing school, never finding my flock.