Let’s talk about something. It’s about loneliness.
It’s the quiet that settles in when the phone stops ringing. You get to a certain age, you’ve been through a constant storm of trauma, and you realize that the friends you thought were a permanent fixture have just… drifted. The silence isn’t a choice; it’s just a fact.
You add autism to that mix, and it can feel tragically sad. But it’s not. The sadness, the isolation — it’s preventable. The autism itself is just a feature. It’s not a choice, any more than the color of your skin or who you’re drawn to. My options list wasn’t available when I ordered this model, and it was obviously assembled by the lowest bidder. However, it came with a few standard features I have always lived with and worked to refine, you may find them irritating. A relentless need for justice. A non-negotiable demand for integrity. And a stubborn, bullheaded insistence on learning things the hard way.
That last part, that’s a tough one. It’s a point of pride for a guy like me, the idea of being self-taught, of figuring out the world on my own terms. But it’s also exhausting. It’s a symptom of a mind that is constantly questioning, constantly probing, because the “easy way” everyone else seems to understand just doesn’t compute. And I tend to skip over things that seem unimportant, my ADHD firing away; I miss the big picture at first. It sucks when others think ‘he’s got it’. Most times, I don’t.
This isn’t a complaint. It’s a schematic. It’s an attempt to lay out the wiring diagram for a brain that a lot of people are quick to judge but slow to understand. The work I’m doing now, the writing, the thinking — it’s my way of making sense of it all. It’s a way of taking the hard-won lessons from a lifetime of being the “difficult” one and forging them into a map.
It’s a map for me, first and foremost. But I suspect I’m not the only one out there who feels like they’re navigating a strange and foreign country. And a good map is a thing worth sharing.