I think I am suffering from clinical depression after events of this summer and before. Being Autistic itself is one thing, but the day to day barriers we face can trigger other disorders. Most of us have anxiety disorders, and from time to time we fall into severe depression if conditions are right. This year it is worry about Dad, loneliness in Deer Isle (I can’t make friends here) and failing IDSVA, which was painful because I had really built it up in my mind and become attached to the vision I had for myself in the program. I also didn’t imagine that being there depended so much on performing a certain identity or personality and I mistakenly trusted that I could be myself. I did not listen to my own warning not to unmask.
As Jason tries to support me, he has been learning about ASD on his own. Then at times he says something insightful that I did not expect him to understand and that is comforting. It has made our relationship stronger and led me to learn about ADHD to support him back. At the same time, it is helping me further understand myself, since it is an outside input. Much of the time I am workingin a vacuum, in a state of autopoiesis, just picking up what I can and recycling it into my order of operations and patterns of thinking as I go. A month ago, Jason said, “they don’t understand, you remember EVERYTHING, and like it’s happening now.” And that helped me understand further why I struggle so much to exist solely in the moment, and to let go or not get mixed up. Just a few days ago we were talking about how I long to return to my state of ignorance as a child, the time before anyone told me anything was wrong, when I did exist purely in the moment and did not worry about who or how I was. This was the happiest state for me, the time in New Jersey before my dad left the house, when all I did was play outside and follow dad around as his “assistant” on odd jobs. Yes, I was bullied, yes, I had no friends, BUT, I didn’t know it was not normal and I didn’t question it. I didn’t know it was becuase the world thought there is something wrong with me, I just simply didn’t know and didn’t think about it. I existed purely inside my mind looking outward and absorbing and reacting to what I found interest in. I told Jason about this time and how, after everything I have been to trying to adapt to the world, make it happy and fit in, I now want to recede back to this place. To do this I need to withdraw from society, and someday I can do that, but for now, I have to have one leg in, as it were.
This conversation made me remember a poem I wrote ten years ago, while I was living in Miami. I had just “failed” at a relationship that I really wanted to be in and I was trying to figure out what I had done so wrong. The poem discusses this childhood state of pure Autism and how I long to be there again, rather than constantly suffering the criticism and judgment of a world that wants to mold me. As it is also a poem about the pain of relationships, especially navigating love of “normal” people who reject our divergence, of course, it has insight to the experience of love and breaking up from the ASD point of view, at least my personal experience of these things. When I wrote it I did not have my Autism diagnosis, but you can see the symptomology evident, especially in the description of my youthful “poo bear state” as I call it (drawn from the book The Toa of Poo) . I also mention the word “Deconstruction: which will go on to be a theme in a photo series I completed in Oklahoma, exploring the concept of “mental illness” and visualizing how we deconstruct and reconstruct ourselves to navigate Western standards of “normalcy”. How this process of constant fragmentation is damaging to the soul, for once you break or tear a thing, you can only ever mend it, not make it whole. The image included in this post is from that series. Here is the poem:
Dawn begins green
A bank of black clouds
Turning gray
The sky ignites
Sitting here staring
Shapes of cranes
Miami is building again
As I prepare to leave.
Dreaming of erector sets
And block kingdoms
My basement when I was tiny
A green rope carpet
And a chest of toys
If only my world
felt as easy to construct
as then
If only I could keep
my block mind
from tumbling apart.
When I was small
deconstruction
was as much a process
as design and build.
Recycling foundation stones,
bricks and cinder blocks
the old fashioned way.
What happened to me since?
Green to orange to yellow to blue
The cloud bank remains
I think of all the things
he loved about me.
My warm hands
My apricot smell
My artist eyes
The way I turned my head
When I was letting him in.
At work a man cut me down
Reminded me all the things
He hated
My gray hair
My cold feet
My need to be told
"I love you".
I realized he might be right
And now all I want is
To be alone
Where I can look only out from
Behind my eyes
Not at myself
Nor anyone else
Just the ground beneath.
Where I can pretend
I'm small and stupid again.
I see my hands in the dirt
Under Forsythia
Singing to myself
Climbing trees
Left to my little
Erector set mind
Looking out over
my backyard kingdom
Where I grew up alone
This poo bear place
Ignorant bliss
If I could freeze it
And return forever
I would.
The sky is white now
The sun keeps coming back
No matter
How hard I close my eyes
A whole person
I craved to be
I asked him:
"Do you see me complete?"
But impossibly fragmented
at every turn
Somewhere in between
5 and 10
I splintered
And he was correct
When he asked me:
"What's the point
if it will all fall apart
in the end?"