Dis-Integrating Into Society

“To be nobody but myself, in a world which is doing its best night and day to make me everybody else, means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting.”

EE Cummings

Do you ever feel like you don’t belong?  Do you ever feel like tearing your hair out in complete frustration ‘cos, no matter what you do, you never seem to get anything right?  Do you sometimes feel as if being autistic in a predominantly non-autistic world is God’s idea of a joke, one S/He came up with whilst tripping on some particularly potent mind-altering substance?  Or, perhaps, some kind of punishment for sins committed in a previous incarnation?  

Do you ever wonder what the fucking point is of being autistic?  After all, it seems to attract nothing but criticism for the fact that it makes me incapable of behaving like a “normal” human being, and constant attempts to get me to behave in order to fit in.  Not to mention all that research people do in order to determine what’s “wrong” with my brain, and how to fix it: or, at least, wipe out the gene or whatever it is that caused it in order to make sure that no-one else has to “suffer” from it in the future.  Is it any wonder I view my autism as a curse, when I’m surrounded by such stuff?

And cursed I feel myself to be, at the moment.  Happy, joyous, and free I ain’t.  If God has some purpose for me, other than to experience the misery and frustration of being constantly on the outside looking in, then it’s lost on me.  I’ve even come to the conclusion that, despite what I read and hear about God being all-powerful, everything, and everywhere, the one thing S/He is not is autistic.  So S/He doesn’t understand me, and I don’t understand Her (which explains why I can’t interpret the signs that I’m being sent half the time ‘cos He’s communicating in neurotypical language).  

And, once again, it’s down to me to have to try to bend my brain into a fucking pretzel to attempt to understand what it is that S/He’s trying to tell me, ‘cos He’s not about to kowtow to one measly autistic who’s refusing to try to understand and change the way she thinks (at least, that’s how I see myself).  Trying to understand God is like trying to translate Sanskrit – and I should know, ‘cos I’ve been trying to learn the fucking thing for the last three years, and I’ve hardly got anywhere.  (Don’t ask me why I’m trying to learn another language when I can barely understand the one I was born to!)

I’m angry right now (can you tell?)  It’s been nearly three years since I was diagnosed as having Asperger’s, and I still haven’t accepted it.  And, what’s worse, I don’t know how to accept it, despite having a Twelve Step programme which is all about acceptance and change.  This just makes it even more fucking frustrating, ‘cos I don’t know how to apply the bloody thing to my autism.  How do you accept the unacceptable?

I desperately want to be a spiritual person (it’s one of the main reasons I do yoga), but I just can’t seem to get that right either.  The problem is that I think there’s only one way to be spiritual (of course I do, I’m fucking autistic and everything is black or white, right or wrong), and it’s the non-autistic way – which means embracing and understanding concepts like the idea that there is no right or wrong, there just is; and that God is in the all and the nothing.  

I’m re-reading the book 'Conversations with God' at the moment, which talks about all this stuff, and I’m trying desperately to understand it.  And sometimes I think that I do, intellectually, but I fear that I probably don’t, but that I’m just trying hard to do so ‘cos I think that’s the only version of spirituality there is: and if I don’t get it then I’m fucked.  After all, I’ve never yet read anything spiritual that embraces the idea of rigid thinking (which is what I’m “blessed”, or “cursed”, with) – other than religion.  And I do so hate religion.

Sometimes I think that God doesn’t want to talk to me, and that’s why He makes it necessary for me to have to have an interpreter.  As my best friend frequently says about other things (like the internet, and books), it’s not meant/written for autistics – and I fear sometimes that neither is God.  Perhaps I should seek help from an inanimate object instead?  A teapot, perhaps?  Or a toy rabbit?  Mind you, I’m sure I could find a way to misinterpret that too.  It’s something I’m highly skilled at doing.  Like missing the point.  And complicating everything.  And falling into deep, dark, dank, dungeons of doom on a regular basis.  And never, ever, wanting to be where I am – like now.

So I’m off now to find somewhere else to be.  Or perhaps that should read, I’m off to find someONE else to be?