2:13pm May 25, 2014

Have you ever…?

Have you ever gotten so physically stuck that you couldn’t move at all, for hours? Have you felt the chair you were sitting on dig painfully into your butt, because you couldn’t move even to shift your weight a little? Ended up urinating on yourself? People waving their hands in your face, acting like you can’t hear them, talking in front of you as if you’ve vanished from the face of the earth?

Have you ever felt as if there’s a barrier around you that you just can’t break through? You can do anything you want inside the barrier, but you can’t do anything that would bring you outside of it. People walk around and they don’t see you, they just see your body moving in atypical ways. You can’t initiate the activities you want to do, so you’re limited to a small number of activities, whether or not they’re what you want to be doing right then. There are things inside your boundaries that you can do perfectly, but you can’t step over that line and do things outside the line. And you can’t control where that line is.

That line makes it so that people see you as incompetent. Because you can’t initiate interactions with them, and sometimes you can’t respond even when they initiate interactions with you. Because you can’t just stand up and walk somewhere you want to go, you have to stay where you are, or follow behind someone and trace their steps. Because you stand there rocking from foot to foot with a blank look on your face and can’t look like you’re engaged with the world, no matter how engaged you actually are. And you can’t understand why the line was drawn where the line is drawn. And the line moves every single day, so you can’t even predict what you can do that day.

And when you stick to doing the things inside the line, everyone assumes those are your interests by choice. And sometimes they are things you love doing. And sometimes they are things you are sick to death of doing, but are the only things you can do, so you do them, and resent it when people assume these are your actual interests. Your dream may be to go to college and study graphic design, but you’re stuck lining up dominoes all day long and that’s what people think you like to do. Some days you love the dominoes and some days they stand for everything you hate and every restriction that’s ever been placed on you. Some days you throw them all over the place and people don’t get why.