4:46am June 27, 2014

The voids, the sea floor, well below zero.

I wish people understood what it’s like to be fifteen years old. To be fifteen years old and not know things other people are literally born knowing. To be fifteen years old and missing elements of the world that most people figure out by the ages of 2, 4, 5, 7, or 11. To be fifteen years old, to have a small number of really prominent skills that impress people, and then these huge gaping voids where all the other skills go, the ones people assume everyone has. To stare at people across the voids and be unable to explain.

I spent a lot of time staring across giant voids, waiting for someone, anyone, to see them.

I think my psychiatrist saw them, but he was little help other than getting me diagnosed in the first place. He tried to bridge the voids with words. It’s hard to bridge a void with words when part of the void is a massive problem with receptive language.

(Receptive language problems mean problems understanding language. It does not mean having trouble understanding what people are saying because you have auditory processing problems. I keep hearing people described as having “receptive language problems” who have nothing of the sort, they have auditory processing problems that make it hard for them to differentiate between sounds, but their language skills are pretty much intact. When presented the words in another way, they understand them.)

I remember living in a world where everyone swirled by me, everyone moving faster than my brain could keep up with. And none of them had these voids in their brains. My brain was seeming more and more void by the moment.

How do you explain it?

How can I even explain it now?

If most people’s brain world is a rich landscape stretching for tens of thousands of miles, my brain is an ocean world with tiny islands here and there.

And for all that time lived underwater, no recognition.

All that time lived at the bottom of the ocean, in a place that most people can’t even fathom its existence, no recognition.

I go to a gathering of autistic people. Most of the time, it’s a gathering that’s fairly diverse. There are lots of people there who have lived underwater longer than I’ve been alive, people struggling to stay afloat at all.

A group of autistic people commandeers me, pulls me off into a corner. Most of them don’t seem to have big voids, from what I can tell. They see me as just like them only I type. I don’t know how to explain to them that even when I could speak, I was not just like them. The assumption hurts so badly I feel like I’ve been cut with a knife, but I can’t explain how I feel. I can’t explain how I feel that they are all clumped together in a group of their own, not mixing with the other autistic people. I can’t explain how I feel that I’m the only of the other autistic people they will mix with. I can’t explain.

You can’t tell whether an autistic person has lived with these voids by whether they can talk or not. Whether they have good academic skills or not. There’s no single thing. But sometimes you can tell when someone hasn’t. There are subtle differences. Not subtle at all when you get down deep enough. But subtle if you don’t really know what you’re looking at, and are only seeing surfaces.

I wish I could show you the voids. How huge they were, how huge they remain in many respects. How it feels to live underwater. Or as Donna Williams puts it, well below zero:

On the edge I ask myself, what will I lose,
To have lived in the depths of “well below zero,”
I grasped the tools to climb out,
And scream loudly to the world,
That I was all that I was, before never enough,
That with all I was, it wasn’t fair enough
That I stayed there: a nobody nowhere.

That. That, everything, that.

If you haven’t lived there, it means nothing. If you have, it means everything.

I don’t have any problem with people who have never lived with these voids. I only start to have a problem when people act like these voids can’t exist, or can only exist for certain types of people that they, from the outside, have designated.

Do you know what it’s like to be fifteen and discovering what most people discover at the age of two, and being called psychotic because you’ve finally discovered make-believe of a sort that you never had when you were two?

Do you know what it’s like to literally not know whether dreams are reality or reality is a dream?

Do you know what it’s like to hear that the world is what you make it, and take it so seriously that you try so damn hard to make your life into a dream, and you can’t, and you get called psychotic, because only a psychotic person would behave while awake the way other people behave in their dreams?

And maybe it is psychotic, maybe it isn’t, but it stems from the voids.

It stems from not knowing things everyone knows.

Every void is about not knowing something everyone knows, is born knowing, or knows by an extremely young age compared to your age right then.

I know the professionals saw some of the voids, this is why they suggested that I had a severe neurodevelopmental condition preventing me even having a personality, and all that weirdness. It’s probably why they sometimes called me low-functioning. But whatever they saw, did not give me any help.

I did things that only a child would do, only to be told “you were an adolescent, not a child”, no I was a child, and an adolescent, they’re not mutually exclusive. And I was a child. There is a border zone where some adolescents are practically adults and some are children even at the same ages. I was a child. I was a child up until maybe my nineteenth birthday.

Just because mental age is useless doesn’t mean there aren’t grey areas. Adolescence is a grey area where people possess attributes of adulthood and childhood. I possessed far more attributes of childhood.

I could not see myself as other people saw me. Not even in the slightest.

I could not see the impact I had on other people. Not even in the slightest.

I was not raised wrong. I was not raised to be irresponsible or spoiled. These problems were not artifacts of my environment in any way. These problems were due to the fact that I was young, and young in a big way.

I feel like I was dancing. I was dancing in circles, doing twists and turns, and I was dancing on this big stage, and everyone was looking, and I couldn’t even see that I had an audience. I was dancing only for myself, only aware of myself, unaware of an outside world, and everyone saw me but me.

I did adolescent things too of course, and I have been punished for doing adolescent things ever since. All adolescents try on different identities. The identities I tried on were so taboo that to this day there are people who will mock me for it and treat me like I did something criminal. They don’t even stop to listen to the circumstances, circumstances in which many times I was pushed or tricked into things. But even if I hadn’t been pushed or tricked, I did nothing criminal, I did nothing that the teenagers around me weren’t doing more than I was.

But I am still punished for trying on the identities I tried on, for whatever reasons, even under coercion and threat. The people who punish me, tried on some of the same identities, but somehow it’s different for them.

I can’t talk about it, it’s too painful.

I can say that I hate being judged by people who had so much more going on in their heads when they were adolescents. I don’t mean academically, either. I mean they had so much more understanding of the world. Amazing levels of understanding. So little of their world was underwater, they don’t know what it means to live underwater, or well below zero, or anything like that. They don’t know the voids. And they will judge you, because they will assume nobody has voids, or nobody who can communicate has voids.

I had voids so big that honestly the islands were hard to find.

That’s why my psychiatrist called me an idiot savant.

I hate the term, but I understand why he used it. I had these tiny but brilliantly visible islands in a giant sea of deep, deep water. They didn’t fade slowly into the sea, but dropped off in jagged cliffs. That’s the texture of what people mean by idiot savant, and that’s what he meant by it.

Empty, empty, empty, empty, empty spaces so wide you couldn’t see across them.

But the weird thing about the voids, the thing I didn’t understand, the thing nobody understood, nobody understands still, is they are not truly empty.

They are full.

But they are full of something invisible to most people.

They are full of rainbows. They are full of the interplay of light on broken glass. They are full of all these things, all these aspects of the world, purely sensory, no thought, all sensation, all sensation and pre-sensation.

These voids create a tremendous amount of power.

These voids create most of my truest insights about the world. The depths of the water are not empty, but full of life that nobody can see because it’s too far down. Strange life. Life they can’t understand.

And that is my home.

That is where I am from.

Not the islands. The islands are showy, and they’re part of me, but they’re a distraction from who I am, in many ways. I don’t trust people who place too much faith in the islands. I don’t trust people who stare at the islands and ooh and ahh. I don’t trust people who tell me all about how much they love my islands, how much they see my islands, how much they notice my islands.

I trust people who can see the voids.

I trust people who want to enter the voids with me.

I trust people who meet me on the sea floor and discover the life that has always been there.

I trust people who can see me totally, see me as I am, see me from the inside out.

I trust people who have voids of their own.

Because I still have voids. They may not be exactly the same as they was when I was 15. I am not a child anymore. But I still have voids, giant voids, voids other people won’t acknowledge unless pressed. And unless you do acknowledge the voids – for real, not just because I said to do so – I can’t trust you. It’s not a matter of won’t, it’s a matter of can’t. Because a person who can’t see the voids will expect me, eventually, to act like someone who doesn’t have voids, and I will be punished when I don’t measure up.

And it hurts the worst, sometimes, when I am in a group where nobody else has voids, or nobody else has major ones, and because they don’t have voids, they don’t look for them in others really, and because they don’t have voids, they don’t see mine.

Draggle has obvious voids, by the way, and every time I recognize them I recognize someone who, even though different from me in many respects, at least we both have that, and it makes me happy. Voids can look different in different people because they’re in different positions, but they’re still these big giant gaps between our understanding of the world and most people’s. No matter what you call them.

Anyway, it gets lonely sometimes. Not in the usual sense of lonely. But in this sense of “Here’s this community, says it’s the autistic community, lots of people in it, most of them don’t have these gigantic obvious voids. Wish there was a community where more of us had them. Maybe there is. It ain’t here, not here.”

I want to stress – because the topic has come up elsewhere – I don’t want to make it sound like it’s bad not to have voids, or like I resent people who don’t have them, or hate them in some way. It just gets lonely having voids and only getting blank stares when you talk about it. I see other people around here with voids, we just don’t seem to be a majority.

I think people with voids are more likely to be the people who have to climb a cliff every day to get up to communication and understanding and stuff like that, and then slide down it again the moment we let go. Rather than standing on solid ground. Voids make solid ground quite difficult to come by. So when I see someone who is forever climbing and falling throughout their day, and falling deep, for that matter… I often assume voids are there too.