11:06pm September 13, 2014

Dear Mel-from-Ago (roughly 13-17 years of age),

I am really looking forward to the time when you learn that your actions have an effect on other people. When you really, truly learn that. When you no longer exist in a bubble world where you think you can’t affect anyone, you think you can’t hurt anyone, no matter what you do. Where you don’t know what your suicide attempts do to your family, where you don’t know what it means to them when you fight them like a cat on the front lawn trying to run out of the house at night, when you walk into traffic, when you act like life is a dream and none of them really exist anyway. Not that you can help all of those things. But one day you will realize that, able to help it or not, your actions had a profound effect on everyone around you. And that will be a continuing realization, probably, for the rest of your life.

As it is right now, you can’t even understand my words, probably. But I hope that by sending the ideas back through time, it will afford you some protection and the seeds that will allow you to learn these things. Maybe that’s not possible. I don’t know. I don’t know how time works. I don’t know how you are me, you feel like a different person separated by time. A person I can remember, but not a person I can be.

I love you, though. I love you and I understand you like nobody in your life can understand you right now. And that means something to you, I know, to be understood. It’s hard enough to be misunderstood as a regular teenager. With what you’re going through, it’s agony. I remember talking to another autistic person about autistic teen angst. There’s a reason a lot of us become violent as teenagers and it’s not because autistic people are just built to one day erupt.

I know you’re violent now, and known to be violent, and in many places that’s all you are known for, is your violence. You don’t even always know that you are anything but a ‘violent client’. There will come a day when you say you were a 'violent client’ and people tell you you just don’t understand what 'violent’ means because if you’re sitting there talking to them then you could never be one of the ones who really hurt people every time they interacted with them. But there was a time that’s exactly what you did. And the reasons were complicated. And it’s hard when nobody believes you, after the fact. All the work you did to become less violent only convinces people you were never violent to begin with. But I know you sent a psych nurse to the emergency room once. I know these things. I remember them. I don’t remember doing them, but I remember the fact of these things happening.

And I remember that the violence done to you to turn you into a violent person was never, ever described as violence. Even though it was far more violent and far more damaging than anything you have ever done to anyone else.

But I also know that you hurt people. You really hurt people, people who didn’t deserve the hurt. You learned that an abused person can, in some circles, get away with anything if triggered. You hurt your mother, you hurt your father, you hurt your best friends. You actually dislocated a good friend’s finger once. You didn’t notice. She did. And yet she was completely compassionate with you. When she pinned you down, she put a pillow under your head and apologized for having to do this to you. She was as firm as she had to be and as gentle as she could be. And you learned, you learned not to be violent.

But it has taken longer for you to know you have an effect on other people. That it’s not just violence is bad because violence is bad. It’s understanding how people felt because of your violence. It’s understanding how other people felt because of the way you really did in many ways live in your own world, unaware of the world outside, the world of people who had feelings and reactions. You had empathy, the kind where other people’s feelings overloaded you. But you didn’t have the capacity, for the longest time, to draw connections between your actions and people’s feelings.

And some of this is so, so recent.

Was it 2011 when you went to the hospital with a bowel obstruction, delirious and with a high white cell count, everyone afraid for your life, you seeing death itself sitting there waiting for you, being unable to pull away? I don’t know the year but it was a recent year. The year before the 5-week aspiration pneumonia stay, I believe.

Anyway, I remember how afraid Anne was, and how you didn’t know, you didn’t know until then, that failing to take care of your body well enough had an effect on people besides you. That your friends didn’t want you dead, and that if you did reckless things that could hasten your death, people would be hurt by them, even if they never blamed you. That shook you to your core, I remember. And I think that was when “My actions have an effect on others” became not a sporadically-known concept but a permanent one. You gained a level.

But even now, I don’t always notice my effect on others. It’s easier to be in my own world. I know, I hate that whole cliche about autistic people being in our own worlds. But sometimes it’s true. And sometimes I’m in my own world and I don’t notice the way people from the outside world are reacting. I don’t notice that their feelings have a connection to my actions. I don’t realize my power to affect them.

But you, back in your teens right now… you won’t realize this for a long time to come. My words will make no sense to you. Both because they’re words, and because you’re still so much in your own world. I’m always reminded, strikingly, of Donna Williams’s sculpture, “My World - The World”.

[Sculpture by Donna Williams, see this page for more of this and her other amazing artwork and life-size bronze sculptures.]

It’s a life-size bronze. In one hand she holds a globe that she stares at with complete intensity. Her other hand she holds behind her back, keeping people at a distance. And she has no idea that in doing this, she is totally exposed for the world to see. She can’t see that, even though anyone looking at the sculpture can see it plain as day. She is so vulnerable, so exposed, and so oblivious, and she reminds me so much of you.

One day you will learn that you can affect others, for good or for bad.

It will hurt.

It will hurt to know all the people you’ve hurt. And you haven’t just hurt them by violence. You’ve hurt them by things you couldn’t even help, that nothing could have been different, yet still you will know you hurt them, and knowing that will hurt you.

But knowing that will enable you to do it less often.

And if there is one thing I have learned from blogging, on tumblr and elsewhere? It is that you have the power to affect people in a profoundly positive way. People send you gifts that you never asked them to send, people whose names you never even heard in your life, and they tell you how much your writing has helped them. People send you private messages telling you the same thing. Having the power to hurt means also having the power to help.

And the way you hurt people came from gaps in your knowledge about the world, more than it came from malice. Most people learn things by the age of five that you are still learning. Most people are born knowing things you still don’t know and may never know. Your lack of malice, indeed your drive to love people, to care about people, that will save you, and it will save other people from hurt that could have happened. Because even if you still inadvertently hurt people (and we all do it), you will also be trying to help people, and sometimes you will succeed.

And you will know that you have accomplished for other people, what other people have accomplished for you: You have shown them they are not alone. Or you have shown them things about themselves they didn’t know until you said them about yourself. Or you have shown them something by example, like how to be proud in the face of bullying. And you can’t take total credit for those things – many of those things are parts of the world working through you, in a way. But you can know that your actions have the potential to help as much as they have the potential to hurt. And you can aim to help as much as you can, and hurt as little as you can.

It’s worth the pain of realization.

I know people might think it’s weird, me writing to all of you from a long time ago. But I’ve written to my past and future selves all my life. I don’t see them the same way most people see them. I don’t see a continuous line. I see different people, specific people, specific to places and times, and I want to communicate with them, and it doesn’t seem so weird that maybe a bit of my letters will slip through time and into their heads and maybe do some good. And if not, they at least do good for me now.

So look for Mel-from-Ago writings from time to time. I don’t know how often I’ll do them. I know I’ve done one before this, at least I think I have. I have a whole series of drafts I’ve never completed.

Anyway, I love you, even though you don’t quite know what love is or how it works yet, not having seen it in action. Not quite yet. You will soon. You’ll have real friends. You’ll have people who understand you so well you’ll think it’s a trick. it’s all just around the corner for you. I look forward to all of it, on your behalf.

Yours truly,

Mel-from-Now

TL;DR: As a teenager I was oblivious to my effect on others. I wrote a letter to hir, talking about the changes that will happen when that oblivion comes to an end.