10:15pm October 6, 2014

➸ Existence is Wonderful: More On That Joy Of Existence (and Not Being Empty) - autistic history (2008)

The whole article can be found by clicking above. This is an excerpt:

Life is an utterly precious thing.

Whenever I pause for a moment to consider what it means to be a person in reality, it is sometimes almost too awesome to bear.

Like I almost want to crawl under a blanket or table or something and let in little bits of it come in one micron at a time, through interlaced fingers.

I can do certain things: art, a bit of writing. I’m not bad at math. I’ve always loved science.

Other people I know can do different things, and I have no doubt those things hold as much joy and value for them as my preferred things do for me.

I don’t understand first-hand what it’s like to really enjoy baseball, for instance, but I would not begrudge someone else their love of it, or the associations it lights up in their brain.

Anyway, though, there’s a fear I have. I don’t know if I’ve ever put it into words before. But it’s based in both (a) some things that have happened to me, and (b) some things I’ve seen happen to other people.

And that is basically the phenomenon where someone is very obviously (to me, at least) doing and/or saying things that speak very much to the validity of his/her experience of existence, but who is in turn being accused of emptiness.