Reflections

I was an angry, reactive, dangerous kid as a teenager.

I was of course a product of my environment.  Having by that point survived a lifetime of hell.  The kind that came via beatings, both physical and mental.    These experiences warped me from a young sapling into a twisted piece of petrified wood.  I was on edge all the time.  Years of surprise attacks in the school halls, or walking home alone.  I was coiled like a cobra after that, after so many people revealed themselves to me to be cowards, idiots, and bullies.  Kids and adults alike both proved to be more enemy then friend.  Adults were only interested in covering their own asses, kids would just brazenly lie when marched into the principle's office with me, the wounded punching bag sitting across from them.  That was as much help as your average adult was for me back then, and all throughout my educational process.

By the time i'd gotten to my teenage years, i had an aura swirling around me.  I had nothing left to lose, it had all been taken away from me already, so bullies sniffed around cautiously.  I still had a few, but i was fearless at that point, dead inside.  They learned quickly engaging with me was a losing prospect.  Either my years of abuse and hardness led me to beat them, and cost them their status, which would be passed up to me by other kids like a trophy.  Or they would outnumber me, beat me down, and i wouldn't cry.  I wouldn't complain.  I would stand back up and look them right in the eye, blood trickling down my face.  They would see there was nothing left to take inside of me.  I was hallowed out by other blood thirsty alpha's looking to make a name for themselves on an easy target.  Wasn't so easy anymore.

This mutation came from how i was treated, like creatures in the wild, it had evolved as a defense mechanism.  No one, and nothing, was out there to protect me from this.  My body had to come up with a way.  My mind ended up stitching it all together.   There were, and still are, side effects.

The rage of those experiences is permanently embedded in my psyche.  The angry and fierceness born of that nihilism hammered into me defended me so perfectly, but only from that one, specific, narrow type of enemy.  Covering your body in spikes and acid defended me from predators, but invariably repelled potential friends and allies eventually.   There was novelty in knowing me as i was, and many people latched onto that.   That's all it was though.  Novelty.  There were no real allies to be found when the days and weeks wore on and that got to see that it wasn't a costume i could take off at the end of the day.  That this is what i REALLY looked like. This i what i really was.  Angry. Acid tongue. Nihilistic. Hardened.

I was autistic too, of course, and had some simple tricks for faking other emotions, but as all weathered travelers know, the mask requires amazing effort to maintain.  And it slips. And it consumes the bones and sinew as part of it's price.  Drinks the blood to smile and joke. To look you in the eye.

That total defense that i had virtually no hand in building, ruined all the years afterwards.  I was too angry, so much so that it consumed me utterly.  I shook with rage at times no good reason.  I wanted to hurt, i wanted to harm, i wanted to punch everyone in the fucking face over and over and over.  I knew, rationally, that this was normal.  It was that wounded child inside of me that wanted revenge at the cost of everything else.  I would gladly, light the room i was in on fire, if i knew i could take some of them down with me.  Knowing wasn't enough. I didn't have any real support system, then, or in the years preceding either.  So while i knew what was happening, and wrote about it often, i could not conquer this thing with ease.   It took me years. and years. and years. Several of which i spent completely isolated. Not dating. Not talking to friends. Not doing anything.  and even saying this now i know, it's still a part of me.  I am standing above it now, but our positions change as the seasons do.  I want you to know i've done all i could on my own.

These memories are so visceral, that when i read about other kids getting bullied, or adults getting bullied, or autistic people getting bullied, i am completely overcome with emotion.  I feel great surges of fear, rage, sadness, and deep anxiety. I want to snap the world in half. I want to sob uncontrollable like a child.  Sometimes i do. When i hear the music of my youth, i remember each emotion connected to each song i sang. To each person i shared that song with, and i am filled until the pressure makes me wince.

The things we endure as we grow up, as so incredibly powerful and life altering, and we don't have any idea until it's too late.

If you ever have the chance to protect someone, all i ask is that you think about this story.  Really try to feel what i feel.   And you do whatever you possibly can to prevent that person from having to endure this pain.  It is not growing pain.  It is the pain that keeps on growing until it is the epicenter of who you are. Everyone deserves the chance to be happy, don't take that away. I am ruined by my trials. By body is a wreck as a result of what i went through, and as it turns out all the science is there to support it. Bad childhoods result in extremely poor health outcomes. It's call the ACE score. Mine was 8 out of 10.

These are not growing pains.

These are the pains that keep on growing.

If you let them.

-e-

Mission statement.

My name is Erik. I am 34 and on the autistic spectrum.  I am for all intents and purposes what you might consider smart.

I've been pinned down to paper like an insect and studied since i was old enough to go to pre kindergarten classes by psychologists and psychiatrists and teachers alike. I have a GIANT ream of paperwork with some of my records i managed to recover as a 30 year old man from my various schools that was so completely gut wrenching to read i was in a walking coma for 3 months afterwards, recovering from the whiplash of all that information and what it meant finally sinking in.   It was the key component to my finalized diagnosis after several months of dual evaluation (differential diagnosis) that led to me being official labeled as having Asperger's Syndrome. Though that definition may have changed slightly due to the DSM manual changing, so now i am simply an adult with autism, just maybe not the kind that you would immediately recognize.

I have spent a great deal of my life in the back of the class, literally and metaphorically BEHIND everyone.  I had to study in class to learn, and keep up with the standards of each state's requirements but i couldn't.  I couldn't find a way to meet that requirement AND to meet the requirements of my autism.   You see, I had to study PEOPLE when i was in school, and it was a full time job with much higher stakes.    Much of the class work was manageable, if i was allowed to do it my own way.  If i knew the answer in math class, i would write it down, but even if it was right, i was yelled at to show my work by the teacher, and i couldn't understand what he had meant by that. My writing started in the 3rd grade, and i was only encouraged because as it turns out, they were just using my writing to study me and perhaps publish a paper on my behavior. I wrote about trying to understand other kids, and why they were mean to me.  I wrote about how scary my asthma was and how sad i felt at home and at school.  I wrote about whatever autistic interest i had at the time. Dinosaurs for a long time. Then learning every breed of dog and how to draw them.  Learning to fix computers and write in MS Dos when i was in the 3rd grade. My homeroom was in a chicken coop outside of the school in a small town in upstate NY.  Not a great place for a kid like me to be, but i'm not sure there was any place in the world for a kid like me to be.

So i struggled. Of course.  The depth of that struggle is a million stories that would make your heart hurt to hear.  They make my heart hurt to recall sometimes.  I have achieved a herculean task in simply making it to this stage of my life.   In managed to exist right now.   I was never prepared to make it this far though.  I made it on instinct and relentless study and mimicry of my surrounding. I took social risks and after years of being beat on became hard and fearless in the face of threats and violence. I stood against my would be tormentors until they broke under the effort required to beat me into submission. I just had nothing left to lose anymore.

So here i am.  Smash cut to the here and now.

I'm functional, in some rudimentary ways.  But i'm also ruined for life, like a war veteran.  Warped by the things i've seen and had done to me.   My rational mind cannot filter out all the hurt, all the negativity, all the cynicism, even being this far removed from it's frequency.  I can't work a conventional job because for all my efforts, i'm still a mutant, and the fact that i require "Effort" at all to affect a normal personality to work with others saps my strength quickly and completely, running me into the same problem i suffered as a young man.    Either i can do the job well. Better then well.   Or i can manage all the social contracts in the workplace that must be maintained, and flounder in performing the actual duties with all level of acumen.

So i live lean. Incredibly lean. I have learned to make the meager stipend i receive for being ruined into a manageable mess, at least somewhat.  I have insurance. I have food. I have a tv, a computer, an internet connection and various other bits and pieces of a life strewn together from thrift stores and sales and trades and the like. I built my own computer. I fixed my own electronics. I don't have a cell phone or a car. I have enough.  Just enough. To survive, but not to thrive.

I have no family connections, nor do i have any connections to my social history.  All the faces and people i have met over my life have fled, many before they were aware of my condition, but i am certain they would not return upon learning of it.  Every living person i know and interact with by and large is brand new, and our relationships are kept shallow and distant. Engaging only under strict conditions of a shared interest on occasion and with great restraint on my part.  I yearn for a deeper connection, the strings i grasped at when i was young and tireless, but anytime i have attempted to obtain them, i find i am overreaching and run the risk of driving new people away.  I want to ask you who you really are, and why. I want to know your stories and how you got this age, to be sitting across from me here now.  My desire is to understand people, so that maybe someday i can fully understand myself. So that i might know warmth and affection born from a deeper place then the utility i offer. The odd collection of humor and skills that i present to you.

I don't have a dream. An overarching goal or purpose. Even when i was young, i just said i wanted to be happy. Maybe when i was a teenager, i thought i could be a singer if i kept practicing, but bands are VERY social and hard to manage.  And a job in the music industry when the pie was shrinking was not to be.  I wanted to be a DJ once. An on air personality, only to share my love of strange music with other people.  This is of course before i understood that being a dj required much more then just being good at it and having a great background in music. It required interviews and uniforms and protocols and gatekeepers. I tried, for a while, but it was not to be.   Since then i don't think i've had a single thing i've really wanted to be. I thought i might be a writer.

That my pain, my experiences, my unique brain and it's story might be worth something in the world. Maybe my life could help ease the pain of others, help people like me who could not relate in the normal world have a comforting and funny voice to support them. Something i wished i had in so many dark moments.  But i only knew the writing part of the puzzle. I wrote and wrote and wrote.  But i never knew what to do with it.  I'm not a guy with a terribly high self opinion. I could never figure out how to "market" myself. What i would send. What i would say.  What to do with a writing style that is like an unbroken ream of paper darting gleefully from gallows humor to sorrow.

I want the same things as you mostly.  A sense of purpose about my life and what i put my effort into. Some tangible result of that spent life to gradually emerge and form the beams that might support a fully realized person and life.  To feel friendship and feel no anxiety about losing it.  To make enough money to support myself, stand up from this wheelchair and walk off into the sunset alone, emerging when  i feel like it, not because i have too. To make a difference.  To mend my shattered wings.

So here i am, and here i have been for the last 2 years. In pursuit of nothing. Digging a hole and filling it back up each day. Strangling myself with my own noose of failure.  My own shattered sense of who i am, versus who i believe i am supposed to be.

And i still don't know. Maybe you can tell me.