despair of any remedy
Just read this. Please. It is not something you will like. It is true.
Now. Not all of that post is completely right for me. If I were to write something like that, the tone and words would be different. My life has been different. Now. I don't want this to turn into an argument about abortion or how one may quantify the value of any given life, define what is life, what is good. That's not the point. The point is that the heart of this is true: there is that wound, that knowledge that I shouldn't exist. Shouldn't exist. My parents love me, of course, and of course they'd have elected not to keep me if they'd known what I'd be. Perhaps if they'd known who I'd become, if they could have seen that I would grow up and I would not be so terrible...but that's the problem, right? There's this particular girl, there is the person I am now, there are the obvious traits of that person, of Julia Who Liked Weird Hats and Julia Who Did Not Kill Spiders When She Found Them In The House and Julia Who Was Good With Words And Bad With Money-- but then there's what I am. That's the nature of the beast, and the thorny part here: I am an autistic person. I'm lots of other stuff, too, but I am an autistic person and I was autistic when I was dreaming in the womb and I will be autistic until the day that I die. I don't have autism the way one has cancer or the way one has bad eyesight or the way one has PTSD. I'm autistic the way a dog is a dog. You can't cure me, or anyone else, of it. You can't. You can only make sure that there won't be more of us. You do that, it sends a message-- it says we aren't worth having in the world, that this place is not for us, ever, but for you. You're the right, we're the wrong, the trash, the defective. This is what I infer. And I, I will live and I'll walk beneath the sky and I will do my best to not be so terrible and I'll play the part of a normal woman so well that sometimes I'll forget that I'm not one, and then something will remind me, a poem or an article in the paper or a line in a novel, something will remind me that I'm not a normal woman, that every time I fail to imitate one I betray my true nature as a tragedy and a disaster and a mistake and a Thing That Should Not Be, a place from which God has withdrawn. And I try, don't ever think I don't try hard to make up for it. Don't think I haven't made sacrifices. And don't tell me that nobody means the ones like me (oh, trust me, they do mean the ones like me, even the me typing this now, her too). Don't tell me they just mean those other ones, those ones who are so monstrous, those ones who are always scary instead of just every once in a while, the ones who do thus-and-so or will never such-and-such and do not, cannot, will not fill-in-the-thing-you-want-to-serve-as-the-act-or-quality-that-redeems-a-life-and-makes-it-worth-living-or-saving-here. Believe me, I have known them too, those ones. They're my kith and kin and cousins and kind, okay? And they're people. They are people. They are people no matter what, we're all people, we're life that wants mostly to live, as life does, monster or no.
There is that wound in a lot of us, and it's ugly, and I haven't reconciled myself with mine, and I do not like to show it. I do not like to write about it. I don't want it to sound like I'm just wretchedly miserable all the time, or even all that often, or for only that one reason. I don't want it to sound like I don't understand that I'm loved and lucky and far less scabbed and scarred than most people on this earth. I don't want to be all YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT IT'S LIIIIIIIIIKE (except, of course, that you don't know what it's like and never will-- and yeah, nobody ever knows really what it's like to be anybody else, but there's greater and lesser distances and there are intersections and there is unknown country and shut up if you're heading into that argument). All I'm saying is, remember that we are people, we have lives and had lives before we were killed, and I guarantee you, I fucking guarantee you, there was joy in those lives somewhere. Goddamnit. That's all, okay? Promise. All I want is for you to remember that we're people, individual real people, and that if you believe in souls, we probably have them as much as you do. And remember that such people go through life knowing that they aren't supposed to exist, that they are not welcomed in houses or in the world, that no matter what they do or say or learn or become, they will never, ever redeem themselves for the sin of being in the first place. It kinda sucks.
Happy Autism Awareness Month.
Don't worry. You're not going to hear any carping about it from me again.