These days I cry every day. I feel like I am grieving a kind of loss. A reflection of myself I am not able to un-see. Yet I am unable to see through my own tears.
My sorrow is springing from a well deep in my memories; and in my solitude I try to hug myself and soothe the shaking, and smooth out the wrinkles of my crushing loneliness.
The escaping sorrow is so deep it leaves me gasping for air. My body feels like I am under the ocean, and my inner self is drowning in the weight of my own emptiness. Like a person still underwater among people on land.
I cross my arms across my body and rub the side of my arms as if I am my own child. At the end of each round I am gasping for air. Again. Reaching down, a line connects my inner self to however I appear in the world, and from my heart in my chest, there is a well as deep as an ocean.
Every time I touch it, this cold loneliness, I descend, and all the air is pressed out of me. My face is tight, my eyes are pressed closed, the muscles in face are tense and my stomach too. I hold myself and caress. It feels like my first breath. Everything in is out, and we are waiting for that first silent cry, that pregnant pause, that crushing realisation, that we are here.
I’ve always known I was different. People told me, showed me, treated me differently. I never minded. I’d catch that reflection of myself in others. I never wanted to be normal. As I got older, I maintained a childlike enthusiasm and excitement. I was aware how I affected other people soaking emotions in and radiating them out.
My mother told me I was special. My special boy. The older I’ve got, this has become more, am I special or special? In reality it’s both.
I’m torn between the conflict of is and isn’t, hot and cold, light and dark, loved or hated. Special or Special. The world’s most gregarious loner. I’ve been struggling. Feeling caught between a polar expression and reflection, wondering who I am. Am I the mirror, or mere reflection. Life is really held in-between.
It’s funny how everything I write these days ends up as a discourse on emptiness. Somehow all my pain emanates from my misconception. It takes a poem of my grief and abstracts it. To say that my grief is a wrong view. This is probably only half the story.
Recently I caught a glimpse of myself, a reflection, and I’ve been unable to let it go. There was a reddit post saying, ‘no one prepares you for the loneliness of high functioning autism. How lonely you will become.’ Someone in the comments wrote that they felt or perceived too normal for divergent, and too divergent for normal. Feeling like they fit in nowhere.
no one prepares you for how lonely you will become
Reddit?
Something about my current predicament, and what I know of my friends, mostly men, although I’ve met quite a few autistic women, is how much they are struggling as they get older. It’s funny in a way. How did we all become so estranged from each other? How did we become so lonely?
I keep avoiding writing it, but I think I have been avoiding grieving or accepting how lonely I am. How lonely I have been. I always say it as my responsibility to remain idealistic and dream. To maintain a childlike enthusiasm and excitement. To believe in love, and imagined what it would be if it existed. What purpose would it serve. Intellectually I found it. And ‘I’ve been dreaming, this whole time.’
If life is a reflection of yourself, the way you perceive the world is partly up to you. I reasoned that we are all in a collective dream. A world of symbols. That our shared reality is a fought over consensus. I also knew, that belief is the limiting factor. Seek and ye shall find.
I chose to give my life to the idea that the unconscious of everyone was like the omnipotence of the divine. Life as a push and pull, and I’ve tried to live it with love and gut feeling, while holding on to the idea that love can save the world, even if its fear that motivates us. But I’ve been trying to ignore how scared and lonely I am. I am too tired to pretend I am something I am not. I want to be honest. I want to be real. I don’t have the energy for the ceremony and appearance. More, I can’t bear the weight of all of one, with none of the other.
It’s’ strange, recently, the tv series shogun offerers an insight into the social conventions of 16th century Japan. Someone else also said, that it’s these type of conventions, even alien or outdated that hold society together. When all conventions and social norms are abandoned, ‘society’ at least as we know it collapses.
In my own personal struggle, I feel there needs to be a revolution in our way of being. We need to transcend, in our understanding, the mechanism of our minds and the relative model it uses. We need to become more comfortable with not knowing. And more accepting there are things we may never know. We need to find our fears and face them. Befriend them and stop separating them. Othering them. We are scared of our own shadows, and we don’t seem to know it.
This post is already too long to be writing about Vajrayana buddhism, but I am happy to have given my life to this dream. It has mostly been in secret. I feel between worlds.
Sometimes I dream, I am a long lost lama. A lama who left his school, his world, his love, and came back to a life where no one knew him. That’s how I felt. I dream that I chose to suffer all experience of human misery. Faith in the stages of the path. That in some way enlightenment is inevitable.
I realise my life is out of balance, and I don’t really know how to right it. Thinking of myself as different has in some way been my protection and an armour I wore, but poison is medicine and medicine is poison. Special is special. To develop compassion for myself and others, is to accept that I am lonely, and I am other people, and other people are lonely too.
I’ve been trying to be strong for so so long, but for now, I just want to cry to be myself.
