#sorry i just. the whole thing with my autism expiring and me explaining it to my peers at college was like.

[thiefnessman]

“ooooh late-diagnosed people have it so hard it’s so much better for people who were diagnosed in their childhood” stop it! they’re just giving you excuses! i was diagnosed with autism at a young age and my college refused to accept my paperwork because it was “too old”, meanwhile a bunch of my peers are given shit when seeking accommodations and whatnot because “ooh you were diagnosed too late”. no one has it better they’re just telling you bullshit.

[memoirsofabasicbitch]

The thing is, I’m not entirely sure I remember how to dream. How to write. How to imagine anything independently of a world created by someone else, in their mind.

I’ve grown so used to hanging my dreams on what other people have created for me that I don’t know if that person is still in there.

That weird little girl, who peeled acorns for squirrels, and walked in circles over and over and over again on the roots of the big oak tree. She had a big imagination. She told herself all sorts of stories.

Was it just because I couldn’t play the other games? Too slow - reflexes and running. Too weak - climbing, throwing, running, playing.

(Or was it because I wasn’t allowed to — couldn’t — play those games? I have a few dim memories of trying to play and being sent away. They’re dim though. I stopped asking.)

Or was it simply that I was filling time? Waiting until I could go back into a world I could navigate a little better than the playground?

Sometimes, though, I was waiting. Hoping, really.

More than a few times.

A lot.

I hoped, I thought, maybe - maybe if I walk in the right way, I’ll hear the trees laughing, like Anne told Diana about. Maybe they’ll talk to me. Maybe a faerie will come creeping out from a little crevice and wave, winking. Maybe a squirrel will come crawling down the wrinkled bark while I watch, and take the little heap of acorn meat I’d left for him. Maybe there’s a tiny scrap of magic somewhere in the world that I just haven’t found yet.

I haven’t had dreams for a long time. That’s what happens when your dreams have expiration dates. I’ve already missed most of mine.

Never really even came close.

I had a “schedule” that makes me want to cry to think of it. Meet someone in college or shortly after. Get married by 25, so we would have a few years together after college. Have our first child by 27, because mom always said I should start having babies by 30 if I really wanted to have more than one and space them out.

I’m 28. I’ve never had a real relationship with anyone, romantic or platonic. I’ve never had a best friend who would place me on the same importance as I would them.

I have borderline personality disorder. I have adhd. I am on the autism spectrum. I have depression and anxiety so severe they cripple me. More than one of these things may be false. The symptoms are nearly indistinguishable once you have more than 2. No one will give me a straight answer, and no two doctors can agree.

Added onto years of emotional and mental abuse - which is what it was, wasn’t it. Maybe because I’m autistic, maybe it really was that bad. Neglect, sure. Public humiliation, that happened too, I’m pretty sure. Being told flat out that I was stupid and fat and ugly and I was lucky to have any friends at all so maybe I should just shut up and sit down before I ended up with none.

I’m pretty sure that happened. I don’t really remember it though. I don’t really have any memories at all.

Supposedly that’s something that happens with “complex post traumatic stress disorder,” which generally crops up when a person is systematically ground down for a long time until there is nothing left but the stories they told themselves when they tried to explain to the fake audience in their head who they were. How they got that way.

I don’t know who I was, who I could have been if I hadn’t had the life I did. Maybe my memories are skewed.

My therapist didn’t seem to think so, but she also sometimes seemed to think I was full of shit. That’s probably me reading too much into things again. That’s what I do.

Was it really that bad? I remember a lot of screaming, and crying, and hiding, and wishing I was dead or that someone would just hit me already so I would have something to say, to tell people other than “they yell at me and make me cry and sometimes they grab my arms and shake me and sometimes they tell me they’ll throw me out onto the street to fend for myself and sometimes they tell me they love me so much they’re so sorry and then sometimes they cry”.

But how much of that was me? How much was that my perception of things? Am I really that crazy, or have I really been gaslit that much? Is it gaslighting if they didn’t even realize how much pain they caused you, which is why they say “it wasn’t that bad stop exaggerating”?

Did I imagine all of it?

If I did, if I didn’t, what was real? What had the weight I felt it carry? What should have been a minor blip in my life but instead metastasized into a catastrophe?

I don’t know. Maybe I never knew. Reality hasn’t ever been my friend.

Fantasy is so much better.

It’s painful now, though. To read some of these stories, these books I used to adore.

Stories about Mature Adult Women of 25! Whole! Years! Going on adventures and meeting their soulmates and having wonderful happy lives.

I’m spiraling. It’s late. I’m tired and a little high, wishing I was higher and maybe I wouldn’t be so bored.

Bilbo was middle aged, wasn’t he? When he went on his adventure? He had an adventure, and then he came home and had a long, rich, happy, lonely, bitter life. Hmm. Perhaps the one ring is not the best foundation for a guiding principle.

I went to law school because I’d come to the end of every plan I actually had. (You don’t really plan for a future when you’ve been suicidal since before puberty.) I figured I’d get to read and write at least reasonably interesting things, make good money, maybe even make a difference.

I’ve been a paralegal for the same law firm I worked for right out of college for two years now and I have never felt more like a shambling corpse.

When I graduated from college, I couldn’t get a job. Could I have tried harder? Sure. Is executive dysfunction a bitch? You bet.

So I worked for a family friend’s law firm. Personal injury and medical malpractice. She’s the mother of my older sister’s oldest best friend and has employed all of my mother’s three daughters.

She’s also a heinous bitch and a terrible boss. Her employees have a shelf life of about 2 years. I’ve hit my expiration date. Once you’ve audibly cried during a phone conference, you’re really near the bottom. Once she decides you suck at your job, there’s no coming back. Either you quit or you get fired. She prefers when people quit so she can blame them and not feel guilty. So she just increasingly treats people worse and worse until they quit in self defense.

I worked for her for a year. It was awful. I became an alcoholic and gained 25+ lbs.

I decided to go to law school.

I moved to New Orleans.

I made friends. I had an apartment all to myself. I had a life I actually enjoyed.

Then I graduated.

And I couldn’t get a job again.

(Of course, all of this is underpinned with my cyclical periods of intense illness, often accompanied by being hospitalized and missing long periods of school. In college and in law school, actually.)

(All the cocaine and drinking didn’t help either.)

(Ah, New Orleans. How I miss thee.)

So I ended up at the same firm again. Living with my parents. Again.

Then I passed the bar.

Now I’m doing the same work as my younger sister, for the same amount of money. (When she graduated from her masters program and was unemployed for 6 months, I convinced my boss to hire my younger sister again, and my sister to work for my boss again after a semi-disastrous summer job.)

(To be fair, while I’m technically a licensed attorney, she has a masters in education, so it’s not like there’s a massive education disparity here.)

(It doesn’t help that I’m barred in a different jurisdiction than the one my firm typically works in, so there aren’t any cases I can really work on as an attorney, and then on top of that my bosses don’t want to pay for malpractice insurance for me so I’m not allowed to practice as an attorney or put that I’m an attorney or call myself an attorney or even put in my letterhead that I’m licensed in the District of Columbia.)

Then there was a pandemic, and I decided I probably shouldn’t try to make a huge life change during a pandemic.

The pandemic is still fucking here. Nearly. Two. Years. Later.

So I guess I have to make a new plan.

Can I be a lawyer? I guess we’ll see.

I don’t really want to, though. I’m burned out and I wasn’t even practicing.

I want to move to a beach and write a novel and actually have a life I enjoy.

The problems with this plan are numerous. Not only is inertia an incredibly powerful enemy of mine, but I’ve lost all imagination.

I cannot imagine a future in which I am happy. Will I kill myself? Probably not, at least not for a long while. I’ve thought too long and hard about the long-lasting, far-reaching repercussions it would have. (Say what I will about my family, at least it’s always been clear that my death is NOT an acceptable outcome.)

I want to find my imagination again. I want to be able to imagine not only a future in which I am happy, but other futures, other worlds. I want to be able to dream, not only for me, not only for reality, but for unreality. I want to create worlds in my mind again, and allow them to take whatever shapes they wish.

I don’t know if I can. I don’t know if all those horrible teachers, all those “peer editors” in fucking elementary school were right, and my story ideas are hackneyed and overwrought.

Wouldn’t it be nice, though, if they were wrong. Wouldn’t it be nice, to start writing, and to find that my imagination didn’t go so very far.

It’s been hiding in the intertwined branches of a birch grove, slim and tall and ringing with laughter. In the space between stars. Down the path shaded with wisteria and jasmine and honeysuckle, where the scent and the heat and the humidity are so thick you can feel the heavy perfume coating your lungs. Tucked away, safe, waiting to peek out. Waiting to creep down the wrinkled bark of a huge old oak and wink at the little girl playing among its roots.

I hope it is there. I hope I can find it.

I’ll keep you posted.

This is my own personal void to yell into, after all.