The Electricity of Every Living Thing

Well, here’s the thing. When you have spent your entire life so far – childhood and adulthood – feeling as though you’re continually circling the plug hole of not coping, you end up wanting to make sense of it. It really isn’t so hard to understand. When you’ve made multiple attempts to pull yourself together, and to tamp down your own experience of the world, but it’s still painfully evident that you’re different from the people around you; when that difference, or the process of trying to ignore it, frequently makes you sick; when you realise it will probably shorten your life because you drink too much to cope, or your blood pressure runs high, or you wonder how many more times you can withstand the feeling of crashing out of the mainstream world and falling through the cracks; then you might just begin to think that it would be convenient to name the thing that’s made everything so bloody hard.

It seems to me now that it’s not that I fail to manage the simplest challenges, but that I pass too well. I am addicted to passing, and not just in the sense of going unnoticed. I want more than that. I want to be well adjusted to the point of inspiration, hyper-normal. I want to be everyone’s favourite. I don’t care about the cost, the way it breaks me open and exhausts me and sickens me. Am I willing to dismantle that carefully made passing for something as intangible as self-knowledge?

There was something going on that was real enough to me, but which I couldn’t seem to transmit to anyone else. The only conclusion I could draw was that I was making a fuss over nothing, always. I was clearly just coping badly with perfectly normal things.

I realised that I didn’t fit a pattern somehow, that I just didn’t seem quite distressed enough. But I was a master, by then, of the surface appearance. I had watched, carefully, the way that other people behaved, and mimicked it precisely.

Perhaps he has just never been at the wrong end of a dead-eyed bombardment of boy-band facts from a particularly obsessed teenage girl.

We’re not an evolutionary accident, but an adaptation. We are not what you think we are. We are useful, valued, loved. We’re the scientists and artists, the dreamers and the engineers. We’re vital to all of it. We’ve been pushing it forward and holding it together while the extroverts take all the glory.

People carry electricity for me; they have a current that surges around my body until I’m exhausted. It’s hard to pinpoint what it is, exactly; something about their noise, their unruly movement, the unpredictable demands they might make on me. It makes the air feel thick, like humanity has…not a scent, but a texture. It makes me feel like I can’t breathe.

Go to work: grinding guilt at my absence. Stay at home: grinding guilt at my own impatience. I may as well enjoy myself while I’m feeling guilty.

People like me can live entire lives wondering why everything is so hard for us. Doctors, teachers and mental health professionals are still routinely unable to spot our autism, and their knowledge is often agonisingly out of date. The invisibility endures. My book, sadly, is very much of the moment.