Letter from a Happy Autistic

Hello, human being. Even if you don't always notice it, I'm very glad to meet you.

What? You don't ask me “How are you?” but keep pressing me with “Why are you like this?” I'm used to that question by now. Yes, it implies there's something different between us. But aren't we all different? What the question really implies is that there's a difference you're not entirely comfortable with. That's my fault. I haven't shown you my world.

My world begins just like yours: with an “I”. From this I, rationally tied to the body, I experience life. Everything I call mine, including the body, the memories, the actions, the perceptions, depends on this pure consciousness that “I” am. I am beyond all experience, the indefinable source of every instant, the divine essence of being. Just like you.

Now, the moment I settle into this identity and move through this society, a form shows up that colors the expressions of this individuality. I exist naturally, of course; there's no neural abnormality or anything of the sort. I built my body from the DNA my human parents gave me. Everything here is human, except maybe me. The differences are born on a level that isn't physical. I might call it the soul.

If you ask me about my soul, I could tell you what it tells me. When I listen to it, sometimes it says: “I am a wanderer. I have traveled far. I have visited countless worlds. I have known a great variety of riches. I have contemplated nights and dawns. I have witnessed unsuspected natures. Galaxies, stars, nebulae. And here I continue my journey.” I ask it: “How are you?” It answers: “This world is strange. Madness rules my whole species. There is hatred, struggle and selfishness, prejudice, incomprehension. It's a little hard for me to live here. I can't seem to adapt.”

So here is my presence, unable to adapt to the concepts that make up the web connecting humans to one another. A lot of things make no sense anyway. And I get along very well in this life, despite this society's pressure for all of us to be the same. Over the years I've learned to ignore it. I've learned to accept myself. I suffered plenty as a child, when even the people dearest to me demanded things I didn't know how to give. You can ask a turtle to pull its head in, but you can't ask that of a fish. The form my soul takes doesn't fit the expectations that are common here. I am a foreigner in this world, hounded by xenophobia.

Are there difficulties? Yes. The main one, as you've noticed, is communication. It's hard for me to shape ideas into words and gestures in a way you can understand. Ideas that are natural to me, even if sometimes they make no rational sense, just as your ideas often don't either. But notice that the mechanism, from the existing of the “I” to the pronouncing of the spoken words, is exactly the same as yours. There's just one detail, a lag at the moment of connecting. “Layer 2 protocols,” a computer guy would say. It's as if the muscle in me that should stretch toward you the phone line you expect and are used to just failed.

I'm not comfortable looking you in the eye. And it has nothing to do with superiority. It has nothing to do with not communicating. And it has nothing to do with insensitivity. On the contrary, what I feel in a gaze is so intense it overwhelms me. With one glance I can already see you and know inside me who I'm communicating with. But only that far, because if you went any further I'd feel it as an invasion. I recognize a fear of losing something vital in me. Maybe a peace, maybe a refuge. This is my soap bubble.

So I'd rather stay calm, centered in myself. My eyes can wander in many directions. But what I like most is not focusing my gaze on anything. That way I focus it on that “me”. And this “me” is the greatest delight there is. The soap bubble I mention keeps me inside, savoring an atmosphere that absorbs me and sometimes distracts me.

When I talk with you, it's you I want to talk to. But, tucked inside this soap bubble, I can't aim the words at you. So I aim them at the one I remember you are. I can close my eyes but keep you in my memory, and it's to the memory I have of you that I speak.

Something curious happens, which can be very trying for the impatient: every expression comes with a varying kind of clumsiness. It may look physical, because it shows up in things like handwriting, walking properly or even holding a fork. But it's really a matter of coordination, a misfit between two pieces, this soul and this body. It's like the story of a fish born a turtle who didn't know how to move the fins on its turtle body. Just as I can't fully communicate with you, I don't know how to communicate with my body's movements either.

The thickness of my soap bubble, which could have been different, is what decides how deep my haze would have been. Maybe I could have been born locked behind metal bars; as it happened, in a delicate soap bubble.

One of my quirks has to do with repetition. Some things I like so much I don't want to let them go. My favorite songs, many of them old, never get old for me. My home is priceless; the more stable, the better. On the other hand, repetition drives me up the wall. If I tell a story to one person and then have to tell it to another, I'll say it in other words. If I go from home to work every day, I'll try never to take the same route twice. Walking, talking, even the way I sit: my nuttiness shows up in all of it. A non-obsessive nuttiness, I think. Well, maybe a bit repetitive at times.

My world is wide. Everyone fits here. I have no enemies. I have no barriers. But yes, I'll complain when you invade me. In fact, it'll drive me crazy (rationally, of course; it's not that I'm really-truly crazy). I love you dearly, human being, but don't cross the boundaries of my individuality. It is sacred to me, far more than any communication. Here I guard a priceless treasure I don't want to let go of for any reason. Maybe a peace, maybe a refuge. This is my contradiction, the one that has blocked me when I've wanted to connect, because I don't want to neglect the shelter I treasure.

It's this other quirk, the protective one, that starts to set up the soap bubble. I picture in my imagination my perfect situation, where I feel good, where I have some control over how things will go in life, where my world doesn't fall apart. I bring this ideal about as far as I can. But when I can't, this world I need so badly is denied to me. Something is wrong, something frightens me. I don't know what to do. Sometimes I act irrationally, as if trying to erase from the screen of my mind whatever I don't want there. Where I meant to hurl the curse wasn't where it physically landed, but at the blackboard that unfolds in my gaze, on which I read my flaws.

But what a treasure it is, the one that shelters me! Here, when I'm alone, I'm free to act without answering to prejudice, without the madness of this world getting to me. I pick my nose, I scratch my back, I laugh with no one hearing me, I sing with no one suffering. I nourish myself by finding myself, I rejoice in finding myself again. No eyes on me. No worries.

Here I find more advantages too. I have an uncommon knack for certain subjects. In my case it points to some aspects of mathematical laws, the logic in computing, and some subtleties in life's situations.

My soul told me a secret once. It told me that a long, long time ago, it came to this world. It told me it was received without joy. It told me those who received it didn't consider it, drowned in their selfishness. That this selfishness followed a very important principle, which was to survive in an atrocious world. To my soul, the world didn't seem atrocious; the selfishness did, wounding it like daggers. The situation hurt it so much that it left that world and took shelter in the darkness of a cave for thousands of centuries. When it wanted to be born again, it chose this very same world. Frightened, used to the warm darkness that shelters, and still disoriented, it was born here. Its firm purpose now is to overcome all pain, to learn to live amid this madness with a smile grounded in the knowledge of its being. Of my being.

I've seen that it's no use changing to be more like you. I don't say impossible, as if the fish born a turtle wanted to grow its fins back. But it is fruitless. You're not better than me, so why would I make the effort? I don't want to change to be more like you, but I do want to change. My path is to drop all the weight from my back. For nothing to matter. And it's not that things don't matter, but that they are so fleeting that nothing matters. Fish, turtle, what does it matter? Existing is a delight, whatever situation life happens to bring.

Understanding this is my path. Sometimes I call it healing, sometimes, better, transcendence. Here, in the freedom I find once my back is free of all weight, I understand that I am beyond any expression or form. You and I are the same. The differences are superficial. The lack of communication we see is irrelevant. In that center that we are, we are connected. In that center that I am, we are one.

Thank you for communicating with me.