different

A bit of a rant, not meant to be a serious piece of literature-- just my feelings on how autism has affected my life and the perceptions of those around me.

All people ever talk about is how I’m different.

Oh, normally it’s not malicious- I hear the word “superpower” a lot, I guess. People look at my disorder with a sense of wonderment, a sort of “wow” factor that neurotypical people just don’t get. People praise my intelligence, my ability to hone in on the finer details all the time, the ‘honesty’ that I seem to possess; all of those traits that can be romanticized and attributed simply to having a better brain.

It’s what they don't like, however, that is the problem.

My noise sensitivity. My inability to read social cues. The auditory processing that requires me to hear a sentence a thousand times before it registers. The impairments to my personality that leave me silent more times than not. The exhaustion that comes with doing any task, that forces me to sleep for hours after I get home from school to recover. The sensitive emotions, hurt by every little thing but never understanding when something is meant to hurt me. Hyper-fixating on something to the point where I can do nothing else, so focused on the task at hand that I forget to eat, sleep, and drink water. My misophonia, my hyperlexia, my hypercalculia. My inability to read sarcasm, the way everything I say sounds like a jab or a joke. My flat face, always read as angry or unapproachable, when I feel perfectly fine. The amount of masking I do to hide all of this-- the way my life is one big goddamned lie.

No matter what they say, autism will never be a superpower. I don't believe it’s truly a disease, nor the terrible thing that moms on Facebook make it out to be, but I sure as hell will not be saving any cities anytime soon. It’s hard to live in a world that was never designed to include you in it, especially when you’re labeled “different”.

Sometimes I wonder if it would be easier to never have lived at all.

Author's Note

Thanks for reading! This is based off of my own personal experiences, and do not reflect everyone's own lives.