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The Other World

From what I've read, it's common for people who are on the autism spectrum to express the feeling that they were born on the wrong planet.  I can say that I experience that feeling.  When I was young, I joked that I was literally an alien, saying that I arrived on Earth six centuries ago from the planet Tylius.  This was my jocular way of expressing something I didn't understand.  I wasn't diagnosed with autism until my late thirties.  As a child, I knew I was different, but I didn't know why.  Most of the people around me insisted that I wasn't different.  They thought my problems were all behavioral.  Some of the few people who noticed that there was something different about me assumed I was gay.  They were kids, and that was the only kind of different they'd ever heard of.

I still feel like an alien.  As I get older, the feeling gets worse.  I pretend to be normal.   The longer I pretend, the more obvious it is to me that I'm pretending.  I have a persistent, convincing feeling that there's another world beyond this one, and maybe that's where I'm from.  Maybe my spirit was switched with a human's at birth or something.  Maybe this alternate wold has magic in it.  Sometimes I feel like I could touch that other world or even enter it.  Maybe the correct hand motions or the right mindset can make the other world accessible to me.  What if I could get there?  Would I go back to where I belong?  All this hovers between fantasy and reality for me, and I'm only slightly concerned with or interested in its settling in either realm.  Sometimes, staying in that gray in-between seems like the best way to live.

Comments

  1. LenaMarch 9, 2018 at 3:51 PM

    I thought I was an alien before I was diagnosed with OCD and knew what it was. I was so relieved to learn many people had what I had.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Ryan DMarch 31, 2018 at 3:02 AM

      Knowing others experience what I experience definite makes me feel somewhat less alone.

      Delete

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