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The Wasteland

I need repetition.  I don't seek excitement.  My small, quiet life might seem boring.  Boredom is predictable.  When I go out, I go into a world I can't interpret. I have no handhold anywhere there. So I need predictability to make me feel safe.  I keep routines I devise because I can know them.

The World of Other People is crowded with signals.  There's pressure to be part of everything.  Gatekeepers to acceptance fold their arms and wait for me to impress them with my social acumen.  I know some signs but none well.  I have to think hard about every aspect of every interaction; I can't improvise.  Being outside my safe zone, forced to follow social rituals' mystifying protocol, I feel like I'm somewhere I don't belong.  It's a desperate, drowning feeling.  A squeezing, crushing.  I overload trying to process posture, context, facial expression, tone of voice, hints and intimations, trying to guess what I'm expected to infer, all on my own.  The system is made for neurotypical people.  I feel displaced, alien. 

My routines reassure me that there's something I can navigate.  The World of Other People has no map.  No Virgil.  My world is controlled and I know all the rules because I made them.  It's where I feel stable.  Thus it can seem more real than the World of Other People.  It's simple, comprehensible, and I know what's there.  I can invest in it because it isn't chaotic.  

Outside is confusion because I miss signals.  I guess wrong.  I can't see what's coming but I'm supposed to.  And people that don't need help can't give it.  They move easily and they don't know they're doing anything complicated.  Some of them feel a little like me: like they're just winging it out there.  They might say that I'm not experiencing anything that they don't experience.  But I am and the difference, like all thorough explanations of autism, is clinical.  

Ordinary people get nothing from clinical explanations.  If we want to foster understanding we have to discipline our language. So imagine that I'm blind.  If a sighted person and I suddenly had to walk an obstacle course, would we both experience identical stress?  This is something to consider.  I face the world at a significant disadvantage from the start.  And I feel it. 

So I cultivate in my routines a separation without which I feel untethered: my world from theirs, inside from outside, home from the Wasteland.

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