If you don’t have Autism…
Imagine that you’ve just got home from a night out.
You’re completely off your face and, to get to your room you have to walk down a corridor in which the walls are all plastered with the craziest psychedelic wallpaper so, not only is everything spinning in your head from what you’ve taken, not only are you convinced that the cupboard at the top of the stairs has just grown a mouth and spoken to you, but you also find yourself having to navigate through some sort of optical illusion maze before you can go to bed.
Your mate who was with you on the night out though, whose had exactly the same stuff that you’ve had, is striding to her room, walking completely normally, not phased at all by the literal maze that’s appeared in your house in the time that you were out. She’s already at the door to her bedroom in fact, shouting down the corridor, asking you ‘what’s taking you so long?’, why you’re just ‘standing at the top of the stairs next to the cupboard, motionless, unable to move.
You don’t get it.
You don’t get how she was completely unphased, how it didn’t slow her down at all, and yet, here you are, talking to a cupboard, completely incapacitated, the overwhelm you feel in your mind having made you literally unable to walk the length of a corridor (and, we’re talking a semi-detached house in Doncaster here by the way, it’s not a corridor in a mansion that you’ve got to navigate)…
But, you just can’t do it.
So you shout back to your friend that;
‘it’s the wallpaper.’
You tell her that ‘it’s making your head feel all funny.’
Looking back at you with a confused expression on her face, she replies,
‘What wallpaper?’
The thing that completely derailed you didn’t affect her because, outside of your mind, it has never even existed…
To you, it is impossible to navigate.
To her, to everyone else with a ‘normal’ brain, it’s…
just a wall?
The very thing(s) that stop us in our tracks, that can make us completely incompetent at functioning like a ‘normal’ human being-
socialising,
going ‘off plan’-
just ‘little’ things that to you are colossal, to other people, they just do them without a second thought. Because, it’s not a ‘circumstantial’ thing. It’s not ‘catching’ or ‘triggered’ by certain things (an ‘episode’ can be triggered but, the actual ‘thing’ is always there. The actual ‘thing’ being…
Autism.
We’re made to feel different because…
we are.
But, this isn’t always a bad thing.
As in the example of the wallpaper, having Autism allows us to see the world differently. And, to be honest, I’d take crazy psychedelic wallpaper over magnolia painted walls any day.
Life with Autism= Life in full colour
(even if somewhat trippy).
❤
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