When “aspie” isn’t you….

I will never be like you. You can try to understand me, and you will see glimpses, but you will never get me, never. Trying to explain me is like trying to explain a color that doesn’t exist, a color I can readily see and am familiar with in all its shades and forms, but still a nonexistent color to you. It’s like trying to explain what a wish is to someone who doesn’t believe in magic. Or showing an alien artifact to a scientist and expecting him to interpret the unknown elements. It can’t be done. I can’t be done. I can’t be undone. I just am and you just are. And here we are: two distant stars.

You understand this planet, at least to a degree you do. I don’t. I never will. I don’t get the things some might call simple. I don’t get the things some may call average or familiar. I don’t understand lies. I don’t understand life without immense passion. I don’t understand why anyone would dare to hurt anyone or anything on purpose. But I do understand hurt. What is it other than the bleeding soul?

I long for you to understand me. To hear me. To see me. But so many, this you you are and the other you’s out there, they won’t. They just can’t. It’s not about lacking capacity or something that is better or worse, or something that is special or odd. There are no labels. Where I come from, wherever that be, the boxes, the names, the titles, or what have yous—these invented ways of deciphering and existing—they don’t exist. So it’s not about dividing or exacting. None of that matters.

What it is about is separation, the split, the way in which my mind and the heart connected cannot fathom the ways of the world, and how, in this separation, I am left isolated daily, walking outside the existence I lead, feeling more than any soul ought to, and knowing more than I recognize.

You can’t see me. You can’t truly see me. You can’t understand. And I hide behind this smile, though genuine it be, waiting and waiting for the time to come where the veil is lifted, and once again, I am here, no longer isolated in a land I don’t recognize.

Sam Craft, Everyday Aspergers
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