identity

545: The Numbing Point

| Aspergers Girls

Somehow, I am a box, the box itself, opened and watching one after another of a torrential stormy land unfold and reveal itself.

Layer upon layer of history and mystery and truths and untruths, all intermingled and hung out to dry.

I stumble, some eyes-wide-open girl, pushing through the tangible thoughts.

Trudging in and out of random memories and formulations.

Much like a computer brought to life; only with raw emotion and temperament, and pain.

I am both the spectator, watching, and the participant, dreading.

Meandering through what has passed, what might be, and what is to come.

Entering a premonition-dimension all whitewashed across the interior of my reckoning.

An entity wrapped inside, opening with one quick stroke to the ‘what-of-me?’

I intake, reaching untimely conclusions at rapid speeds, left twirling in afterthought and apprehension.

And behind this beyond is yet another broken voice screaming my demise: some torn-out, abandoned demon attempting to sliver its way back in.

And still another, quite broken in its proclaimed ‘un-brokeness,’ quivers nearby, judging each string of thought.

At times I am that mirror facing that mirror, reaching into infinity, my limit of selflessness limitless.

Confusion brought upon confusion, interruption placating interruption, each theory and circumstance trying to predicate the next.

A judge. A jury. An entire assembly of multiple communes all gathered in a singular speck.

And all at once there is this nowhere, and I am lost, drowning in what seems to be logic and feasible steps to the opposite of entrance.

Only each way pulls further. Again, and again, fooling me into thinking it’s a truth, the accurate avenue of escape.

But what am I running from?

Am I so predisposition for analysis that I am predisposed to slipping beyond reality?

What are these propelling thoughts that seem as comforting friend set about as offered confidant, when in actuality they be but bitter tastes, gathered entities, scattered brain-firings awakening prospect after prospect after prospect?

I cannot untie myself from this pain; I am no escape artist.

I am but a trepid flame doused with fuel after fuel, in all forms, to arouse the dragon-centered-heart.

I am opened and set apart and made to bleed out, continually abandoned.

Help is nowhere and everywhere; and that is where the terror sets spindly claw in motion.

Straight out, in the thought that nowhere in the thought is a resolution.

In the thought that each inching perceived as somehow forward is indeed illusion of progress.

That in fact, I am no further now than before, only set upon differing landscape, created by yet another skewed view.

I am where I set out to look.

My angle determines my outlook; my perching point, the end result.

And yet, point after point, I still gather my self upon, to collect the data set forth, in hopes of knowing what is.

And point after point fails me.

Bending, misshapen forms retreating and becoming foundation no more.

The naught of everything evaporating before these wearied wandering eyes.

And so it is, full circle, this numbing point…

I am endless in this reasoning and there is no resolution where thought breathes.

I am but a buttered lady, slipping through the spokes of motion.

I am that honeydew drop immersed in the morning light and made as vapor for the taking.

Everywhere abounds insight and happenings.

Yet nothing ends.

Nothing begins.

And all is left as forgery revealed; mysterious markings of what would be masterpieces; only they are devalued in the discovery of falsehood.

542: Self

| Aspergers Girls
self
self

I know what I am not but not what I am. I know when to stop but not when to stop starting. I can inch my way into the middle and get stuck in the molasses of neither here nor there. I don’t know how to swim upstream without pounding pain, and instead, in alternate route, float downstream away from the waters where all else abounds.

Somewhere I have forgotten myself, and I search to find her, thinking I have arrived, only to once more find I am at the backdoor looking into what was and thinking I had known then.

I cannot remember who or where I have been, anymore than I can visualize where I am going. I am lost, in a time maze of confusion, falling upon a self I cannot fathom or detect.

She is there, in the shadowed-tunnel, collapsing and reborn into another, faster than humanly feasible. She is multitudes unopened and reopened—an anomaly in form. To be and not to be. To care and not to care. To unravel into the very depths of reason and peer down into the pond of ‘me.’ Only to question what it is that stares back with such disregard and wonderment.

I am but enough and then I am unequivocally lacking, never measuring up to the enforced standards absorbed from the path I walk. I clamor for explanation and find a thousand books untouched, though in some fashion taken into the realm of reason. I can feel the words: the spoken, the whispered, the silenced, the ones that never came and ones that never speared the element that is I.

They make me. They form me. They penetrate me into something I know not. Clay to my mind. Dirt to my heart. Scattered residue of earthly wants and needs. Goods that I am neither capable of grasping or acquiring.

I am this existence that the observer watches. Reformed with the passerby. Morphed into their reality and then left, unscattered and splattered, broken and unbroken, in a pool of endless duality.

I am what I am—yet only for a fleeting moment; a chance to take glance towards the outline of my palm, the beat of my heart, the opening of a billion universes. Everywhere I am, and at once I am alone. Isolated. A loneliness no less easy to explain than the essence of what I have become. ~ Sam, 7/24/15

525: Pre-Return

| Aspergers Girls

There are moments as if someone has stopped the dripping faucet in the mind’s eye, replaced a cardboard box with a feathery-down pillow, and removed each segmented-sliver from the stretch of the entire sensory-skin. Here, in these times, everything stops and the world seems manageable.

I’d hoped, in such intervals, that I could be like another in the way of my thinking: liken to the majority, who don’t have to climb over various mounds of seeming nonsense to get to the reality of a situation. However now, I think that part of my reality is the journey itself, the way in which I weave and turn, and even blunder in thought, being a collective representation of my own truth. I’ve come to understand that my complexity is partially what makes me, and that the sole sum of my parts equates a dynamic search for some form of truth.

In my reality, I am a truth seeker, and in here rests my chainmail of heaviness.

I woke up this early morn returned to me, after a brief reprieve. Before this morning, in those intervals of yesterday, my mind felt light and airy, and much as I imagine it would feel to be this someone else, without the agony of intense contemplation. Hours before, I was gleeful and relieved, and anchored with a confidence of being, as if in existing somewhat freed from the burden of thought, I knew all was well. As if I recognized I could begin again to strive forward through life with easement of mind and recognition of hope. A happiness enveloped then, caressing me. A magical pill surrendering into dissolution inside my spinning spirit and setting me centered-mark upon serenity, contented in my own casket of self. Everything made way for the abstraction of pain and the taking in of gentle manner.

Yet, even with this release set open, the act of enveloping reprieve brought with it an unanswered woe. Drafty windows letting in wind’s whispers of another truth: the skins of a ghostly drapery dressed in the gauze of temporary. Hollowed out whispers echoing from nowhere and into nothing a jaunting truth of ‘this won’t last.’ And so it was, that even as I basked in the delightfulness of ease-of-mind, my ears opened to the emptiness, a realization of the inevitable return of before.

I am reminded in this way of the constant rotation of existence, in which elements collide and burst, and events never are at standstill. I am reminded in the ways of the universe, of how with every movement there is a consequence, and I am placed without exertion into the acceptance of this all. Therefore, even in these seemingly standstill moments, as I accept the long-awaited detour of complex thinking, I also recognize the familiar complexities so deemed: pre-return.

This experience could be equated to the lover slipped out of the arms of dismay. One once battered by the entrenchment of another’s ways, who remains teetering on the bending dock of instant relief, with the constant knowing of the unavoidable arrival of another’s return. Or of the blinding reflection in the huntress’ eyes penetrating the doe. For even as stillness captivates the arrow shall still decimate the heart. For to know the momentary absence of so-deemed chaos, is to breathe in the phantom stillness and turn back again the awakening.

And in so being, with eyes reopened again upon again, life becomes predictable in one way only: in the cycle of change. And rather then, our journey be that of buoyant surrendering, riding the waves as feather-light into the current-driven canals, moving neither forward nor backward, yet rather spinning into various intervals, landing somewhere in the ‘somewhats’ of before, with a differing perspective, not granted by the absence of time, but more so recreated by the angle in which thoughts have returned to hatch.

And so it seems, we are neither ablers or enablers of reality, but at last a mere reflection of all that moves within and about, constant drifters on the external and internal ocean. These self-proclaimed selves bleeding out the excess of returning thought into form, and form into naught, and pleading for the return of nothing. And here is where this ‘I’ exists: in the constant uniformed thoughts of knowing naught and in waiting for the tides to cease in an embodiment of water without end.

515: Invisibility

| Aspergers Girls

I don’t mind when someone challenges me, as I don’t take things as challenges anymore. As soon as I feel a rise in myself, whether that rise be quantified as anger, fear, sadness, or some deep powerful emotion, I stop and ask ‘why’? I don’t take the time to sit with the pain. I don’t think the pain is caused by another. I know all emotional pain is triggered by me. Triggered by my exact reasoning and in the resulting ‘truth’ I create based on what I choose to believe and what I choose to tell myself.

I lack the ability, anymore, to blame anyone for my own response and feelings. I own up to how I feel. It’s me. No one else is in control of me. No one.

I have learned that I can accept everything anyone gives out. I have learned, also, that I have the right and power to release what another gives—to kindly return it with a “thanks, but no thanks.”

No one’s thoughts, or words, or perception represent who I am. I know this fully. It’s not a concept I have to convince myself of, or remind myself of.

In many ways I am much more free than I was two years ago, during a time period wherein being in the public spotlight I held onto every stranger’s belief of me as truth. Had you told me five years ago that I would care about people but not care about what they thought of me, I would have thought you crazy, or at minimal an idealist who didn’t know me at all. How could I, so sensitive, so attune, so empathic, not ALWAYS care what people thought?

The truth is there came a point where I didn’t have a choice but to let go, because the two camps, my only options, were clearly marked: 1) Care about what everyone thinks about you and constantly yoyo back and forth in your self-perception and self-worth 2) Realize no one’s perception of you is accurate.

The latter took some hard looking and soul-searching, and some help from above—call it collective unconscious, angels, God, or aliens, no matter. There came a point where I was truly shown the light. I was given the vision of a room full of people, each standing on a soapbox and taking a turn to talk about me. Each was pulling from their random memories and past, from what they had chosen to collect, and then again chosen to remember. It was subjective to the third degree. Everyone’s view of me was first, and primarily, based on their own lives and gathered ideologies, belief systems, personalities, experience, etc. I was merely a random interpretation. I was a flower being dissected by multiple viewers. Some loved me for my sweetness. Some adored my beauty. Some merely saw me as a weed to be plucked. Some thought I stunk. Others inhaled and couldn’t get enough. Still, regardless of the onlookers, I remained a flower. Or at least that chance name I’d been assigned by society.

I theorized, in reviewing this vision, that it wasn’t just the loose interpretations of me that sporadically changed (and were skewed based on the onlooker and all the onlooker brought to the table from his or her past), but also the onlooker him/herself. Everyone’s view altered in any given random point of time. People were affected by their past (foundation they’d built up as truth) and by the moment in time they drew conclusions.

I realized also that any word, action, or subtle way in which I lived could bring about an altered interpretation. If I left my husband. If I abandoned my children. If I joined the circus. How would this audience interpret me then? And if they, the viewers, made any life changes, or faced crisis, or shifted consciousness or outlooks, how would their view of me change?

I saw how I had altered the way I looked at the world and others in the past years, and in so doing the people I thought I knew appeared different to me. It was only logical to conclude from my reasoning that I, ever-changing, would remain incapable of stagnant being based on continual transitioning. And that likewise others remained incapable of stagnant being, and thusly incapable of stagnant viewing of me.

In understanding I was nothing more than gathered evidence, and that the evidence itself always shifted based on the moment, circumstance, and the observer, I understood that I, this loose interpretation of I based on others’ viewpoints, was never stagnant in interpretation enough to be called factual.

With this, I saw that all opinions of me no longer mattered. Even the so-called ‘positive’ comments were not able to penetrate me. It made no sense to attach myself to fleeting ‘positive’ descriptors based on the once again random observers with their random viewpoints. Plus, if I was an information gatherer shifting my gathering, (what I caught in my positive net based on my shifting self), then how could I ensure what I gathered was substantiated by any form of non-stagnant truth?

Sure, I could know someone for years, and they could view me as consistently steadfast, sweet, and loyal, but what in that individual’s life made them an expert on those ‘virtues,’ and how much of me had she seen, had she known, and what had she missed? I could get a round about idea of who I was, but only based on a round about idea of who someone else was, (and where she’d been, what she’d experienced, and what ‘truths’ she momentarily upheld as valuable.) The complexities of attaching my being-ness to an outside source soon became an intellectual burden and a tiring mind-puzzle lacking any sort of sense-making end mark.

And beyond this, if I had latched on to semi-permanent, most-likely-true and reasonable interpretations of me, then how could I be judge and jury of self? How was I to decide what was me and what wasn’t me? How was I to allow myself to collect everything flowery and rosy and make this me, while disregarding and discarding the rest? How could that not be some extreme form of ego-lust and ego-building? It seemed logical that the only way out of the process and habit of decorating my self based on outlookers’ viewpoints was to disrobe myself of any and all doings and opinions of others.

From here it followed that in order to dispel the potential hypocrite inside of me, that if I were to discount others’ opinions about me in totality, then in equal balance it was essential that I discount my opinions about others. In other words, if others could not define me, I reasonably could not define others.

Next, the process became a matter of what to see, what to believe, and what to qualify as truth of those about me. And the only natural conclusion, that arose no further conflict or query within myself, was to apply love to all, to choose to see another being as another being and nothing more, to love the light in all, and to overlook the illusion of what appeared to be ‘wrong’ or ‘against’ me.

In a sense I had annihilated self through logic—the act of rationalizing no stagnant representation of ‘me’ existed. Without a true ‘self’ I had no true or stagnant opinions. In reality, my opinion couldn’t be trusted. My thoughts were just that: thoughts. Nothing more. Nothing less. Not bad, just not real.

If I had based my ‘wrong’ and ‘against,’ and the concept of me, on my limited scope of life, if I had based my judgment and view of the world on only what I had been exposed to, able to process and assimilate into memory, and able to recall with any ounce of reality, and then based all this recall on my current state of thinking, emotions, and environmental influence, if this be true, I was a constant changing judge. So to enlist my personal arsenal of evaluation on another was a form of temporary fallout and nothing more. It was adding illusion to illusion, and agreeing to be a game player in a game I no longer believed in.

And so the act of evaluating another became self-abusive. It actually hurt. It hurt because my mind was bombarded with this sequential reasoning that again and again reached the same conclusion, despite my ever-changing hypothesis: no matter what I thought at any given moment, it wasn’t permanent enough to remain true.

In addition, it is obvious to me, now, that I am dying off and I am regenerating. Some part of my body is digesting and decomposing, and another part is fighting and refueling. And just as the interior microscopic parts merge and shed, the exterior view of my life follows suit. There isn’t anything I can hold onto. And in this way there is no one I can hold onto either. I only have a fleeting moment in which I spot someone, and then he has changed as much as the rest. I cannot define self. I cannot define another.

And in this place of no definition and no judgment, I am freed. I am freed from the burden most of society carries. Freed from attaching to one ideal or concept or way of life. Freed from battling to make my opinion heard. But most importantly I am freed from needing to be seen.

496: When ‘Aspie’ isn’t You…

| Aspergers Girls

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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