As of today, I am 43, and I would like to reflect and share on this day. I don’t know what else I can do.
Over the last nine months, I feel so much has crumbled away. Like many, I’ve watched as images from the genocide of the Palestinians come across my social media feeds. I can’t make myself look away. That feels gross. It feels like a denial. The least I can do is witness what others are being forced to endure. To witness it is nowhere close to experiencing it. I know I’ve harmed myself by seeing so much of it. I have seen the human body at all ages broken down in every possible way by other humans who see their victims as animals, as vermin. It is naive to act like these behaviors have been dormant since the Holocaust. There have been genocides across the planet almost constantly before & after. This is the first time I’ve seen it all so crystal clear unfolding before me.
It may sound silly to say in comparison to abject horror the Palestinian people are suffering, but this genocide has also torn the veil away from my eyes about people I grew up admiring or being influenced by. So many comedic figures have revealed themselves to be either apathetic or outright supporting the slaughter. I often wonder how much of my mind/personality is my autism, and now, as I purposefully expunge these pieces of media out of my life, I do wonder what is left inside me. I’ve realized that despite my insistence over the years to myself that I didn’t grow up in that big of a bubble, I most certainly did. If you grew up in the States, you certainly did, and there’s a spectrum of intensity for that, too.
I don’t think my bubble was the most extreme, mainly because my parents were just discontented, hopeless rabble. They towed the Evangelical Christian line because that was popular in the Midwest/South when they were at university. The Christian Right movement of the late 1970s swallowed them up. They came from ineffectual reactionary backgrounds, so they continued the tradition in their own way. I suspect, at this point, my father only took religion seriously as a means to get my mother to put up with him. I’ve learned in recent years that his first attempt at asking for her hand ended in her saying no and him saying he would kill himself if she didn’t marry them.
I can look back now and realize how utterly neglected and outright abused I was as a kid. They had to have some inkling that I was “different.” I’m convinced my father is on the spectrum but too internally ableist to ever admit that fact. Making fun of disabled people was a regular thing he would do, and I think he did it in the way someone tries to hide their true self to avoid receiving the bullying. I was screamed at so consistently during that time. I’ve remembered things about my potty training that are pretty awful. Both parents were caught up in the brutalist teachings of James Dobson and his Focus on the Family organization. That told them that raising a child was about beating them into submission, making them compete for your “love.” Is it any wonder the relationships within my family turned out as dysfunctional and fragmented as they did? It seems inevitable when you think about it.
When I went to college, my parents went radio silent. I was picked up and brought home for the breaks, but I don’t have many memories of them calling and checking up on me. That was the moment when I felt myself becoming distanced from my family. It felt like they had finally managed to get rid of me, this stubborn child they never really understood and hated to deal with. Because I wasn’t competing for their affection, like Dr. Dobson had told them, I was not worth their time and they would focus on making the other three kids jockey for their love & affection.
I don’t wish them any ill, though. I see no point in revenge. Isn’t the world horrible enough without being petty and nasty? All I want is for the things that happened to me to not happen anymore to anyone. I can’t reverse time and change things for me, but I can do what little is within my scope of influence to prevent it from happening to someone else. I know I will never have a childhood home to return to where my parents are looking forward to seeing me. Holidays seem to mean less and less with each passing year. There are no family gatherings like that ever happening again. I won’t lament it too much because the idea of those things is often just that. They are images and concepts we’re told our lives are supposed to be like. If you take a moment and look around, you realize that almost no one lives like that. I will admit I find it so curious when I see adults who have healthy relationships with their parents. I don’t know if I would even like something like that as I’ve become so used to this distance & coldness. It does seem like a nice thing to experience, though.
It’s strange to look at your life as something that probably shouldn’t have happened if the people you came from and the cultural void they were raised in had possessed any substance. It makes you feel like an aberration sometimes, an error in the system. Now that all four kids are grown, the parents seem relatively disinterested in our lives. I went no contact with my dad sixteen years ago after he threw me out of the house. My mom was five years ago when it became clear she was losing her mind to the insanity that seems to possess so many back home. He’s only reached out once, and that was after trying to convince my siblings to stop talking to me, which he thought would force me to come back. They didn’t, and I didn’t come back to him. I don’t think I ever heard him offer an honest apology in the time I’ve known him. My mother has made no effort to reach out. I don’t feel anger towards them anymore. I felt that for a very long time. Now, all I can feel is pity. I can’t imagine having four children and being so distant from them. What was the point of making a family if that’s what you do in the end?
It feels like I’ve been experiencing some degree of depression for the last two months or so. I’ve found that depression isn’t a constant drumbeat but something that ebbs and flows. You might forget about it for an hour or two. I see an image of a fragile human form blasted to bits or a toddler drawing their last breath as a doctor desperately tries to save them, and the depression retakes hold. I can feel myself becoming numb to so many things in the immediate world around me. I still feel good. I love Ariana more than anything else in this world. I still can find moments of joy in beautiful pieces of art. I love recording book read-alouds for my nieces and nephew in the States. I do see a sense of reward in tutoring students. But ever-present in my head is the quicksand of depression, slowly subsuming me, making me cold towards people I don’t know very well or at all.
Social media feels worse than ever. Everyone is so lost. Most of the time, it resembles people standing on the street, screaming into the void. I regularly start to type something, stopping when I realize there’s no point. Very little happens in this digital corral that we’ve been kettled in. I went through and unfollowed several people I’ve known since college. They’ll never know how often I’ve thought about them since graduating. But the thing is, if we really wanted to stay in touch, one of us would have reached out, right? And we never did. So, I don’t see much reason to continue to follow them. We don’t genuinely care that much about each other. For a brief handful of years, we kept each other company, and then we moved on.
I also see the way people talk, even other “Leftists” and realize they’re often just repackaging the same reactionary ideas of the people they are against. That’s the United States, though. The hyperindividualism is so soaked into the fibers of everyday life that people have taken on this transactional, brutal stance towards everyone around them. I’m completely convinced the only thing left for the “home country” to do at this point is collapse into discord and just pass into history. It’s absolutely absurd to think a genuine revolution will come out of a society so subsumed by distractions, escape, and treats. It’s like waiting for this lumbering vacuum that takes up as much space as it can to pass into extinction and allow the rest of humanity to have a chance. My “revolutionary optimism” is gone in regards to my fellow countrypeople.
Some people might think I must be unhappy not having lots of friends and going out to do social things regularly. Money isn’t great, so that’s a significant factor, but I have never enjoyed big social gatherings even if I have money. I’m cautious about who I befriend. Before I knew I was autistic, I was likely aware I was different and could read when someone became annoyed with me hanging around. I’ve never known how to balance being too quiet with talking too much. So I withdrew. Ariana is my best friend, and I’ve never trusted a person as fully as I do her. I encourage her to go out. There was a “girls’ night” recently when some coworkers were getting dinner out, and I was glad she went. I know that’s good for her.
I do enjoy my solitude, though. I don’t mind being alone with my own thoughts. In those moments I read or play a solo tabletop RPG. I feel very entertained by the stories that emerge. I’m unsure if I communicate them as beautifully on the page as I see them in my head, but I genuinely love it. The best new movies I’ve seen this year emerge from the solo games I play. I find it sad when someone can’t handle being by themselves. It’s disheartening that a person can’t enjoy their own company. It makes sense in a world where so much value seems to come from external transactional interactions.
I don’t relate to other men. It’s a combination of a father who never had friends and seemed invested in making me not like myself & that I find so many men I come across both in real life and online as pretty awful. I still identify as a cis man, which is weird because I don’t feel a connection with many other cis men. It’s something I just know about myself, and I think I have created my definition of a man for me. There are places where it overlaps with a slightly more universal definition. I don’t like sports (watching or participating), I’m terrible at repairing things, and I have zero interest in cars. Art is it for me, in pretty much any form, as long as it is an authentic expression of a person. I find what keeps me waking up and breathing every day is Ariana and art.
Things happening now also make us contemplate matters of God and the like. I’ve gone from being atheist to agnostic simply because I’ve become more attuned to the material world. There’s no way I can prove something like the concept of God is real, so I don’t bother myself with it. God is our anthropomorphizing of the universe. Humans love projecting our qualities onto animals, plants, inanimate objects, and ideas. I saw human qualities in our two dogs before they passed. But, of course, they never had those qualities. I can see human qualities in plants in our house, but they don’t actually have them.
If there is a sentient entity we are calling God who actively shapes our reality, then I would have to be opposed to them. The amount of suffering that happens regularly on this planet is enough to make me turn on such a deity. If God is real, I must do everything in my limited power to destroy them to save innocent people. In reality, we’re simply in a fascinating stage of organic matter transmuting from one form to another, where it gains self-awareness while becoming something else. The atoms that compose our bodies were once other things; now they are us, and in the future, they will be something else. I find that far more beautiful than an omni-being directing my life. I will become something else in time. Perhaps my consciousness follows, or maybe that’s just a fluke of this stage of transmutation. The matter that composes me is nigh-eternal, and that is all I can know.
But that leads to another question about the meaning of our lives. There is no meaning. My life, nor yours nor anyone else’s, has inherent meaning in it. The universe has no meaning, or at least none coherent to the state of our minds at this point in evolution. Meaning is a human invention; we derive meaning from ourselves and the communities in which we find ourselves. Those meanings can be beautiful & inspiring, or they can be cruelly destructive. Once again, I go back to evolution as my guide. What makes logical sense is not that we are pitted in some war towards homogenization. I think that is proven by the fact that when genetically diverse people reproduce, their children are healthier than those from inbreeding. Diversity leads to survival. We’re a collective species who, possibly through a horrible mutation in the brains of a whole lot of us, has created division through avarice.
Avarice is not the totality of “human nature.” We wouldn’t be living in communities of any kind if all humans were simply constantly greedy. At some point, some of our ancestors had to put aside their differences and work toward something better. The problem, then, is scale and unity. How do we unite the most significant possible number of people towards a common goal of ending the preventable suffering on this planet? Communism is the answer to that, or at least the next step towards that solution. You can chug all the U.S. propaganda that you want, but in the Global South, Communism has lifted a miraculous number of people out of squalor and poverty. That’s simply a fact.
A thought I had recently that I’d never had before, and one I think you can only have when you reach a certain age, is of all the people I know whose endings I will never know. I think of all the children I’ve taught. I think of my nieces and nephew. I think of my siblings as I am the oldest of four. The best outcome is that I don’t know how their lives conclude because that means they will live longer than me, hopefully well into old age. The uncertainty of these things in the moment of death is how it should be. I think we need to become more comfortable with uncertainty. Despite everything I’ve said here, I don’t know if I’m entirely or even partially correct. All I can do is process the material world I exist in and make assumptions based on the evidence I encounter.
This is why we need each other. I can’t see the world exactly as you see it. The things you’ve loved, the things that have broken your heart, the things that have saved you, the things that have harmed you, the complex series of often random events that have transpired in your lives is something I need to know just as you need to know mine. None of us can see the totality of the human experience alone. We can only know what we have perceived in the brief instances of our lives. This is why the mass destruction we’ve been witnessing is such an affront. So much beauty & knowledge of what it means to be human has been lost forever.
So many words, and I know I have failed. Some people will read this and have an inkling of what I have tried to say. Others might read it and think I am a fool. Others still won’t read it at all. They see a lot of words and glaze over. That’s the flaw with language. It is still an inadequate means to communicate ideas. It’s our best so far, but it can’t be where we cease to develop in our consciousness. Beyond even the human perspective is that of animals and plants.
What is it like to see the world through your dog’s eyes, an elephant’s, a housefly, a bacterium? Each of those perspectives would likely explode our whole worldview if we were lucky enough to experience it, even for a moment. Seeing the world from another human’s POV already can have that effect. Although I cannot know it in my lifetime, I will pursue that knowledge, knowing that the pursuit provides its own rewards. I refuse to stop being curious in an existence full of fascinating things. I refuse to allow the drain-spiraling cynicism of the society I was born within to stomp that out.
When I look out across the landscape of the United States I see a lot of people, even the “good ones” whose point boils down wanting retribution for harm done directly to them. This doesn’t make the world a better place, getting revenge. It is just more horror in the world. I don’t care if a single person who harmed me is hurt in equal measure. What I want is for younger people, children, and future generations to not suffer the same harm I and others have. I want those future people to live in a world where what has happened before and is happening right now is something you read about, not live out.
But, I’m just as big a coward as the next person. Something inside me keeps me afraid of how others will perceive me, or that will perceive me period. The idea of fading away and being visible only to the very few people I enjoy being around is very tempting. It’s in these thoughts that I realized it doesn’t matter if I live or die. Now, don’t think I’m going to harm myself, I am not. I just understand that if I were to die today there would be some people who mourned tremendously, but in time they would have to move on with their lives. The universe wouldn’t even acknowledge my absence.
That’s why any desire I have for satisfying petty grievances is meaningless. It won’t actually matter if I “get revenge.” But what might matter is if someone lives out a life where they aren’t made to feel the alienation I’ve struggled with for so long. That is something worthy of focusing our energies on. In the time I’ve spent working & teaching children, I hope I’ve had some inkling of an effect on them. I can’t really know. But existence is uncertain from start to finish. And we have to live in that unknowing because the only other option is deluding ourselves and I’d rather face the anxieties of life then live in ignorance about them.
And then today, I let some tiny thing just infuriate me. We’re dogsitting for friends. My whole life using a different shower has been exhausting. It feels like trying to solve a puzzle and I hate it. Two knobs. I can get the water flowing. There is a button on that knob (50%), the other knob must be temperature. It has a button (38°). I turn them how I think they should go. Minutes pass. Water is ice cold. I can’t seem to figure it out. I get in and have an absolutely miserable ice cold shower. I’m left feeling like an idiot. I am reminded why I hate staying anywhere but my home base for extended periods of time. I know that place. I know how things work there. The most frustrating parts of life are these ones. And then I feel guilt that I feel bad, because so many have it so much worse than me. And that’s a the daily internal struggle – every single day – frustration about something small which makes me angry at myself for being so frustrated.
This is how I live. So much roiling inside & no relief in sight.
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