People who have read my journal at length will probably have one of two impressions of me. Possibly even a third one, which is an uneasy hybrid of the other two. It probably comes as a real surprise to scum like Autism Speaks or the entire passive community that I do, in fact, have a mother.
My mother will be fifty-six years old this Winter. During her most recent visit (days ago) to my place and space, I began to wonder to myself. How does the world look to her? And moreover, how do I look to her?
And of course, one way to answer a complex question is to reverse it. To ask myself, or part of my consciousness, how my mother looks to me. Because for a long time post-diagnosis, I was concerned mainly with how I could find assistance to find a way to lead a productive life and thus please my mother at least somewhat. When I was a child, people spoke in front of me about big things that they expected me to be, primarily on the basis of my command of the English language that only about half a dozen of my peers at the school could really match. So much was expected and believed that by the time I was told I was autistic, I had been dealing for what seemed like forever with feelings of grave disappointment in both myself and my life.
But a couple of years prior to diagnosis, I had a very strong idea in my mind that I wish I had been better able to pursue. I did not have much of an idea of how to pursue it, but I knew that I wanted to put my linguistic and creative writing skill into a career in journalism, work my way up to writing about international events, and leave the country. Presumably to never see my familial units again except when my schedule and whim permitted. Which would basically mean very rarely. If ever.
Oh yeah, there is one exception to the rule. Well, sort of two if you count… let me start over.
My sister and I did not have the best relationship growing up. Especially during the really growing up part, the transition between childhood and adulthood that people generally call adolescence. Whilst a tiny fragment of it was down to her lack of understanding, calling a lack of understanding her fault would be like saying it is her fault that the social workers, psychologists, and other upper class twats she, myself, and our mother interacted with did not have a clue what to do. I am not saying I forgive her of anything, because frankly there is nothing to forgive.
So for all of the bruisings and my generally behaving like a drunk uncle who should be in prison, I am sorry. I can sit here and say how I would have done differently if I had known “better” (or just the precise, salient facts here), but that does not change anything.
Speaking of changing anything, longtime readers will be aware of a story in which my proxy character goes back in time and tries to warn his parents of the hard road that is ahead for they and he alike. Well, I sort of have been working on a revision of that story, or perhaps a “sequel”. The main outline is that a psychiatrist working in one of the most neglected hospitals of the local area is called upon to talk to a very odd patient who expresses himself in words and phrases that have her scratching her head until he says to her, matter-of-factly, that he could go back and time and prevent her from ever hearing of him. So obviously, after much back and forth about whether perhaps he should be on stronger medications, the patient disappears without rhyme or explanation.
The midsection of the story follows more or less the same path as the original, except the patient actually gets his mother on her own for a moment and says things to her. Mother, he says, I know that gentleman you are with makes you think he makes you happy, but take it from me when I say that thirty-five years from now, he will have proven constrictive and toxic to all around him. If not by his inability to recognise what is in place of what should be, then by his determination to ignore same. You are worth more than this. If you do not start to act like it, and find something or someone better, then you are going to spend your old age with a son who wishes every day that you had aborted him.
I have no idea exactly how I can going to transition between the three parts, but the final part can go one of two ways. One, we see the doctor from the first part again, and she is called on to see a semi-difficult patient. Either the patient is the same man from the first act, or she is joined by a doctor that she is rather… friendly, I will just say, with. Who happens to look a lot like the patient from the first act.
Yeah, it is not exactly an elegant layout for a story, but the salient point here is that the proxy character feels he has been doomed to a life nobody would want to lead by virtue of the “father” figure in his life. And I use that expression very loosely.
I tried very hard to communicate to my mother on Friday afternoon that I have a lot of reasons why I do not wish to speak to my father ever again. What I did not say to her, and I honestly do not have any way to say it except in writing, is that I feel much the same about the majority of the people who claim to be related to me. That is, I want to cut them out of my life much like a cancer out of my skin. And given that I had to have two layers of stitching for the last skin cancer extraction, the anesthesia burned like liquid fire, and my back continued to hurt for days every time I moved my shoulder… Well, let me put it this way. I wish I had started cutting them out sooner, or at least succeeding sooner. Because it would have hurt the both of us, and by the both of us I mean myself and my mother, a lot less.
Things like my desire to move to a more expensive part of Sydney (yes, apparently that is Humanly possible), to start a business, to not speak with any familial person except perhaps my sister, my soon to be brother-in-law, and their children, all flow from that. And this is the part that I am so dazed and flabbergasted by my mother’s failure to comprehend. The fact that the people, the only people in fact, that I bothered to not inject every one of the 20 millilitres of anti-coagulant I had in my possession in one shot for, are in an area I want to go to so I can be amongst them and start building a better, or actual, life for myself, just does not seem to register for her.
In fact, I still sense a certain difficulty on her part in comprehending the fact that I wanted to leave Queensland, and still want to leave it in ashes. It seriously is almost as if she does not comprehend that being autistic means I have a certain need of certain things in order to find my life worthwhile, and that Queensland was not meeting the requirements to such an extent that I was beginning to feel dirty and disgusting just for being there.
I want people to really look over that last statement for a second. I felt dirty and disgusting for being where I was. You see, in the months and years following my diagnosis, I would go with one or more family members to see some specialist whom I had been assurred would have enough answers or all the answers and things would work better and blah fukking blah. But I think the specialists in question got the wrong message, and I am pretty sure I can guess where that message came from.
You see, it pays to do a bit of research about people when they come to talk to you about their lives. Even the most mediocre detective with an intelligence quotient that can be measured in triple digits is able to work out that when a boy from Parramatta is yanked off the map and shoved into a place he will not stop referring to as Cuntborough, he may not be very happy about being there. In fact, we can break down the reductions in qualities into tangible, provable (and proven) points. A boy from Parrammatta being forced into a count-ry town can count on:
- lesser quality of retail service (and product)
- lesser quality of health care
- in some specialised cases, non-existent quality of health care
- even in cases where health care options are sufficient to service the count-ry town’s population, they are ruled by a mentality that the civilised world ditched at least twenty years ago
- retail prices that are commensurate with, if not greater than, those in more civilised areas
- and to cap all of this off, a smug superiority attitude about all of the above
It is this last point in particular that made me tell my aunt and uncle that I would have rather been in prison than in Cuntsland. It is one thing to live in shit conditions with shit services and simply sit and live with it. It is a whole other matter entirely to expect people to look upon you with awe and respect for doing so. Thank gawd you’re a count-ry boy? More like damn Loki for you being able to reproduce.
Psychological professionals of all walks have a saying. It is harder to break shackles of the mind than those of the body. This is why when numerous Africans were brought to the Americas in utterly inhuman conditions, they were not just unloaded from the boats and put to work. They were first put into camps where they were physically and psychologically tortured into accepting that they were slaves, and slaves foremost.
And this is the point that I am getting tired of trying to get my mother to understand. I know that my aunts and uncles are not going to get it, and nor are my cousins. Because with few possible exceptions I can think of, my aunts, uncles, and cousins are not clever enough to get this point. I do not believe the lengthy, exhausting trips back and forth between Cuntborough and Pseudocitybane were done for my benefit in the sense that I was hoped to derive some benefit. No.
I believe, without even the slightest doubt, that my familial units dragged me back and forth between Cuntborough and Delusionsofgrandeur so many times because they thought that this would accomplish the task of breaking me down and making me accept Cuntborough as the absolute border of my world. This would also explain all of the hopeful plans verbally laid out at me with no intention of ever carrying them out or even remembering them. Because you do not simply chain a man with an IQ in the 140s to a wall and tell him Cuntborough is his whole world now. You have to emotionally and psychologically abuse him until he starts to think it himself.
This, in a nutshell, is why I want to punch people like Lynddie England in the face until their eyes roll back in their head and neurological activity becomes non-existent. Yes, Lynndie, I think you are stupid. I would rather pay three hundred dollars a week to live in a flat in Avalon than three cents a year to live anywhere in Cuntborough. (And believe me, the real estate agents there think theirs are worth a lot more than that, by factors in the millions.) Because in Avalon, I know people who regard me as being worth something. I know one person who knows how to connect with the services that might help me lead a productive life, as opposed to just sitting and staring at a fukking wall.
If my mother is reading this now, as I hope she does at some point, then I have one thing in particular that I want her to take away from this document. This, in a nutshell, is why I find it utterly impossible to regard my male parental unit as anything other than a bully who used to live in the same house and I would sooner shoot dead than speak to. And that is whilst I am under the influence of Vitamin D supplements, Fluoextine, and Quetiapine. Look them up at your leisure and get an idea of how unshakable this feeling really is.
You see, when I read people like Lynndie England whine about how unfair they think it is that they are viewed as country hick fukktards (my words), I do not merely react with hatred because I think, well, they are stupid. No, that would be too easy. During To Kill A Mockingbird, both novel and film, Atticus Finch tells his children, and thus the audience, that “you never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view — until you climb around in his skin and walk around in it”.
Well, not only do hick fukktard Cuntslanders demonstrate no ability to do this on my behalf, but this also begs the question of how the world looks when you try to climb into their skin and walk around in same. And I think the comedian who made his way through use of a hick fukktard act (to some extent), Kevin “Bloody” Wilson, has a song that exemplifies how their view of the world looks to me. Super-Mega Fugly.
(It should be noted, for completeness’ sake, that “consider things from their point of view” and “let them tear out your brain and replace it with theirs” (which is what the curebies want to do) are two different things. But try getting my mother to understand this point.)
I have committed more words than I care to to this outlet of frustration already, so I will close with one final statement that I hope will properly convey how angry and frustrated I really am to the right parties. For several months, I have been talking about a desire to start a sort of company or commercial enterprise to support autism civil rights. Obviously, this is not going to be an easy task, and I am not exactly the right person for the job because of my serious difficulty with organisational skills. But when I share such ideas or plans with people like my mother, and ask for some help in finding resources to get the basic organising started, I hit a wall. Literally, as in I am just told it cannot be done and I should give up.
Look at what I wrote earlier about trips intended to break my spirit.
So whilst travelling across Sydney with mother a couple of days ago, imagine my disbelief when told she and my asshole male parental unit were ninety percent sure they were going to move from Cuntborough to Adelaide in order to be closer to my sister. Or more specifically, their grandchildren. Forgoing all mention of the logistics and complications, especially financially, of such a move, it brought several emotional-thought responses to mind.
For one thing, if this were my children (the ones I never want to have, I mean) that we were talking about, I would be very clear about this upon learning of such an idea. Do not even fukking think about it. I already live with very vivid nightmares as a result of both the time I spent around you and the medicines I have to take in order to have a chance to cope with that. If you think I would want you that close to me and where I live, then, well, were you fukking kidding yourselves during every moment I protested my lack of foot contact with Sydney?
For another, well, when you say a move that would only involve a little research time and a bit of pointing in the “right” directions on your part is too difficult, yet something that entails significant logistical and financial distress is basically a done deal… Precisely what am I meant to think?
Congratulations, mother, you have convinced me that you and that asshole I see you as little more than a living glove puppet for want me to be trapped and in distress forever. Well done.
I Still Find It So Hard... 