Actually A: Where Did You Hide Yourself?

Other

Feeling other is a common issue with people dealing with autistic. Granted, I'm sure everyone feels out of place at one point or another. But there is a difference. I have always felt out of place. Different. Other. Weird. Awkward. I often feel like other people understand things that I just don't get. I will fake the understanding, but as I mentioned in the section titled "Chameleon," some people pick up on this. I will come across and disingenuous or fake and unconsciously untrustworthy.

Often times, people think I'm weird, obnoxious, and even sometimes annoying. Not that it happens all the time. It was worse in elementary school and junior high school when I was often bullied because of this weirdness. I spoke differently, acted differently, thought differently and kids being kids, they noticed.

As I got older, I started to learn how to hide it better, but I've never felt like I've fit in. This isn't some sob story on my part, just a reality. Nowadays, I've stopped pretending so much and allowed myself to be different. Instead of hating my otherness, I'm exploring it. Somewhere buried under all the mental noise is a person.

There is a lot to this topic, so I expect I'll have to break into smaller pieces to really delve into it. In someways it is the heart of a lot of my struggles. The fact is, I am different in some fundamental ways. I don't experience the world the way other people do. I've found some connection to other autistic people, but even then we have our own differences. How I experience autism is unique to me. Like Indonesia, we have enough commonalities in our vocabulary that we can understand each other even when we speak vastly different languages.

When I was in Elementary school. I'm not sure which grade because timelines are weird in my head. Anyway, I remember sitting in P.E. on a bench in the gym. We were waiting for something, I don't remember what. Whatever was, or wasn't, going on, I was bored. I remember lightly bouncing the back of my head off the brinks. Not hard, just enough to feel the solidness of the wall. And not for any other reason than the sensation. For the non-autistic crowd, this is called "stimming." I remember one of my classmates asking me why I was doing that. I didn't really know, so I told him it was because I liked how it felt. They gave me a weird look and that was the end of it. Either way, for that moment, I was other.

I had a lot of these moments. More in my younger years than when I got older, but people noticed, and probably still notice. I'm grateful that we as a society are starting to be better at accepting people who don't fit into the cookie cutter idea of a person. Maybe someday, kids growing up won't have to feel like they are an other for being themselves.

I've also felt other. Not because of something someone has said, but because I don't feel like I exist on a wavelength with the rest of the world. It feels like they understand things that I know I should understand, but don't. When those situations occur, I feel stupid. It was worse when I was a kid.

Because I went to a Catholic grade school, a lot of our schooling revolved around stories in the bible and how we would do them. The one I remember the most was a lesson surrounding the classic tale of the Good Samaritan who found the injured man on the side of the road and stopped to help him when others didn't. It's a good moral story, but in this lesson, the teacher had us gather around one student who was the injured man. We then had to tell the teacher how we, as good little Catholic boys and girls, would be a good Samaritan.

In my head, it made logical sense. Carry the person to the next town. Yes, it might hurt them, but it would keep them from getting eaten by wolves or some such. This was the wrong answer, but to this day I don't actually understand why. It seemed that every logical solution I came up with, from carrying him to making a stretcher to getting help from other travelers, was wrong. They wanted the religious based answer. The one we had been told about. Follow the teachings of Jesus, or whatever. My classmates understood this, but I didn't. I felt stupid and ashamed that I couldn't figure out something so basic.

I don't think I'll ever not feel like I'm separate from the rest of the world. There is a feeling of isolation with that. People with chronic illnesses will understand this feeling. Especially the ones that are invisible illnesses like chronic fatigue where you want to do things, but can't because something out of your control separates you from the world. That is what other feels like.