I will go to her too-white office, and she will smile from behind her desk of all-knowing. Then she will tell me I am Autistic. (Or something like it.)
I will say to her, I understand, and yes: I do believe I must be.
I will say I feel the world.
I will say the small child within me still remembers the nightly news; the drownings in the Yarra, the little bruised boy’s funeral song, the kidnappers and the murderers. Most people watched these things. I felt them. Just like I felt eggs. (Eggs have a nice feeling about them, although I never did much like the taste.)
Being Autistic would explain it all. And though hyper empathy is not typically seen as an autistic trait, it can be in women, and it certainly is in me.
There has always been an underlying discomfort to my existence.
A difference in what my brain seems to be telling me and what the brains of others seem to be telling them.
My Mum said I was unique and perfect, just the way I was. And perhaps I was. Perhaps I am. But my life was hard.
My life is hard because I live in a world not made for a sea as deep as me.
I have tried to be okay my whole-life-long.
I have tried alcohol and isolation to hide from the big wide world. I have tried avoiding all problems, by telling myself there are none. I’ve tried losing myself in chocolate, in books, in dreams, and in men who held my heart with eyes and whispers that soothed me.
But my soul has at last said, hush darling.
Let the others help you to understand their world. Only then will you fully understand your own.
Just one step deeper. One step further into the stars, and I am there.
It is rare that I allow myself to come home, knowing the depths and where they can take me. Knowing that real life can never be a match to the perfect light I find in this place.
Why do I leave, I ask myself, when perfection is on offer, and the simple task of folding laundry is a beautiful gift of moment to moment life? Everything is soft in the moment. Everything complete, and I am wanting for nothing.
Thought is the destroyer of the wind that moves me, and yet I think, and I fret, and I think about why I’m fretting, and life becomes the scramble it was before I knew this beautiful home in the stars.
Today, this night, I feel a beautiful softness of heart. My eyes are tired, and my soul aches from all the disharmony in the world. And yet, gentle is here, and life fills me with memories of beautiful love gone by.
Every spare moment I have is spent drawing. It is an obsession. An itch that will not go away, no matter how vigorously I scratch it.
It is all a great mystery, this creative road I travel. Art has been the little sister to music and writing, all my life. Suddenly she yearns to be seen, known and expanded upon.
I have loved being with her.
Every moment, she takes me on a sacred journey, home again: and in such a different way to writing, which I’d previously identified as ‘my thing.’
I cannot call myself an artist, though. It is a block I’m unable to identify, and yet, it is a block that feels familiar.
Years ago, the voice within asked me to write poetry. I wouldn’t. I couldn’t because I didn’t know the rules. And because I didn’t know the rules, I would likely do it wrong.
‘Doing it wrong’ was not something I felt comfortable with. Until one day I wrote, with an open heart, something that looked and felt like poetry…no rules attached. No standard to meet.
I just wrote.
I wrote: me.
I now must take the same journey with my art. I must remove any worries of not doing it ‘the right way’ and simply do it my way.