"I Remember This" - a tearful poem from me, to my smaller, past self
When I was a mewling kitten, a chuffing cub, a trembling child,
I was prone to randomly screeching to a halt—so to speak—
basically halting without warning in my movements, going still, staring off into nothing.
I've done this as far back as I can remember. It can still happen now (not as viscerally anymore…).
It wasn't always disassociation, because no one's born with that kind of trauma,
right? I know generational trauma exists, but this is…not that. Right?
In-between running around on all fours, pretending to be an animal,
I'd stop and somehow think-fester-dwell on my own existence,
without quite understanding or comprehending I was doing it.
And in these moments, I'd feel. I'd transcend. I'd...reach inside me, in my deepest-down,
and experience a level of my being that I've never been certain how to describe through
mere humanspeech, through simple American-English text.
I was an exceedingly odd kid, especially before my (eye-opening, scar-inducing) preteen years hit.
A lot of things for me were animalistic instincts, gut feelings, intuition.
I didn't follow a person's logic. Other children my age made more sense than me.
They always did. I was the weird individual who mystified everyone else at all times.
It always looked strange to others; others, who'd sometimes ask me with sudden confusion
if I was all right, why'd I stop moving, what the heck, girl? What's the matter with you?
At worst throwing their hands up, shrugging, and quite clearly dismissing it as oddness,
and-or stupidity. I was no stranger to both my peers and adults alike in my life
insulting my intelligence and worth as a student, a classmate, a two-legged juvenile, at every corner.
"Autism," my therapist reasons with me. "You felt this way because you had untreated autism
your whole life, and you weren't diagnosed until you were sixteen.
Of course you are a human being.
It's impossible for you to be anything else.
I'm here to help you convince yourself that you belong in society, just like everyone else does.
That you can be happy, adjusted, and stable."
And I get where she's coming from, I really do.
I believe in most of that she said, except for one bit: I am nonhuman. I identify as this.
It feels rightest to me. It isn't wrong. I'm not subhuman; there is a difference.
I am Other.
I try to reach into myself and experience those remnants of what I'd felt as a small child,
now and then.
I try my best. I swear.
It doesn't work as distinctly or vividly as it once did. I have been too desensitized to…
to the human experience, in general.
I've gotten too accustomed to puppeteering my idiot meatsack of a body around,
unable to change it in ways that would truly matter to me.
I wish with all my heart I could shapeshift at will.
I will never stop pining after this.
I want to be a purring cat, a bellowing lion, I want to be the being inside me that
my trembling child-self once perceived those flickers, those almost-memories, of.
To soothe her, almost. As if to say, "Look! You ended up strong and smart, after all!"