It’s
September 2022 and I’m in a god-awful room with a picture of a waterfall on the
wall. This to me marks a less-than-subtle, saccharine attempt to calm me down.
An attempt that has been somewhat undermined by the bright red panic button on
the wall behind the psych nurse who’s assessing me. I feel down- properly down.
The sort of down that physically drags you to the ground. Every breath is an
effort, yet, under my breath and emotion, I mutter, ‘I’m alone. I just know
I’ll always be alone.’
It is May 2023,
and I am in the sea. I told my friend that I felt that I was going to crash so
she took me here. You might think that this is some narrative device or infantile
metaphor: I felt like I was going to crash so she took me to where the waves crash
against the shore. It is not. This is genuinely what she did. She took me to
the sea and held me to stop me from falling (again, not a metaphor; she physically
held me). In that moment, I am safe, and I am cared for. In that moment, I am
not alone.
Loneliness
is an all too familiar emotion for me and one that I believe is underestimated
in its painfulness, powerfulness, and pervasiveness. When I think of my sixth-form
years when I had no friends and threw everything into schoolwork because I
didn’t think I had anything else to offer the world, all I feel is pain and
grief. Grief is another familiar emotion to me. As a late-diagnosed autistic
adult, I grieve a lot. I grieve the child who was misunderstood and not
accommodated for. I grieve the lonely lunches in the library. I grieve all the
times I was misinterpreted, and people extrapolated that I was, at best, sour
and difficult to love and, at worst, downright evil. I grieve the fact that sunk
in, and I started to believe I was unlovable and needed to change myself. I
grieve what all of this did to my mental state. I grieve the life I could have lived
in a world with a more nuanced view of the autistic child.
Despite the
carbon monoxide clouds of societal forces that nearly suffocated me, I was
saved by two people. One of whom is the human embodiment of hot pink. Before I
met her, I didn’t know that Kylie Minogue made wine. She is easy to stereotype so
you would almost be forgiven for underestimating her. You do this at your
peril. She is fiercely intelligent- emotionally and otherwise. If you sit with
her for long enough, you realise that she knows pain, but she transforms this into
care for her patients (we are both medical students) that oozes out of her with
ferocious intensity.
The other
is harder to stereotype. Her aura is a calmer one but there’s still an
intensity behind her eyes. She is physically incapable of going to the beach
without running into the sea fully clothed, yet she properly listens when you
speak. She likes to write poetry with thoughtful imagery but runs around our
kitchen singing Hamilton and kicking a football about. She has a sense of
social justice that runs so deep through her core it softens and hardens her at
the perfect moments- she is kind when that is needed but angry when that is
needed too. She also knows pain and pours what she has learnt from her past
into inclusive communities.
It is November
2021, and I am in my bedroom watching penguin videos (I am a big fan of
penguins). I am empty and hopeless but more than that I am alone in my
hopelessness. I overdose 3 times in one month because the thought of keeping
myself alive to experience all this pain on my own is too much. Every single
breath is something I fight for but also something I don’t understand why I’m
fighting for.
It is May 2023,
and I am in another god-awful room but this time there’s a polar bear on the
wall and I am wishing it was a penguin. I, once again, feel empty and hopeless.
The weight I shoulder is so dense I feel like it will collapse me down into it.
This time, however, I have the people I love in my arms. I must stop it from collapsing
me down because it is not just me it will crush. Maybe one day, like my
friends, I too will find an avenue for my pain but, for now, I will grip onto them
and let them and the healthcare professionals here shoulder some of the burden.
This illness did not come to teach me a lesson, I got unlucky and I got ill.
Today, however, I am choosing to take my illness and learn from it that
belonging is where I can find determination. I promise to stay determined or die trying.
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