Postcard from another place #autism

These days it feels like I’m in another country. Landscapes fall away and I float  above them. Nothing is fixed and yet I feel more stable.

Life’s problems abound, don’t get me wrong about that.

No one has waved a magic wand. Yet it is possible to feel both lighter and more substantial.

I have been writing now about my personal and professional journey as an autistic woman since March 2016.

The journey metaphor is unavoidable (is it not?) Such cliches adhere to the collective consciousness for a reason. Like barnacles on a boat – they’re not going anywhere. And they’re real.

The landscapes we carry within us are the other eternal and lasting image. Humans are we, all tasked with mediating our inner and outer geographies.

You might well know what I mean when I say I’ve crossed a border. And I have.

Cliche, after cliche would like to trip off my unwilling tongue. No going back, is one such.

Early on I wrote about onion layers peeling off as I became revealed to myself incrementally, after my late in life diagnosis of autism. That is still true but I dislike onions. Day old peelings in the food recycling caddy press against my eyelids and shake a fist at my nostrils. I reach for the window and throw up the sash. Give me fresh air and landscape any day. Give me journeys too.

Eye watering in the wrong way are the fresh chops and the stale skins.

I like footsteps and most any kind of tree. A train window. The urban picturesque.

As long as the journey is circular and I am returned to myself. And daily I am. It’s the views from the windows that alter. Have altered.

More irony.

How can I be so contrary to the world? It’s shifting off its axis with the weight of the improbable. A discomfiting on a global scale shades but doesn’t dim my growing comfort with myself.

I’m sorry I chose this moment in history to have such good fortune. No actually I’m not. It’s never a bad time to know yourself.

But if I seem distant, if I’m somewhat removed, it’ll be because I’m somewhere new.

One day I’ll send you a postcard. Or maybe I just have.