Tw: this is a vent, and this is not a nuanced take, this is just me screaming my feelings into the void. I’m talking about a lot of trauma that I’ve never mentioned here and there’s some triggering stuff. (CSA, cults, child abuse mainly). I just needed to get this out where nobody knows me
I don’t really feel anger, but today I at least feel my version of it. I’m angry. I’m angry that I’m a level II autistic and nobody cared. I hate that instead of accommodating me, people beat the autistic traits out of me (literally and figuratively) until I became a shell. I hate that when I reached the point of not being able to survive at 9 and told my parents I was autistic I was shut down. That I missed my chance to get screened. Nobody would screen me over 15, I’ll probably never get my diagnosis.
I hate that when I spiraled further, I was beaten and traumatized and told to kill myself by my parents. The people that used help as a weapon. I didn’t remember my second CSA for more than a day before my brain buried it.
I hate that I feel like an imposter in my own community. I hate that I feel like I’m appropriating the word semiverbal. Speaking is physically distressing for me 60-40% of the time. But I do it. I had to learn to repress myself to survive, my very mind spilt under the pressure to conform. In order to live, I had to forget myself. I grew up in a cult. My mind got good at being malleable.
But in the end, I don’t appear to be a level II autistic. The guilt of calling myself that is like acid in my throat. In many ways, my trauma is a privilege. I learned how to blend in with neurotypicals and I do it expertly. I got good at hiding my pain. I CAN work, I CAN go to school and do well, and have nightly meltdowns and shutdown and drown.
I’m faced with this constant dichotomy between my true self and who I adopted as myself to survive. DID makes the false identity, the false safety feel so real. But it crumbles and I sink in like quicksand. Some part of me always thinks I’m lying, no matter what I say about myself.
In the end, brains don’t invent pain, or trauma, or anything that isn’t conducive to survival. When I strip away the layers of plaster that my brain used to mold me into what I was “supposed” to be, to protect me, I’m left with broken, traumatized pieces. I wish I could believe their screams. I wish I was believed when their screaming still sounded like my voice.
No wonder people feel like bombs.
I feel anger that the child in me is still screaming
