Tonight, I was talking to my mom about one of my younger siblings and I had a revelation about not only my childhood, but the human experience as a whole, I guess? So basically, I have a little brother who is, for privacy purposes, between the ages of 6 and 9 years old. My parents have had 7 children, the 3 youngest all boys, all between the ages of 6 and 12. Each boy has their own little slice of challenging behavior patterns, speech delay, and neurodiversity. We live in a small house given the size of our family, and there are currently 8 people living in the home including myself, although I am moving out at the end of the week to my new apartment. All 3 boys currently living in the home share a room, because there are only 4 bedrooms, and I have 2 teenage sisters who each have their own rooms. With that being said, the bedtime routine to get them all into their respective beds and asleep can be a challenge; some nights taking many hours and special supervision to achieve. It is not uncommon for them, as most children do, to be particularly rowdy once the supervising adult has exited their room.
Tonight, my brother F asked my brother D to toss him something (I think it was a toy), and the object hit F's finger. He then came out of the room and said, "D crushed my finger!" Almost immediately upon these words coming out of his mouth, I said to my mother (who is, by nature, an anxious person) "That is almost certainly not an accurate description of what just happened." (F was not in earshot when this was said.) She then said something under her breath that was painful for me to hear even though it was true.
"I know. That's what's so hard about him."
I became overwhelmed with feelings. She was right. With F, it can be very difficult to get to the bottom of what he is saying and feeling, as well as the facts of the situation, because the way he experiences the world is inherently very big. Nothing is small to him. I also was hurt for him that we, as his caretakers, were struggling to manage making space for his experience. It was strange because, for a moment, I was on the other side of my childhood. I was experiencing what, I'm assuming, the adults in my life had experienced when I was growing up, although I think I have slightly more self-awareness about what these feelings were as they were happening.
Little me spent the overwhelming majority of my life so far as an undiagnosed autistic. F's experience and mine, though not completely similar, share some distinct similarities. One of the ways my autism causes me to process information differently is that I, too, do not experience anything in a way that is 'small'. Everything I experience is large and overwhelming. The difference is, as an adult, I have language to describe things on more appropriate and real scales. F does not yet have the vocabulary to describe many of his experiences to scale yet. This is a circumstance that will change with time as he gets older, and we will each figure out how to make space for each other's experiences as it relates F's.
There is, however, another difference between the two scenarios I am currently finding or have found myself in. F has not been called and will likely not BE called a drama king/dramatic. Now, I could spend the rest of this post and probably several more posts talking about how AFAB autistics and non-autistics alike are more likely to be not taken seriously on any number of topics/areas of our lives due to sexism, and it is 100% true, but that's not the point of this particular word barf salad. When I was young, I was called the above names/described with the above descriptors whenever I would say something that did not align with the experience of my caretakers, teachers, and doctors. While I do believe that my gender had something to do with these instances, I think the primary, nasty, and pervasive evil that painted the way these adults interacted with my experience as an autistic person, but before that a CHILD, was a lack of empathy for what they considered small struggles.
Many times, over the years, so many times they are not countable, I was told that whatever I was experiencing, be it pain, joy, sadness, anger, anxiety, whatever emotion you would like, was simply not, and could not be, as big of a deal as I was making it out to be, despite that every time I was experiencing something and doing so in a way that wasn't what other people considered "proportionate" it WAS that big of a deal. This pervasive lack of understanding and empathy for my experience caused me to have a systemic mistrust in everything from my pain signals to my emotions. Over and over again, they were saying to me: "You cannot trust your body, you cannot trust your mind, and most of all, you cannot trust us to listen to you or help you." I will be in therapy forever about this. Every time my husband or sister says "it's not that deep", my fight or flight response kicks in.
I said something poetic about it to my mother, about how he simply doesn't have the tools to describe his experience in a way that allows us to clearly determine exactly what he's trying to say the first time yet, but until he does have the tools to share with us, we must work to make space for his experience as he learns to person for the first time. But if I am being truthful, there have been many times where I have not practiced this. Where I almost blatantly have not had empathy for another person's struggle or feelings because in the moment it just feels like too much work, and I find myself begging the question about how we are meant to find infinite space in our hearts for radical empathy for the experiences of others, no matter how difficult we find it, and how do you not let other people's experiences, ESPECIALLY the ones that don't align with, or even contradict, our own experiences. I said out loud, "We have to make space for his experience even though it's hard and we have to do that for everyone all of the time." And I'm smart enough to know that leads to burnout and burnout leads to apathy and apathy leads to DEATH. I don't have answers. I wish I did. But what I do know is that at least, I will fight for F to not grow up to live a life where he cannot trust his body, mind, and spirit the best I possibly can. And I think if I can at least do that for any children I might have in the future and for my brothers, that might be something close to enough.
Sorry for the run on sentences, it's Alice in Wonderland all up in this bitch. thanks for reading.
baratheonpilled
discoholicmusic
prguitarman
germansingergirl
dededos
stormborns
romaincrisis
