How it feels to be 10 years old with your first ipod
There are days I long to go back. Unburdened by the traumas to come and unburdened by the intense mental health pits I've fallen into over and over again since. To be 10 years old, when everything is new and exciting, is to cry to sad songs without knowing what despair truly feels like. To cry because I don't feel human, but don't yet understand what that means.
I think about those days, and the conflicts I cried for, and how small they feel now. I find myself wishing to go back to being so carefree.
But I can't go back. That world doesn't exist anymore, and neither does that me.
To love yourself, is to accept that you cannot go back.
When I truly think about those days, I realize I wouldn't want to go back. Rose tinted glasses makes it easy to think the past was great, but it never was.
As someone with autism, I always struggled to fit in, even back then. I couldn't understand why I was treated more like a bug than a person by my peers. I couldn't understand them either, and over time this evolved to feeling less and less human. When I think about these times, I realize this is where some of the spiralling thoughts I've spent years overcoming started.
The first spiral started with puberty; my body changing caused my family and society to pressure me into conforming more with femininity. I didn't understand why I was pressured and this all felt so wrong and so alien to me. I started to disconnect from my humanity even more, as I fell into my first mental health pit. That mental pit was the first time I ever longed to go back.
In my darkest mental pit a few years ago, I was convinced no one could ever see me as human. That everyone would look at me and instantly know how freakish I was; that every attempt to even communicate would be misconstrued. I wanted so desperately to go back that I went down endless thought spirals thinking of ways I could change, and 'get better.' But in these thought spirals, getting better meant conforming, and fitting in. Every attempt only dug me deeper into self loathing.
What it took, was for me to realize there is no going back. That memory is a place that even in the moment, didn't truly exist. I could never be this ideal version of myself that I longed for so badly, because there is no reality where I could have conformed in a way that made others view me as human.
All the factors that led me here, all those influences, were there even at 10 years old. Though I didn't feel the pressures of those around me yet, everyone else still perceived me with them in mind. What changed was that realization. Though I miss the naivety of 10 years old, nothing I could have done would have changed the way others thought of me. Someone like me was never meant to be viewed as human from the very start.
I am not human, and I am okay with that; but some days I still find myself longing for this dream.
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I really hope that this post finds itself to those who need to hear this. The most important thing in my journey of learning to love myself, was accepting that I never could have been like everyone else.
Neurodivergence leaves one to often feel as though they are not human. This is something I have really experienced in my life.
There were times where I would look at myself in the mirror and see something else staring back.
The definition of what I see staring back at me has changed a lot throughout my life, but all those definitions can agree upon that what was staring back at me was not human.
I could never relate to those around me, and I often caged when I tried to abide by their expectations of normal. Endlessly pretending to be something one is not leads to one feeling further from being said thing.
At the end of the day, i just look in the mirror and I wonder why it can't be easy for me.
Am I a creature? Why do I feel so small?
No matter what I do, it feels to never equate to anything at all.
Though the face in the mirror is supposed to be me,
I still ruminate and wonder if I'll ever break free.
I agree with this so hard. Learning to play again was one of the things that helped me out of a really dark place with my mental health a few years ago.
In the dead of winter a few years ago, I found myself completely isolated. I was at college, and it was at that point of the semester where everything is piling up and things start to feel hopeless. My mom had died recently and I lived off campus so I was very isolated from my friends.
I'd just attempted suicide a few days before, when I receive an invite to hangout at my friend's apartment. I figure fuck it, It's been snowing on and off for days, and today there's a break in that so I may as well.
It ends up snowing again while I'm there, so I'm stuck for the night. My friends have just finished watching parkour civilization and someone says, "lets go play parkour civilization in the snow."
I felt like a kid again, out there playing with my friends. Out there in the snow, I decided I wanted to live. I wanted to live for more moments like these.
Playing saved my life.
Included some art i drew in the month after, it was very influenced by how I felt
