I’ve often described being autistic as having to wear a metaphorical bra. You put on a bra before you leave the house, and you take it off when you get home. It defines the border of ‘home’ and ‘not home’. Throughout the day, your bra might get itchy, sweaty, scratchy or otherwise annoying. When you take your bra off, you breathe a sigh of relief and just feel completely relaxed.
To understand what it’s like being autistic, just replace ‘bra’ with ‘pretend normal personality’. Your entire personality gets itchy and scratchy throughout the day. Your entire personality is harnessed and constricted.
This makes sense, I hope, to the bra-wearers among us. But what about the non-bra people? Well, tarry no more! Being autistic can also be compared to shaving your beard. Except instead, an autistic person is shaving their weird.
Every morning, you painstakingly shave your weird in the mirror, trying not to miss any sneaky bits. If you cut yourself shaving, too bad. Only once every trace of weird has been eradicated can you leave the house.
But just because the weird is shaved off doesn’t make it go away. The roots of the weird are still alive, still producing more weird. As the hours tick by, the weird slowly yet unmistakably grows back. Your normal facade eventually gives way to a 5 o’clock shadow. Then a stubbly growth of weird. To get back to normal, you have to go home. If you stay out, the weird will just keep growing and growing and people will look at you like “dude you need to shave your weird”. So eventually, if you don’t want it all to come out, you have to go home, then the next morning you wake up to shave the weird all over again.
The weird is always growing. Always poking through. Shaving it makes it look like it’s not there, but it still is, just beneath the surface, it’s only a matter of time until it grows out.
Hipsters grow their weirds on purpose. Somehow it’s okay for them. But when you let your weird grow people just think you look crazy. (You don’t look good with a weird). The sucky thing is, your weird grows faster than any hipster’s weird. If you left your weird to your own devices it would reach your nipples in a day. Hipsters spend thousands of dollars trying to fashion their weirds which really aren’t that weirdy at all. They buy special weird shampoo so their weird grows at a quarter of the speed of your weird. Hipsters make the weird into a fashion statement!
But, I must emphasise this: You don’t have a cool hipster weird. Sorry, you just don’t. You can’t fashion your weird into something fashionable, on you it’s something deeply taboo. On you it’s stigma. On you it’s shame. Wrong. Defect.
You see, you just don’t look good with a weird. So go shave it and don’t leave any stubbly bits in the sink.
