"I'm tired,
I'm tired of being tired."
All too often I can't help thinking that this should be our motto, or legend written on our flag, were we ever to raise one over a land of our own. And it's hardly surprising really, given how exhausting just being autistic is in the human world.
We are constantly having to try and understand and translate what allistics are saying and trying to communicate, whether that be through speech or the written word, or ads, or everything really, into something that we can at least vaguely understand. But that, to say the least, is always an uphill and somewhat fruitless endeavour. Their speech is filled with so many allusions and stuff "we should just know and understand", givens and common understandings, that only really work if you actually ever fucking understood them in the first place. With meanings that are meant to be perceived, or invoke an emotive response, or show the important things, at least to them, of their existence and relationship to you, like status and position, power and authority. All the things that are so often lost on us, because it's not the way we see, or think about the world and yet without which make their words lack the meaning or substance that can actually make them useful. And then, of course, we are in the wrong, or just wilful, or just rude when we ask for an explanation, or fail to understand.
And then there is the sensory hell of the world they live in. All the noise and lights and smells that they just take for granted and seem to consider normal. So normal, in fact, that complaining or trying to protect yourself from them, is also often considered rude, or weird and certainly nothing you can explain to them with any hope of them really understanding. In fact trying to explain pretty much anything to them, or trying to get them to understand your needs and experiences, the way you need people to communicate with you for it to work, or the environment that you can live in, is so often a fruitless enterprise, or, at worst, the sort of encounter that ends up making you want to bash your head repeatedly against a brick wall until something, literally fucking anything, no matter how small, can make sense. Because rarely what we try to communicate to them, normally because of bitter experience, is that difficult or demands that much effort and yet still it still seems to be beyond them.
All too often, to a lesser or greater extent, this is the story of our lives. Masking can help, but that is its own energy drain. Being able to surround ourselves with the right people can help more, as can stubbornly looking after your own needs. But the wider world is always there, like an opinionated black hole, always ready to drain so much away. Getting older doesn't help with all this, as the natural wear and tear and the struggle of the years begin to gang up on us. As the energy reservoirs become less and less what they used to be, or fill back up with anything like the vigour of our youth. Everything becomes its own kind of harder. So perhaps is it any wonder that burnout dogs our ageing footsteps like an over eager puppy just waiting for the chance to trip us up and slobber all over us. In fact, you could almost argue that it is an inevitability, especially for those of us who expanded so much masking and uncertain and not realising that we were autistic for so long and didn't know all the things we could do to help ourselves, as little as they can sometimes be.
So perhaps it is no wonder that tiredness is so often our default state. We live in a world that all too often makes little or no sense, that can be hateful and harmful and care not a wit for us, or our needs. Why we spend so much time trying to understand how many spoons, or spell spots, or however we like to think about it, things will cost us and how much we can afford to spend. How we can be like paupers counting their small change, over and over again, in the vague hope that we can afford the simplest things that we desire.
So yes, all this and more is why I'm tired and tired of being tired, but then that just means I'm alive and still going. That I am still struggling and fighting and paying the price to just live in this world and if you think about it, that is no small thing.
