1
Throughout my life, I have been asked various forms of the same question that usually boils down to this: “What the fuck is wrong with you?” Sometimes it’s said with anger, sometimes with amusement, but at its core it is the same question, the same disbelief and assumption of brokenness. And after a while, after hundreds of people who encounter you, sometimes for mere seconds, ask you what the fuck is wrong with you - you begin to believe that indeed something is very wrong with you, at a fundamental level. Something is so incredibly broken, evil, and wrong about you that anyone else can see it, so palpably, by just having known you for less than a second. You are not simply different, you are so wrong, that even the stupidest person can see the evil emanating from your core.
When I get asked, in various forms, why I have such a problem relating to other people I’ll usually either say “I hate people,” or “I’m shy.” Partly because it’s incredibly difficult for me to describe exactly the mechanisms that have brought me to this point, partly because I know most people don’t care and if they do care, can’t comprehend it. I have been assaulted, abused, ignored, mocked, and disregarded so many times that I no longer let people approach me from the grounds of neutrality - it is immediately hostile. And I don’t have the energy or care to explain myself in a way that they could understand.
If this sounds -emo- to you, you know how to click off. I’m not wasting any more of my life trying to justify myself to idiots. But if you’re curious about me (Or just want to fuck me, which people mistake for genuine curiosity), then this is probably one of the best ways that you can understand who I am and what I’ve dealt with, on a fundamental level.
What the fuck is wrong with me?
2
I’m in preschool. I am dropped off for a few hours to wander this room full of toys, and puzzles, and experiments. I do not talk to the other children. It enters my mind that this is a possibility - I see the way that the other children interact with each other. But to me this feels impossible. I do not even know how to begin to breach the gulf between them and me. And a large part of me does not want to. So I wander around by myself, playing by myself, fizzling with anxiety, but mostly glad to be left alone. I only feel relieved when I can go home, when I can be alone, not have all my sides assaulted by people.
I cannot remember a time when I would rather not be alone.
This is brought up to my mother with concern - I do not interact with the other children. I am not socializing properly. Later she’ll bring this up to me, with anger, to keep me crushed, as if this is my fault.
The same scenario repeats itself in kindergarten. In first grade. In second grade. Everytime I make a friend, they seem to become sick of me, or disappear. Once I had someone who I considered my best friend in 2nd grade, one day just suddenly ignore me. It was as if there was a wall between us. No matter how much I said her name, no matter what I said, I couldn’t get her attention. Even when I screamed. I realize that it’s because I’m broken. Once again, I’m alone.
Again, my mother brings this up, when I come to her in tears. “I told you that you’d have no friends, and now you have no friends. You should have listened to me.”
Even at this age, I know she’s just trying to hurt me. But I still don’t see a way out of my misery. It seems so easy to everyone else, to make friends. To be happy. It seems like it’s a natural part of who they are. And whatever that -thing- is, it’s been ripped out of me. That fundamental way that people relate to other people, is missing inside of me.
3
Imagine being so intelligent that most people can’t comprehend how smart you are, and what you see. That you can form logical conclusions more easily than most people, because you see the vastness behind each one, the ways they connect, and how intricate they are. That you often know how people are going to finish their sentences. Not because you’re a telepath, but just from knowing who they are, their experiences, the trajectory of the conversation, and the situation. Because you see not only what they want you to see, but everything else. You see things that you aren’t even aware that you see. You are so smart that only about 2% of people in the world are smarter than you are.
Now imagine that everyone, except for a rare few, look at you and come to their logical conclusion, based on what they think they see, that you are a fucking retard.
Can you imagine what that would begin to do to a person? How that would fundamentally warp who they are, how they see themselves, and even how they interpret and retain information?
Every Wednesday in elementary school, the gifted children and the ‘disabled’ children go to separate rooms to be taught a lesson for an hour. You are ‘gifted.’ A girl starts laughing at you one Wednesday because “You’re going to that special class.” And you realize that you must give off the sort of behavior, and speech, and body language, that indicates you are stupid.
That teachers tell you “You’re kind of special,” in a dripping, condescending tone. The other children, that everyone thinks are intelligent, seem to possess this quality of wholeness that you don’t have. That from all sides you’re assaulted by “What the fuck is wrong with you?” You try to modify yourself, to adjust, but you’re unable to.Because you think something is missing and broken inside of you, so you try to hide it. You’ve begun to try to interact with the world in such a way that it sees you are unassuming - and they pick up on that, and tear you to pieces. You want to get away from being in pain constantly, and a lot of that pain is boredom, so you read books during school, read books during recess, only to be told to stop, to pay attention to the lesson, to go socialize. And when you do try to socialize - it’s met only with more disappointment, more rejection, more pain. Everything that you do is wrong, wrong, wrong.
Sometimes you try to escape - you withdraw inside yourself so tightly that the world disappears. People can yell at you and you can’t hear them. When you stop withdrawing, when you come back, you’re met with anger or laughter. “You spaced out.” “You weren’t paying attention.”
You are trying to escape pain in the only way you know how.
In Kindergarten we have an art contest. I draw a cowgirl riding a horse, a lasso in her hand. And then beneath her, in the dirt, I draw a vast network of ant tunnels. It takes up half the drawing - these tunnels, branching outwards, the world we can’t see. I win the art contest. It makes me feel validated for a moment. There are so many vast things living, writhing, squirming, inside my unassuming body.
4
I once asked Robert if I was different than other people he’d met before, and he told me “Out of all the people I’ve met, you tread the closest to insanity.”
Everything that you see in me, I have built from the ground up. Every part of me - has had to be reconstituted, piece by painful piece, from that little girl in the preschool who was unable to even comprehend what it meant to interact with another human being. How it caused so much pain, that she would rather not even regard reality. How she retreated into books to learn what it meant to be a human being. How she saw the way that people, with their malicious ignorance, hurt each other without even understanding the damage that they caused.
Once I had someone ask me how I managed to become so cool, because they’d seen my ‘dorky’ pictures from a few years ago. But I wasn’t trying to become cool. I was trying to become myself. And the way that I pieced that together, with blood with deprivation, with submersion, with mutilation, was far more surgical than merely modifying a few pieces on the top - a better haircut or losing weight or ‘acting more confident.’ So I can’t tell anyone how to ‘be cool’. I can only say this:
Every day that I wake up I have to make the conscious decision on whether I am going to be a sane human being or I am going to lose my mind. I wish I could say this was an exaggeration, but it’s not. Every. Single. Day. My self - the thing that I call Autumn - has had to be so surgically created, so meticulously maintained, that being sane is not a natural thing to me. It is an act of will. It is a conscious decision.
Tomorrow I could be in a mental hospital. Again, not an exaggeration. That is how much my self, my being, has the potential to oscillate between states. I can tell you that I haven’t cut myself in over a year, that I haven’t burnt myself with cigarettes in over year, that it’s been almost six months since I’ve made myself throw up my food - but this isn’t because I have grown into a person who would not do those kind of things. That is because every time I get the urge to do that thing, I have to with sheer force of will, tell myself that is not the kind of person I want to be.
And that is the same force of will that made me decide - I want to learn what it is like to not be alone. I want to learn what it is like to love and be loved.
Maybe one day I will be able to wake up and realize that I have wholly stepped into the thing that I have created, but that is not today.
5
I want to be the kind of person who loves other people. I want to appreciate people, and what they’re capable of. I see what humanity has constructed from almost nothing, how they took the universe and they reshaped it, and I could stand in awe in that feeling.
And I do find people that I like being around. But most days I’m assaulted on all sides by malicious stupidity. I am assaulted not by people who want to understand, but people who want to assert THEIR understanding, THEIR reality, onto everyone else. Not because they have put in the work to understand, but because their ego is supported by the rickety frame of cognitive dissonance and half-thought that they’ve created because they need to feel validated, they need to feel whole. And they will RUIN you to feel this way.
And I’ve tried to explain how telling a person they look ridiculous in a certain skirt is the same kind of logic that allows for mass genocide - but people don’t understand that, not really. They don’t see how devastating the way they try to enforce their own reality can be. They don’t see just how malicious they are.
And for all the times I’ve been told I’m too sensitive, I need to get over it, for all the times I’ve told MYSELF this, how I’ve laughed off people telling me
Sometimes people will be understanding, at first. They’ll find my body pleasing and they’ll read my writing and they think they’ve come to some sort of acceptance of me as a person. But the minute I do something they find uncomfortable, or embarrassing, or out of line, they will turn on me, vicious. Ah, yes, those familiar words. I’ve been holding my breath waiting for them. I’ve been waiting for the moment when the desire to fuck me and touch my ass has receded enough that your real feelings can rise up. Here we go. I’m ready. Let me here you say them.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?”
6
Here’s a story I’ve never told anyone:
I meet a man in a dive bar. It’s the kind of bar where I can hear women doing coke in the next stall over. He’s not the kind of person that I usually go for - big, muscular, bald. Drug dealer. (People have been coming up to him all night, and then he retreats for a while, and comes back. When he finally turns to me with this ‘confession’, as if daring me to have a reaction, I just raise an eyebrow and say. “Yeah, wasn’t that obvious?” )
He notices people. That’s what I notice about him. I like to play a game where I ask people what they think I do for a living, because it gives me an indication of what kind of traits they look for when coming to a conclusion, and whether their scrutiny goes beyond surface values. At the time I have blonde hair. I’m wearing a long black skirt, and I have on a shirt that says “Vote for Vodka.”
“You work in computers,” he said, and I laugh, because he’s right.
Later he drags his hands through my hair and pulls, studying my face for a reaction. I can’t help it. My eyes roll up in my head. I didn’t realize it until that moment, but I’ve been desperate for someone to hurt me. I want him to notice this about me, though, so I don’t mind.
Here is someone who has a capacity for intelligence, who sees people: But to him it is all a game. To him people are simple, because they want something and he can either deny or provide that want. To him, the world is dirty and small and ugly, weeds rising out of the soil. He has some, if not all, of the raw components to be someone who truly understands but he can’t, everything is mired in murk. Everything, in his mind, has gone to shit.
I can’t tell when I begin to hate him. Maybe I hated him from the beginning. Maybe I hated him when he told me how awkward I was. Before he kissed me in the parking lot. Maybe I hated him when I asked him what the worst thing he’s ever done was, and he told me watching someone’s eyes, and seeing the realization that they are going to die. I’m alone with him and I think of how easily he could crush me, kill me. I can tell that he has the capacity for that violence. But I don’t care. Not at the moment. I’m trying to understand. That seems more important.
“People aren’t difficult to understand,” he told me, and I know he’s wrong, because for everything that he sees, he has boiled it down to a singular point. What they want, and what we can get out of that want. And they are so much more vast than he imagines.
He tells me he wants to see me again. He’s fascinated by me, and it disgusts me, because for whatever he can see me, I know that he CAN’T see me. He’s incapable of it. I ignore his text messages. I’m terrified of running into him again. I cry about this for days. Robert tells me that I have to tell him, to make the pain stop - that I have to get rid of him. And I do. But I never told him why he terrified me, not exactly. Except for now, when he reads this.
Once again, I see another form of evil. They seem neverending.
7
Even if I were to be perfectly mentally healthy, perfectly assured of myself, even if I were to see reality as it were, even if I were able to appreciate the good things that people offered, even if I were to understand my own boundaries and assert them, I don’t know how I’m supposed to reconcile malicious stupidity.
So how do I live like that? How does anyone live like that? Tell me that I’m wrong, that I’m not seeing this clearly, because I don’t want to live my whole life feeling like this. Feeling as if I need to guard myself and be (mostly) alone for the sake of my own insanity.
There are times when I’ve felt immobilized by understanding the free will of other people and not wanting to interfere with that - seeing all the lines of how people interacted with other people trying to impose their wants. Feeling unable to even begin to move a finger, knowing how it would ripple through time and space, how it would affect those around me. And seeing how blatantly other people bull-charged into that space, without a care for who they affected or hurt, without a care for what they were imposing other people. Wondering, how is it even possible to do that? Wondering, if you knew what you were doing, you would find it impossible. You would lay on the ground, inert, unable to hardly breathe.
But also:
I have done my fair share of hurting other people. Do NOT mistake me. I don’t want to appear as if I think I am a saint in that regard. And in many ways I am a hypocrite, I have hurt the people that I have loved the most. I have demanded compassion from people who were incapable of it, or did not wish to give it to me. I have hurt people because I was smarter than them and I knew they loved me, because I could yank them around as easily as I could a dog, and I exploited their feelings for me. I have not had nearly enough consequences for acting like a complete fucking bitch as I should have, and partly it’s because I’m pretty, partly because I am excellent at putting on a show, of playing the victim, of acting like I have compassion but because of some block of mental character I’m unable to give it. When really I should have just walked away, I should have stopped fucking around, not just for their sake, but for mine.
In many ways I thought this was the way the world was supposed to work. I remember running away from some friends one night, upset, because I realized when we were having a conversation, they couldn’t hear me. Not just that they weren’t paying attention, but we were on a completely different plane of understanding.
And being told by my girlfriend at the time, “Baby, they’re teddy bears. They are their for you to play with, and to comfort you when you are sad.”
This felt wrong, but I doubted myself. Maybe I was on such a level that all I could do was exploit other people, to force them to love me. Finally, after all these years, I knew the correct combinations of actions and motions to make people like me - how far I had come from that little girl in preschool who felt so infinitely alone. But when I talked to people not as I saw myself, but as they wanted to see me, I was even more alone.
So how do I live now, being myself and knowing how many people can’t reconcile that? How do I live, knowing that 99% of people are intolerable to me?
How do I live, knowing that a huge aspect of what is wrong with me, is what’s been tormenting me my entire life, is not some invisible entity, but a very real, physical, malicious stupidity?
How do I live, knowing that I can’t forgive the thing that is the very apex of evil?
8
I was intending to end this on a good note. I understand how composition works, and how if you’ve read this far, I’ve dragged you through all these states of emotion and rhythm to come to some satisfying conclusion.
But I can’t - because I’m not there yet. Maybe I’ll come back to this year, and see where I’ve come. Maybe I’ll laugh at the ways I’ve mentally warped myself, the ways I’ve brought myself again and again, back to solitude, to retreat from the agonizing, continuous assault of mental pain that other people inflict.
I would like to. I would like to be able to meet someone for coffee, and enjoy all the aspects of their personality, as a whole self. I’d like to be able to walk downtown and not feel like I’m the victim of a thousand self-imposed iron grids of harsh reality.
But for now the best I can say is that when someone asks me “What the fuck is wrong with you?” I can turn to them and say:
“The real question is, what the fuck is wrong with you?”
Follow me on twitter, facebook, or on my website. You can also buy my books here
Gifs from tumblr, portrait by me canon t5i