Being Autistic in a Neurotypical World
by guest author Sydney Cook on November 9, 2021
I am autistic. The details of the world stick out to me. I see individual blades of grass; I hear the rustling of leaves and the hum of electricity. My memories replay in my head like 4K video clips. I must make sense of them somehow, so I find patterns. I organize my thoughts like planets around stars. Form them into galaxies of possibility.
For me, school was . . . interesting. I was good at memorization, which teachers liked. My cognitive aptitude and preference for systematizing was enough to get by without much issue, in the academic sense at least. The galaxies inside my skull proved useful. I could string words together on a page and create things tantalizing to the imagination. But I could never let go of my projects and the things I created as easily as people wanted me to. “Resistant to change,” they call it.
School was also a sensory nightmare that caused me to shut down, daily. I sat in little plastic chairs behind composite wood desks and froze, into a near catatonic state, floating in stress up to my ears. I swallowed enough stress so that I could breathe; it burned my esophagus and tied knots in my stomach. The pain made it so that I had to swallow tears, too. And for all of that, I was praised. Lauded. Called “a model student,” “a joy to have in class.” But my joy was nowhere to be found within the four walls of those classrooms, and more time I spent inside those rooms, the harder my joy was to find.
Sounds were a whole world unto their own. I could feel their textures vibrate through my being and rattle my teeth. Melodies washed over me like water and compelled my feet to move. I danced ballet avidly from ages 3 to 15. It was my escape. I took comfort in the structure of it all: the order and routines within class that never changed, and the formulaic nature of ballet choreography itself. The music and movement put me in a trance, euphoria. “Seeks vestibular and proprioceptive sensory input,” they call it. Ballet is a vicious environment. It hurt me in many ways, most of which I didn’t realize back when I was in the thick of it all. I only quit after my mom had been begging me to stop for years and a sharp decline in my mental health all but forced me to. I clung to ballet for dear life because for so many years it was my life. “Social naivety,” they call it.
My life now is . . . interesting. I am twenty years old and trying to navigate life outside the confines of classrooms and ballet studios. I have explored the world outside of those spaces. I have explored who I am outside of those spaces. I have felt the shock of seeing for myself just how big the world is outside the bubble of one’s childhood existence, and I have pressed on. I have grappled with the trauma of autistic childhood, being placed in restrictive environments not designed for me, and tried to reconcile it with the freedom I have now. I’ve felt like I might crumble under the weight of it all, and I have pressed on.
Being autistic in a neurotypical world is . . . interesting. The way that I move through the world is ‘normal’ to me. If ‘normal’ even exists anyway, but that’s a conversation for another day. The world has a special way of foisting its expectations onto you, many of them being arbitrary. There are always more, and they always change. Sometimes I slide through them. Sometimes they are like mountains to me, insurmountable. But I find another way. I press on. In my life I have carried invisible joys and invisible pain. I have worked hard to make them known in this society with its expectations that are not made for me. My autistic tenacity has been invaluable to me through all of it. No matter what comes, I press on.
You can follow Sydney’s work via her website or on Instagram.
