As I child I loved to collect things. Some of the things I collected were deemed usual. Erasers and soaps were acceptable, girly things for a young lady to collect.
Everywhere we went I would ask for a new eraser, to mark the occasion and preserve that memory.
I collected stuffed toys. I had so many that there was hardly room for me in my bed. This was ok until a certain age when I should have grown out of it. I couldn't bare to part with my stuffed toys. They were all special to me. Had names, every single one of them. I would spend time in my room and have conversations with them. I even had one which I think was just part of another stuffed toy that broke off. I found it on the ground down the creek trail near my house. But it looked like Fizzgig from The Dark Crystal and I kept it in my pocket for ages. We had adventures together down that creek trail. I loved to play alone and live inside my own imagination. That imagination would win me writing competitions and had me a member of the gifted and talented language group. I had things published in the Possum Pages in our states major newspaper, and won youth writing awards.
But was considered weird if laid out in the open, like my adventures with a part of some stuffy I had labelled Fizzgig.
I also collected ring pulls from the tops of cans. I picked them up everywhere, cleaned them up and put them in my big international roast coffee tin. I don't know why. I did not use them for anything. I just collected them and put them in the can. I still do this as an adult. Though now they are given to rotary or whoever locally collects them to use in making prosthetics and wheelchairs.
I collected books. I had every single Stephen King book, Bryce Courtney, Famous Five, Judy Blume books. Whatever was my flavour at the time. Again, I still do that. I spent an entire year collecting and reading all the Jack Reacher books just recently. They are not even that great. But I cannot not finish my collection.
This happened with music, back in the day of cassettes and cd's. Films and tv series also. I would focus on an actor and collect everything they were in.
My interests were considered typical, although the extent of them was anything but typical. For example, I had all the films made by the Coreys (Haim and Feldman), but I also had a scrapbook with all of their articles, knew every fact it was possible to know about them from magazines or tv interviews back in the 90's when we didnt have all that at our fingertips.
Same with Madonna, George Michael, whoever else was my latest hyperfocus.
These can all be brushed off as the usual interests of a teenage girl. But it was so much more than that.
For example, Princess Leia and Star Wars were one of my intense interests. I had to BE her, whenever I was 'playing' with friends. Or Sandy from Grease. I could not handle anyone else 'being' those two characters. They were way too important to me. What if they did it wrong? Plus, they just didn't 'get' that character like I did. I watched those films over and over and over until I could practically recite every line. I used them as a guide on how to be. Sandy was my marker on how to be 'nice', because girls are supposed to be nice right? Don't get me started on what a crap example that was for a young impressionable girl. But I knew I wasn't quite right and needed to change so people liked me or kept liking me. I wasn't actually an unpopular person. I just knew I was a fake. I never felt the same as anyone else and had seen by the way people treated others who were different, that the same was the safe option. And so I needed to keep that mask on to stay popular.
I mimicked their expressions, and their reactions. Because I would often get those things wrong. While Leia taught me how to be a strong, independent leader, Madonna was my marker for sexy and desirable. All of these contradicting personalities that I collected and studied and emulated.
Kylie. Wow how I loved Kylie. Out of control curly hair, with a real sense of innocence oozing out of her. I still love Kylie. And Olivia. And I cried so hard when Carrie Fisher died. I burst into tears at the cinemas when she appeared as Leia in her last film.
I felt like that with Robin Williams and Olivia Newton John. How on earth could I feel such a massive loss for people I have never met, but when I lost someone close to me, I just seemed to move right on with life?
It is because they were so much more than just actors, or singers to me. They helped me get through life back when I didn't know who I was, only who I was supposed to be.
I knew I was different. I always knew that. Maybe if I was able to have my 'label' back then, I wouldn't have needed them. Because I would have known that yes, I was different, and this was the reason why.
Not because I was a broken neurotypical, but because I was a perfectly usual, autistic child.
Things are so much easier in film, or books, and in my imagination. They have a plot, and a villain, a hero, an ending that was nice and neat.
Books especially, they even told you what people were thinking and feeling and why. OH. EM. GEE. That was definitely not apparent in the real world. I mean, most times no one ever said what they actually meant. Expected me to guess their feelings or know how to act in certain situations. Their facial expressions rarely matched their words. I don't recognise my own feelings, how the ferg am I supposed to recognise yours? I cannot articulate my feelings. The words get all jumbled up in my brain. It feels like a big tumble of words rolling over each other at a great speed, then my throat just clamps down on them. I have situational mutism. Everything I want to say just completely overwhelms me and I end up saying nothing.
Plus, people lie. A lot.
Those who were supposed to love me and keep me safe, lied and abused me.
Friends would be nice to my face while speaking awful things about me to others.
I trusted things to go a certain way and they didn't.
I loved people so much who did not love me at all.
Margarine pretended to be butter.
So now at 47 years of age, in this little healing journey I am on, I am reparenting that autistic child.
Whose life could have been so much different to how it was if only she knew she was autistic. That her impulsiveness was just her neurodivergent brains different wiring with her ADHD in the drivers seat, and that her complete disdain for following the crowd was that PDA profile that should have been nurtured into the great leader she could have been and turned into anyway. Eventually. The constant fight for approval of those who continually hurt her, was just that RSD taking over.
So, every night I curl up with my favourite teddy bear, Winston, who my partner bought for me one day, as he revels in my autistic joy. And NO ONE is ever too old for teddy bears. And I give myself the compassion and empathy I should have had as that struggling child.
Because I know now. And when you know better, you do better.
Simples.
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