The Great Barrier Weef

A Field Guide to Autistic Feelings | The Matchbook | 6.5.26

Navigating life for 30+ years as an undiagnosed Autistic person means a few things: You have a lot of feelings that don’t have names.

These are, not surprisingly, highly specific, entirely vivid, and completely real emotions, reactions, and feelings that usually lead to a particular blankness in faces when you try to describe them to other people. Especially neurotypical people. So, today, I decided to do what any rational and reasonable poet with an Autistic brain would do when he doesn’t have the proper words or definitions that accompany them:

I made them up myself.

Here are some.

• Overknowing - Everyone always thinks I am wrong. Always. I am doubted, ignored, I am flat out told I am incorrect when these strange gut feelings hit me so loud and pronounced that I cannot breathe with the certainty of them. “Reads” when meeting new people, predicting outcomes for future events, it matters not. Call it advanced pattern recognition, call it a literal psychic 6th sense I was born with, this is the feeling of overknowing, and it’s knowing more than I possibly should, and the weight of knowing that I will be doubted for it. Eventually it’s proven right, and I say this not with ego but with data to back it, had I bothered to actually keep a proper record.

• Spiralfall - Something new pops up, always at an inconvenient time, and you then fall so deeply into it that you spend the next few many hours falling through the emptiness of its space. Learning about it, fixing it, working on it, obsessing over it. This is the passing of 6 hours without bothering to eat, drink, or even get up to pee until you’re finished. You’re never finished. This is at least 4 times per week.

• Waitlessness - Not gravity or the lack of corporeal heft to keep you grounded, but something worse and even more cruel: the hyper-specific feeling of being unanchored in time. Your schedule demands you be somewhere, but you’re not sure how long it will last. You’re required to show up for something, but the duration is left vague. This is the feeling of being somewhere and having no idea how long you’ll be there until you’re allowed to leave without seeming rude or hurting someone’s feelings. It’s always longer than you think it will be, but you’ll never be told that, so you’ll probably activate the wrong Waiting Mode and then feel very, very discombobulated.

• Crulety - The experience of being punished, disciplined, and met with disbelief and anger for doing or saying something you had not the foggiest inkling was wrong. Apparently a Rule Book is handed out to neurotypical people sometime between puberty and 40 that outlines all the secret and unspoken social mores and laws people must adhere to. We’re never given that book, so we are bewildered at the response that comes from the masses when we are convicted, sentenced, and punished for a crime we never knew was one. The worst part: No matter how many you try to learn and memorize, there are always more.

• Routigue - We NEED to do the same things the same ways at the same times. We NEED to eat the same foods in order to avoid distress, be it gastrointestinal or emotional. We NEED to follow some very particular patterns. Until we don’t. Until the adherence to these routines causes a very unique and intense form of burnout where we’re so sick of the routine we created, the routine we need, that we are almost willing to dramatically spark the lighter, toss it over our shoulder, and walk away from the resulting explosion in slow motion just to break the cycle. When the fire dies out and the ash falls like snow, we’ll be there, soot-covered and worn out, doing the same things in the exact same order we used to do. Probably because we have to.

• The Smush - You walk into a room, an event (you didn’t want to go to), a gathering, and all at once you’re being compressed from all sides. You’re the thing on those viral YouTube videos where the hydraulic press squishes down against an everyday object until in super-slow-mo, the whole world gets to see what happens when all that weight is concentrated onto one tiny thing. You’re the everyday object. You’re the tiny thing. Small talk, people’s perfume, fluorescent lighting, onion breath and the smell of their garlicy dinner last night leaking from their pores, the throbbing hum of the speaker in the corner, the feeling of strangers hands on your shoulder when they ask you a question or the stabbing of their fingertip in your arm or back when they try to get your attention. This is THE SMUSH, and it will implode you if you allow it. Out, is the only way to survive it. Just out. Where doesn’t matter, as long as it’s out.

• The Great Barrier Weef - Life as an Autistic is hard. Very. After the Crulety, the Waitlessness, the Routigue you will experience, after the doubt that comes with Overknowing, and the hours lost to Spiralfall, it might feel hopeless, it might feel terrifying. Alas friends, not all is lost, there is hope still. There is one feeling, one emotion that if you are lucky, truly lucky, sneaks in and somehow protects you (mostly) from all these. That insulates, that takes the brunt of the forces of the sea of struggle around you. This is The Great Barrier Weef, and it’s a person, it’s the person that makes it ok to be you, exactly as you are. That is patient when you break the rules you didn’t know existed, that fixes the same 3 meals over and again so you don’t get sick or overwhelmed, that defines the time you’ll be required to be somewhere before you even walk out the door. This is the person that will (with time) believe you when your Overknowing kicks in and you get a bad ick about someone you meet, but cannot clearly explain why. This is your Weef (the word I use for wife), and the form they take can be anyone, a partner, a friend, a person who showed up. If you’re lucky they’ll come. They are home, and they make you feel like wherever you are, you’re home there too. I found mine, and it’s why I’m here, doing this, and not somewhere else freaking out. Thank goodness for that.

A field guide of sorts, and I hope it’s helpful, I hope it educates, illuminates, and hell, entertains. There are more, trust this, and maybe one day I’ll compile them all into a book.

I love you all.

Be good.