#ActuallyAutistic. But Desperately Trying to Reach You…

I desperately want to say something important to me.

Honestly… Clearly… Without sounding like a quote-ready Hallmark card… Another cosmic meme…

Or losing you in a fog of metaphor, ambiguity, indirection.

Yet…

Maybe we do have to play the cards we’re dealt.

Maybe, tho, they change every moment. Discards. Draws. Flipping hidden cards over.

Once in awhile, a brand-new deal.

Maybe, just maybe, we can only choose a new way to play them.

At any moment.

When I sat down to this table, I got a handful of black cards…

Autism. Anxiety. Attention deficits. Depression. Mania. Selective mutism. Delusions. Hallucinations. Psychotic breaks. Shifting personalities. Undependable skills. Undiagnosable illnesses. Catastrophic decisions. Mockery. Ridicule. A family unable to cope. Isolation. Night terrors…

Above all, Loneliness…

But I drew just a few others…

Uneven genius. A compulsion to create. A gift for words. The drive to love…

Tried masking. But that bluff never works.

And Life’s one game I never had the balls to just throw a hand in and wait for the next poker night…

But, late in the game, with a loaned stake from a loving partner who arrived just in the nick of Time…

And just a few weird friends…

I’m working on turning this busted flush into something I can leave this game with.

Not a jackpot.

Just satisfaction.

My apologies. I write like a 50s movie voiceover stuck in the wrong century. (Say, Bladerunner?)

Drama button permanently stuck “ON.”

Note: Thanks to my good, #Neurodivergent friend, Gary Bryers, for the loan of a coupla metaphors…

Originally published at http://autisticaf.me on March 15, 2020.