I Kept Trying So Hard To Be Understood By Them

I a 36 year old man, never though I would end up writing something like this in my life yet, here I am typing this all out.

I’m still partly in shock about what I’ve recently have come to understand about my life,. Things that were there but, never named in a way I could see our recognize them.

I grew up in what most people would call a big family. Me, 12 years old at the time. My sisters were seven and 7. Asha, the oldest, and Camilla, the youngest.

They always knew how to label things neatly. Asha was “the beautiful one.” Camilla was “the smart one.” And I was the one who was different.

They doctors had diagnosed me very early on:

I still remember my parents faces when it was confirmed.

Not relief our clarity. Something closer to quiet grief, like they had been handed an explanation they didn’t want but couldn’t return.

That was the first time I felt it. The idea that something in me had been measured and was found to be off, like a broken machine missing a part to make it whole.

It sat in my stomach like a weight I couldn’t name and, I blamed myself. For I felt responsible. Going over my short lived life of what I needed to do to fix this.

And so, I decided early on that I would not let a label define the limits of my life.

So I adapted. Trying to edit myself. I didn't want to be the problem, to be the one that dragged every-one down. I didn't want to become a liability to my family.

It didn't just go in mall ways it was in constant ways when I started to do it.

Every sentence, every reaction, every pause between words became something I monitored. I would rephrase myself during conversation. I would soften, shorten, correct, re-explain. People with Autsim talk weird right? That's what they said, and I didn't want to become another addition to the stereotype of that. I did it online too, the time to think made me feel calmer, but also made me more perfectionistic, I sometimes couldn't go without re-editing a single post 29 times.

I thought that the clarity would fix the distance between me and other people. That, if I just made it easier to be understood, that it would connect me more.

It didn’t.

It did the exact opposite.

The more I explained, the more uncertain I became. The more precise I tried to be, the more I felt people pulling away. At some point I stopped noticing where my real thoughts ended and where the performance began it became like wearing a mask, not just the speech, my behaviour too.

That’s what masking became for me.

Not pretending to be someone else and, copying them but, trying to manufacture a version of myself that could survive other people’s reactions. In my head, I kept replaying the conversations I had with other people a million times, trying to find the flaws.

It usually failed in the same way as before.

I would say too much our say it wrong.

Sense the shift in someone’s expression and immediately try to repair it, compensate it.

That’s where it gets worse. I don’t know when to stop fixing things. I keep talking until I’ve buried the original point under layers of explanation. I kept simplifying.

The people around me just ended up going more quiet.

That silence is always felt louder than whatever I said before it. Whatever word I could speak to them.

I just wanted to connect. I just wanted to belong, to repair what was broken inside of me.

That’s the part that never changed. The intent was always simple, even when the execution wasn’t.

I think a lot of people would understand this more than I used to believe in these times. Especially people who are autistic or have ADHD. The effort of translating yourself into something socially acceptable, and still getting it wrong.

At some point inside it all, I started believing that effort itself was the problem.

That maybe if I tried less, I would hurt fewer things but, trying less also felt like disappearing. Making myself silent, in order to make room for everyone, felt like I was errasing myself.

Then I had the idea, to just coping others, I already had most of their languagse patterns on record, so why not do like the people in movies do? Acting like other people would, copying them. So I did, I started to copy the accents of those around me, I watched their movement their reactions. I start having scrips for every reply our questions people often had our said. People where reacting again, I thought I was improving things. The signals where there right?

I wasn’t.

I was building a version of myself that required constant maintenance just to appear normal. I was building a version that left me tired, when I was alone, when I no longer had to perform my role, I started to lose interest in the things, I once found joy in. For they where now, thing in a fantasy world, I had to left behind, to live in the real world. To connect with people. I needed friends, so my parents could improve.

The biggest irony of it all? The people still noticed the cracks, no matter how hard I tried to hide them, our tried to cover for them.

I used to think if I just tried harder. If I stayed consistent, if I became more “emotionally fluent,” if I removed the parts that made people hesitate. I would eventually become someone who could be accepted without effort.I just had to errase every part that was broken and, autistic.

Truth is the the effort never stopped, it turned into exhaustion fast, nor so did the rejection I kept facing every single day of my life.

At some point I posted a simple question online asking: Would you want a child who is autistic?

Unsprisingly to me: Most answers were some version of no. Not always cruel. Just certain. Like it was obvious because, no one would want to have a child that was broken like me.

Those answer stayed with me longer than I expected, and it changed the way, in how I saw people. It wasn't a hatred for how they rejected me, our the anger, I once wished upon them. This was different like a kind of conclusion I didn’t know how to undo. A new rule, that I alway's knew was there yet, never voiced.

To me, it translated that: If acceptance has conditions I can never fully meet, then I started to wonder what the point of trying at all was. So I stopped looking for acceptance, not for peace, but for distance.

Because now? I no longer believe I’m failing to connect in the way I used to think. I think I’m doing what I learned to do best: Adjusting, anticipating, preventing rejection before it happens.

The result just looks like isolation. The tragedy isn’t that I don’t know how to connect. Even after everything I still haven't learned the singlest thing about it. To me it's like other humans are magically connected to each other, as if they where in some kind of human network that I am unable to access from start.

But, to me it's not isolation, it's survival, and I survive by pre-emptively leaving them. They can exit, they can die in front of my eyes, and I wouldn't give it as much as a single thought, to me it's just noise in the background.

If you where to ask about my feelings our thought, I would no longer be able to tell you them. I dissconnected and, copy the ones of others, to a point. Whether what I'm feeling if at all? Is even real anymore.

Which desires stem from me our are copied from someone else I once met in the past.