Let it Be Known

I sewed on lashes

smudged a rosy hue

over pale sunken cheeks

memorized my scripts

dutifully spoken through

painted cracked lips

still, my inherent otherness

was easily detected

spirit wholly rejected

let it be known

I tried

🎭🎭🎭🎭🎭

I hid in the twilight

from my disguised

reflection

garish and harsh

in the slanting rays

evacuated the

spiral staircase

of society's expectation

flattened under

the stampede

let it be known

I tried

🎭🎭🎭🎭🎭

Ring my teachers

and friends

elders

cousins and aunts

tell them I ran out of

giving a fuck

but just for the record

to run out means

I gave some once

let it be known

I tried

K.B. Silver

There is no cure for autism; it’s likely genetic and isn’t just one trait or behavior. It is a broad set of traits, symptoms, and behaviors, some of which can be mitigated and some of which cannot and should not be. I could no more easily be cured of autism than a left-handed person could be cured of left-handedness.

I can hide the traits that make others uncomfortable. I can be harassed and tortured into doing it better and better, but there is no “recovering” from being me. No amount of abuse, no slapping me for stimming, no sending me to my room for hours to avoid being near me, telling me to do chores to “wear myself out,” putting me in the hall or sending me to other classes where there were other kids like me, amount of drugging me with opiates and antipsychotics that has ever or will ever make me not autistic.

I am still in here. I am just afraid of what will happen once the real me, whom I have been taught I must keep masked from the outside world to survive, is revealed.