Thinking in Movies

There was a lot I'd assumed throughout life. It became one of the neater aspects of my diagnosis. I'd been describing myself as mildly autistic, I just didn't know it. I described myself as a "weird boy" and later as "Mildly to Moderately Spicy". "Only 'weird boys' think those sorts of things," or "I've heard about 'weird boys' that squeeze things they love too hard and kill them,".

A lot of things that I'd considered, I'd eventually just pushed aside. With no adults listening, I just threw my hands up at many points and said, "alright, I guess I'm just normal…!" It was that avenue with psychologists that lead to me believing that I might be kind of cute or something. I'd heard it said over time that beautiful people got things. While I wasn't getting a diagnosis, I started to wonder if they were holding preconceived notions like Autistic people are unable to love, or even that I was good-looking enough to be nothing but depressed. I'd often just wonder about the Tiny Jory I remembered.

Do you mean that you don't have tiny yous running around in your brain? Tiny Jory wasn't aware of what my brain was capable of. I was trying to describe to kids how my brain worked. There was an office up there and all the Jory's were frantically running around filing things into different cabinets. Boss Jory was always angry and quick to lash out when someone slacked off. One of the Jory's misfiled a document and Boss Jory lost it and threatened to fire him. I grew concerned wondering where fired tiny I go. There didn't seem to be a way out of the brain office, did they get shredded? I'd often just laugh at how hard they worked…

In Grade 12, I wasn't able to see past a certain point in my life. A filter had been put up and I'd forget all about Tiny Jory, his huge natural naïve heart, and that big smile. I'd stopped believing in myself. I wasn't getting belief from the side in any regard. The belief that I knew I was different. The belief that I was trying. All the things in between.

Nothing in life was concrete and I grew a vast confusion in all aspects of life. An ability to ineffectively put me in other people's shoes. People telling me I was smart or destined for greatness while simultaneously treating me like I didn't know how to chew my food. The medical professions couldn't figure it out. It was pretty obvious that the kids at school weren't going to solve a thing or diagnose me. Some people would even mention they were studying to be psychologists. I'd suggest that maybe I am their thesis subject.

It was those things that hurt my big heart. I didn't just ask for help from adults, I'd been spelling it out for people I went to school with. It added to that complex of feeling unimportant. It added to the confusion of why I got infamy. I never shied away from my misgivings but wondered about all the times I had given. That caused further regression.

I'd felt left for dead as rumors spread about a boy doing hard drugs. I'd sat there knowing I was probably just losing fragments of my mind. Left for dead for the one reason, really left for dead when I talked to death and no one knew. It was apparently just the drugs.

I'd argue with my mother, who I kept insisting that I was fine. She was already blowing things out of proportion, so I reasoned that telling her I was almost getting stabbed just trying to find a couple of grams of Marijuana wasn't going to help anyone. I was just smoking pot; it was slowing down my brain. But my mother wasn't listening to the intricacies of my language and was focused on a possible future, not on making it through the present. I'd get battled on everything.

I was just trying to make it out of this high school thing though. After a one-month suspension, I'd noticed how good the environment and The Warden had been. I got all my outstanding homework done, and that was a lot. I'd surpassed the class in teaching myself. I even had time to go back and teach myself the grade 9 math fundamentals I'd skimped out on being angry. The Vice-Principal was surprised when I asked to remain in juvenile detention indefinitely.

They say kids know everything, maybe this one did know a thing or two. A mother still holding on too hard after she'd kicked the boy out. Like most people I'd known, I wondered how she thought she was going to have that cake, and eat it too. It took a long time to squirm away and fly.

Once the haze of life calmed down and I managed to remove the filter, that's when it became clear why I hadn't been able to forget like normal boys. I had a movie recorder brain. Each piece to my brain started clicking into place and making sense. Like other things, I just started to assume everyone thought in bright colours.

I still tried to study other people's thought processes and started referring to myself as 'The Observer'. While people were out living, I was surviving and trying to make it all make sense. I wished I could 'connect' people to my mainframe, so they could understand what I was dealing with. I was building 'logic gates' as rules.

It started to make sense why I'd done so bad at math. Each year I'd spent more fighting with a math teacher. I was putting in the effort now, but still getting challenged. They wanted me to show my work, but I had a hard time manipulating the formulas on paper. I had no problem doing math in my brain and coming up with the answer.

I wasn't winning either way. If I didn't show my work, they didn't believe I could come up with such answers by showing so little work. They just didn't understand I was doing the math in my head. If I tried to show my work, I might get lost in the translation from brain to hand, then pen to paper. Other times, my long-form was twice as much as I tried to take what was going through my brain and write it down.

It was my fourth year of technical training for my electrical apprenticeship. School turned out to be my favourite part of the trade. I'd have never guessed there would be so much science involved in it! We started learning about logic. Hexadecimal systems and binary. We were shown a universal chart and I noticed a pattern immediately.

The teacher was explaining a bunch of formulas and that started to hurt my brain, confuse me. I interrupted, as weird boys tend to, and asked if the formulae were relevant if I memorized the chart. They weren't, so I made an excel spreadsheet for the class, showing how my brain drew the pictures up. Maybe help someone understand the content better.

I still didn't quite have my license to be weird. It was in those ways I'd describe myself as lazy. I would much rather do math in my brain landscape than write it down. Lazy.

I'd finished writing about Tiny Jory. There wasn't anything to add, only things to remove. After all those years of being unable to see Tiny Jory, I wrote out my weird story, and for the first time was finally proud of myself. Proud of the middle iteration before Major Jory. I'd finally accepted all that had happened. That was my brain. I knew I could change the past, but accepting what happened was a different story. All I knew was that Tiny Jory didn't have many good memories.

A few like watching cartoons while eating dry Fruit Loops with my pet rabbit, Bailey. Instead, I used my brain to do a few things. I went through that nerdy boys' terrible memories, and at certain points, I'd have some Meme Shades come down.

I also put Tiny Jory in a landscape, the field across from my first house. Tiny Jory didn't have friends so he's alone but that's alright. I've got my usual mushroom-style cut. The sun's shining bright. I'm wearing the shirt I remember the most. It was short-sleeved, but with my tiny arms, it was more like a medium-sleeved shirt if those exist.

Tiny Jory's just running around smiling big. The oversized cuffs bobbing against my tiny arms. Running like I'm trying to do the egg beater in the water to float but no one to make fun of me. Not a single care in the world like I haven't already started holding the weight of the world and my brain on these tiny shoulders. I cry when I visit the landscape. Just being a kid and I think the little gaffer deserves it. Deserves some carefree moments.

I had such a serene moment there, that I thought I'd check in on Little Jory. But I was having a hard time writing that section. I was trying to write a mystery-style memoir, where the reader would be confused while the boy was. I can't blame people for me living in a pen reality, while they lived in the chocolate bar world. I'd figured it was at least a chocolate-pen.

I wasn't surprised to find that Little Jory wasn't running around a field. All the issues hadn't been addressed yet. I'd only been told I wasn't understanding the subtle inferences of abuse from people I loved dearly. Another reason I stayed confused. I don't imagine Little Jory will be running around a field anyways.

Right now, Little Jory is where most people assumed I was. Laying in bed. At first, I wondered what I was doing but I wasn't going to be hard on myself anymore. A lot of hard work had gotten me here. The symbolism is heavy in my life. How long it took me to grow and find myself. I figured if he just wanted to lay there after I was done writing, that was okay with me.

Little Jory could just rest, take a load off. I'd take it from here.