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lately i find myself staring at the wall

I’ve been back to New York for a bit, and I guess it’s all feeling different, as the air is crisper and the heat has passed. As for me, my sun is blazing a little less brightly, but not because it’s trying to heat up anything anymore — I still smile a lot, but I don’t speak as much as I have before, and I’ve hardly had time to notice.

I am rawer. After the latest exposure to unspeakable triggers, I have ceased the ability to bite my tongue and withhold. I will either become mute, noticeably so, and lack the words, or I will talk happily but not for long.

I am more sensitive to people’s reactions. I am more viscerally scared to engage, even with friends at times, because I can’t really process or afford to be self conscious, as I freely am now. I watch myself. I notice I still have the ability to respond, but not the ability to explain. I have the ability to listen, but not the ability to process. I am slower now. I am more honest. I am less numb. I am losing my access to my extroversion. The craving is there — the satiation is melting away.

I want to be known, paid attention to, wondered after — very few people have done this. But in the absence of talking, I have noticed what I forgot to listen to.

Now, in this time, I see how much energy it genuinely takes to be completely naked to the world. But suddenly I lack bandwidth. I doll myself up, but shy away now if someone wants to get to know me. Suddenly, my brain will short circuit, go blank instantly, if I don’t maintain a sense of optimistic focus.

Instead of being sad, I want to scream angrily. Instead of being excited, I want to stare and wonder why I should care about so many things I have no appetite for.

“It’s autism unmasked,” was a thought that ran through my brain.

“You’ve been quiet,” my friend chimes in the Discord. Even online, something’s shifted. There’s an ambient sense of depresso. He points out it took me a few days to work up the energy to see people again, and even when I did, it wasn’t the same cadence as before. Instead of endless chatter, now it would be like I turn on like a wind up toy, then wilt again. I will pop in, spam the group with a bunch of reactions, flit back out. I want to initiate, not engage.

It’s not that I feel bad, it’s that I’m unable to name things I feel with the accuracy I did before.

****

The dam started breaking last week, as I found myself in a place, mentally, I had not been in a long time. For most of my life, I would cower and wilt in the presence of my mother’s feedback, always knowing that she’d go through the motions of letting me live the life I want, but the price I paid was her berating me for it and asking me why I didn’t feel guilty I was a burden on our family for my unconventional life style.

But the latest fight with her, where she finally nitpicked me into a submission I had always dreaded, a suicidal place where I’d bargained with myself for years to not succumb to — I ended up shrieking and banging on the car door, my tongue wetting with rage, feeling horrible that all the work of the past few years had just slipped from my hands, losing a control I had sustained for so many years, being inconsolable in a way none but she had ever seen, finally leveling at her everything I’d held back for years, every time I’d tiptoed and compromised for her sake, no longer caring if I hurt her, no longer even seeking for her to understand. Simple release came from the blind pain, the resignation that I would never be the daughter she’d longed for me to be to replace her own decrepit relationship with her own recently passed mother. I unbit my tongue, and let her rip.

For the time I spend talking, there’s certain things I’ll never say. That’s ending now.

She stopped. She didn’t say anything of relevance — she stuttered, too — but through it all, I felt something different. I felt fear, and remorse, finally break through the cloud of sullenness and bitterness she’d kept hanging over my head for the last decade. And even though she didn’t apologize, a bit of guilt came through the way she shoveled food on my plate in the evening. I kept it business professional, like usual, knowing if I acknowledged the mess swept under the rug, it’d just start a family wide fight again. When my dad came to say goodbye, I cheerfully lied to him, again, that it was gonna be okay. But this time, I felt there was a respect from her side.

****

I didn’t talk on the plane for days. I just sat there, angrily, still tweeting jokes to my friends, but feeling a rage burrowing in my chest that felt so red hot I didn’t know what to do with it. A rage that I wanted to remain silent about. A rage most people in my life already understood was the thing, the shadow that would never stop hovering, the darkness of the broken narcissistic mother-daughter bond that grates at the wound that won’t heal.

I started walking around feeling self disgust. I don’t want to be the kind of person that isn’t real to other people anymore, I fumed. I don’t want my anger, my sadness, my scary red hot grief to not be taken seriously. I don’t want to be around people who can’t handle me at all. And I might as well find out if I can be.

I rarely fight with friends, but J and E tell me that this makes me scary. I never acknowledge when I’m hurt, and even if the dam hasn’t burst often, what about when it does? How would I handle conflict? If the sun never stops shining, won’t you live in fear of the day a cloud comes?

I’ve let myself be grumpy, snap at people, more than I ever have in the last year. Most people are relieved to realize my aggression doesn’t go deeper than a basic bark, if you get too close to my mother wound.

My tongue further unnumbed as I made my way across town with my suitcase, feeling pain in my left arm again as I was reminded of how much my story has to play out here, along with the rest of me feeling a synthesis finally with the girl I’d been when I was too afraid to speak.

Recently, I spoke my mind, not angrily, but straightforwardly, finally, to those who’d hurt me that I hadn’t told. And I resolved that that treatment would never come about for real, because I had learned how to let the right people in enough to let it.

In exchange, I started staying quieter. I stared and watched TV, said no to friends, made dumpling soup, stopped crying about my past and started gazing hazily out into the future.

It looks kinda bright. I think the sun may be out.