@actuallyautistic
One of the things I've always loved is spending time alone in nature. Mostly for the obvious reasons that most people enjoy it. But also, as I now realise, because I could drop the mental shields and defences I'd created, almost entirely unconsciously, and really allow my senses to expand and sink into the world around me, without all the usual noisy horror of humanity causing me its pain. There was also a sense of peace in the wilds, that nothing was being demanded of me.
Grow up knowing you are different, even if you don't really know why, and you quickly learn the dangers of showing it, of letting others see the truth. It's why many of us learn to mask from an early age. The world around us quickly lets us know, in many subtle and, quite frankly, fucking unsubtle, ways, that we aren't right and that it's us who have to change. Being in nature was the only place I could feel free of that. Alone in it, nothing was being demanded of me by the world around me, just as I demanded nothing of it. We could just be, existing in the world that we made together. It was the only time I ever felt truly at peace and relaxed, without the nagging thoughts and whispering fears of caution and of not being seen.
I realised today that this was because I separated, in my mind, the human world, from the world of nature. In one, I had a sense of belonging, of just being a part of something, just like everything else. In the other, I was always the outsider, who could never really belong because he was too different, too other and that all I could really do was hide that, mostly for justified fear of being seen. It was, and still remains, the cause of so much of the anxiety and stress I feel just being out in the world. This sense that I'm always in hostile terrain and the fear of showing it.
Which, whilst still so true in many ways, I realised isn't really needed any more. I'm an adult now, OK a gnarly old git, who's often far more trouble than he's worth, and I have my own truths to live by and don't need theirs and that it was never their world anyway, they just happen to populate mine.
#Autism
#ActuallyAutistic
#Neurodivergent
Hello! I'm a disabled, neurodivergent writer based in Tiverton, Devon.
Blog: dispatchesfromthethreshold.substack.com
Inoculating the Odd in AuDHD 
