Though I am 43, I’ve always been aware that my inner child is more alive than anyone I have met my age. I don’t know if it was luck or bad luck. Or if it was hereditary. Or a trauma thing, like regression to experience childhood perpetually. I don’t know if it’s because I am autistic. But my sense of wonder was always lively and I tended to keep myself open to new experiences. Or maybe it’s just a masking thing. That showing my belly and being vulnerable to any and all was a superstitious action rooted in the belief that only in recklessness could I avoid danger.
But this year broke me. I thought 2024 was the year that was going to cause me to crumble. But 2024 for all its faults cannot hold a candle to the trauma that was 2025. I know this because I had fire left in me last year and a sense of hope that whenever everything broke apart I could rebuild anew.
I don’t feel like rebuilding now. I barely even have words left in me. Sometimes I lay very still and will my nerve endings to feel heavy and numb. I haven’t connected with my friends because I don’t know what to even talk about or be anymore. And my masking is awry. When I need to socialize, like a meeting (it’s always meetings nowadays.) I laugh so hard and joke so wittily and merrily that I recognize myself even less. Then I hang up, my heart beating as I wonder what impulse drives me to acting in a way that’s the absolute antithesis to who I am. I feel ashamed and too visible in my masking.
When not in meetings, I let the quiet envelop me. Those deep deep silences in the middle of these sunny, crisp days feel like the only thing that protects me. I read frantically and don’t play music. I turn off the fan to make the air still because even the air circulating feels like too much.
Maybe it was time for my naivety to suffer some last blows and just need to grow up. Maybe this quiet person that has no words to connect with was the real me anyway. It’s always hard to tell what parts of me were forged to make society happy, to avoid being abandoned, and to pretend I was ever normal.
The night was so deathly silent that I felt I could hear the sound of the stars moving across the heavens.
– Banana Yoshimoto (Kitchen)