Nobody wants to be a retard
Today was my third presentation here. It means I have only one more to go before I can leave this place and pretend it never existed.
It did not go how I planned or how I hoped it would go, and that knowledge is making me writhe in embarrassment. I tried. I tried so hard. The fact that it didn't go the way I expected and it was witnessed is what has me nauseous to this moment. I am coming down. The way the body does after the perceived danger is gone, or when you're about to get sick, or the fever is just about to break, but never does. That is my normal response to public speaking since I've arrived here, and while part of me is fully aware this is not my mother tongue, it is not even my second language, I still cannot just... accept that I've had such a mediocre performance. It is no wonder my body sometimes feels like it's systematically failing me. I cannot accept, I am cultivating guilt as if I'm being paid to do so.
How do I let such humiliation go? That's how it feels. Humiliating. I should not be allowed to be alone with my brain and my thoughts. I should not. It should all just be quiet. I wish there was a manual for this, something comprehensive and not just word jumble and abstract bullshit. Just step one, step two, and preferably a step three that's not 'kill yourself.'
I think what hurts the most is the knowing that I could've done better and I didn't. What's making letting this moment go into such an impossible mission is that now this (this pathetic, underwhelming, and embarrassing display) becomes the baseline for what people will think I am capable of. This moment is now a reflection of me.
That is the point it all comes back to, isn't it? The therapy, the anxiety, the core of the perpetually rotting apple. Every entry, every room, every experience, every exchange, every glance. It all comes back to the fundamental worry of what others will think of me. How will I be perceived by those around me? There is something different about my wiring. Something I have been repeatedly, and without ever asking for such input, told is weird and wrong and off-putting. I live knowing that I had to fight nail and tooth to be taken seriously by mental health professionals, to get an assessment and a subsequent diagnosis, already entering adulthood, and that the same diagnosis that explains everything is nothing but a brand. I will not receive accommodations or support of any kind without a label that will make navigating an stressing, male-dominated field in a foreign country even more challenging.
No one wants to be a retard. Hence the visceral fear of people taking one glance at me and seeing not what I want them to see, what I curate purposefully and with almsot obsessive focus, but this... thing that is different and they can't quite pin-point why.
Sometimes a diagnosis is not clarifying, sometimes is just a name on a burden. I resent my autism. That's a word that often comes up. Resentment, anger, hate. All these sharp, angular things I carry inside my chest. It explains why I hurt the way I do, why the pain is chronic. I punish myself for the deadly sin of existing. What a sad existence.
Not all is nearly bad. I have people that see something in me and is not this weird thing but something that's twinkling and reflective. A shine. And they shine so bright too and it's the most beautiful thing in live. To care so deeply and find in my path people who care just as much for a stranger they met and subsequently chose and kept choosing.
My only classmate from the last semester came to listen to my presentation today, and she hugged me, and she was so supportive when she had no obligation to be. They are pieces scattered along the path of life that show me who I am and who I can be.
Or maybe they are just people. The same way bad people cross my path, good people do. Maybe it isn't that deep. But how boring would that be?
I've been reading Louise Hay lately. My hip is... doing a thing where it feels like it'll give up any minute now. I feel odd about anything that frames tragedy as a lesson, and that explains pretty much my whole existence (I am aware. I am working on it. It is not nearly as simple as they make it up to be), but 'You Can Heal Your Life' is basically a modern-ish intro to the Hermetic law of cause and effect. I am trying. I just want that on record in case I ever just give up.