On or about my forty-sixth birthday, a moment of crisis led me to the realization that I’m autistic. It would be difficult for me to overstate the impact of that moment on everything I had come to believe about myself. I examined nearly half a century of memories only to realize that very few people in my life have ever actually been good to me.

Maybe you know about autism. Probably you don’t.

I live in a parallel but very different world than most of you. Yours is probably a world where predictable external forces are constantly shaping your experience. Friends and family, diverse though they may be, probably make sense to you even if you disagree with them. You likely have an instinctive understanding of reciprocity and expectations. You know how people should act, and you know when they’re not acting right.

I don’t have any of that.

Mine is a world that exists primarily on the inside. I live in my imagination. I don’t always know the difference between reality and my own mental fabrications. In my years upon Earth, no one has failed to point out to me, unnecessarily, that I am a deeply weird man-child failing to uphold even the basic responsibilities of a modern adult.

Autism is a developmental disorder of the brain. Among a myriad (or ‘spectrum’, if you will) of other symptoms and co-morbidities, I simply don’t process external information the way normal people do. A firehose of sensory data bombards me every second of every day – far more data than any human brain, even a properly functioning one, could ever process at once.

Complicating this, I don’t possess the mechanism normal people have for regulating my own internal state. Emotions come in two kinds for autistic people. There’s the kind we don’t know is happening and so we ignore it, and then there’s the big, monolithic, overwhelming explosion of emotion that builds up because we didn’t do anything with the first kind. We are zero to sixty in zero seconds. And when we finally melt down, let me assure you that we weren’t expecting it any more than you were.

Autism thus becomes a game of allocating mental bandwidth to deal with what most of you consider normal life things. Normal people generally have those resources available; autistic people almost never do. We have to divert our mental capacity away from the screaming internal demon of our emotions in order not only to appear normal on the outside, but to parse the constant tidal wave of things we see, hear, smell, taste, and touch just to assess how successful we’re being at normal shit you probably don’t even think about.

Autism is normally spotted in childhood, assuming your parents were even trying. Mine weren’t. Mine didn’t want to deal with a fucking weird kid, so between the two of them (they divorced shortly after I was born) they succeeded in keeping me alive for a couple of decades and then threw me out on my ass. Most of the suicidal and homicidal ideations I’ve endured through the years could have been avoided if they had taken the single moment it would have required to say, “But why is he so weird, though?”

Instead, I spent half a century creating a series of fictional characters so that I could wear their masks. People don’t like me. That’s fine. I’ll just be a better me. People make fun of me when I do this; don’t do that. People were awestruck when I did this; crank that one up to eleven. They say I’m weak. I’ll get strong. They say I’m dumb. I’ll get smart. My accent is funny; change it.

But the worst part, bar none, is that I picked up some ugly things from you as well. I discovered that you think I’m a joke until I scare you. Motherfucker, I will scare you. I discovered that my needs aren’t important until I take something from you. I will take from you. I discovered that you don’t cherish anything until I profane it. Fuck you, fuck your stupid god-myths, fuck your lame imagination of heaven and hell. It’s all fake, and you wouldn’t deserve it if it were real. You couldn’t even comprehend it if it were real.

Today, I stand up in defiance. I reject cruelty. I reject suffering. I am the enemy of everyone who would subjugate, ostracize, criticize, and dismiss. I will no longer suffer the superior affectations of people who are beneath me.

Today, I swear to destroy everything that hurts. And if you’re the one who’s hurting, then today I become your ally. No one deserves to suffer, but more importantly, no one has the right to willfully cause suffering.

I will no longer stand for it. The hateful will answer for their hate.

Believe me.

I am here.