My Asperger's

There is no cure or pill or treatment. I was diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome at 18 years old. It was 18 lonely years of being a circus freak, violently losing those unfortunate enough to be my friends. It became my greatest shame, my denial, and something I hope will kill me quickly soon.

Asperger's isn't 'cool.' You are fodder for endless, tasteless jokes. I don't tell anyone about my condition because of the shame attached to it. As soon as I become branded as autistic then that's it; no-one will ever respect me ever again. "Oh, don't mind Max. They're autistic. They're not normal so you don't need to pay attention." I'm lower than a second class citizen. I'm lower than a child. My thoughts, insight, and very existence is ignored because it comes from a mentally subnormal being.

Portrayals of 'cool' autism are laughable. They are always a mathematical or at least a scientific genius who can calculate ridiculous sums yet get's confused by The Very Hungry Caterpillar because apparently we're space-aliens. You can tell the titular character of the (shit) show Sherlock is 'smart' because he makes numbers and images flash about. He keeps leading his companions into near-death situations just to show off how other-worldly his 'intelligence' is, when the original Sherlock Holmes took cases because he was genuinely invested in the mystery and had a connection towards the people involved.

The 'cool' autistic individual is 'funny' but in a way where everyone laughs downwards. The theatrical version of A Curious Case Of a Dog in The Nighttime was first staged with the audience literally looking down into a pit at autistic protagonist Christopher - who of course doesn't have a diagnosis because 'cool' autistic people mustn't have the stigma of an actual condition otherwise the audience might start getting uncomfortable (a fault carried from the original novel). Christopher too is somehow able to unlock the mysteries on the universe like he was part of a scientific experiment gone wrong as a child.

The 'cool' autistic individual is a natural rebel who makes stuffy, no-nonsense authority figures roll their eyes, puff their cheeks, and act as incredulous as if Oliver Twist had just asked for more. The embarrassing portrayal of Alan Turing in The Imitation Game does this to a typecast Charles Dance, as he unnecessarily tears into Turing for speaking 'out of turn' in conversations that absolutely did not happen in real life (within a movie containing all the biography of a child's picture book). Turing is coded autistic because you can't lay the foundation for computer science without being unable to hold eye-contact, apparently.

No, I can't navigate myself around a conversation. Yes, I can't understand what you're talking about. I cannot pick up on social cues or hints unless you explicitly signpost them. I'm trying, OK? There's no point insulting me with these overly-broad, laughable depictions of autism in media because it's not helping to improve the world in any way. Everything is still too loud, to layered, too distorted. I particularly hate that A Curious Case Of a Dog in The Nighttime made those who knew about my Asperger's turn around and say "Oh, I understand you now! I know how it feels." Fuck off. No you don't. Saying Christopher made you understand autistic people is like those idiots who said Thanos made them understand Hitler.

Is your art going to make me currently handle being in love better? Love is far worse than my suicidal thoughts because with those I can just look at my own reflection and say: "There! That's the problem, and the solution is death. Easy." But now I've fallen in love I've bought other people into this.

Oh, fuck my own feelings. Don't worry about hurting me, because I'm a piece of shit. You can squash a piece of shit and it's still a piece of shit. You can cut it into pieces. You can mix it with casserole. It's still a piece of shit. But ruining other people's lives? People realising they've been lied to and I'm not normal and they're stuck with a piece of shit following them around? No-one is better off from knowing me. Be my friend and you're going to get awkward conversations followed by inappropriate comments followed by some falling out over me doing something stupid or someone saying some 'joke' or 'banter' or 'meme' or something that I have no idea what it is because I've already stopped replying. And then it's another step to dying alone in some shit-hole and not being found until I've decomposed to the state of a lump. My life will continue to be a string of failure until I will regress into what I actually am: a piece of shit.

Both the help available and the help you receive is dire - if there's any at all. The world simply isn't made for people like me. Tech-corporations have started saying that they're welcoming people on the spectrum because of their 'genius' (because the autism fairy brings gifts of algebra) when to work at Google you're asked impossible questions you can never answer. To work at Amazon you're pushed to deadlines you can never meet. It's called post-Earth politics because you're not just pushing yourself beyond what humans are capable of but beyond what the world as we know it can stretch itself - and in the process destroying the planet for some pointless folly. Tech corporations already control Earth, and it's burning alive.

Corporations don;t want people with autism. They want work-machines with no life outside their office, who use their underlings as simple props to hold their own positions afloat, who don't have time for ethics, and against their knowledge are themselves an underling to hold their superiors up as they salvage the planet for numbers on a screen.

They don't want people with autism. They want sociopaths.

The confusion between the two is common. The Social Network heavily coded Mark Zuckerberg as autistic with his oh so quirky fashion sense, the hilarious way he ignores social decency, and the inspiring way he speaks of out tun and 'says it like it is.' In actuality, the diagnosis is more simple; he's a cunt. He collects your data, invades your privacy, gives it all to anyone with a credit-card, thaws societies infrastructure, and reaps tax-free billions from it.

Autism doesn't remove your empathy. In fact, your experience is of constant heartache as you fail to understand or act upon social cues until you've just caused someone else to feel upset or angry or even scared. Yes, there is a huge amount of self-pity; but ultimately it's the pain of knowing that you're making other people's lives worse.

If only everyone felt this way. Maybe if those who understood how to work their way around a person felt empathy then we might not all be heading for extinction in 2050. Until then, I'll carry on trying to find a place in a society that mocks me until I inevitably die trying.