There’s an old saying called “Be careful what you wish for… you just might get it.” and I must say it’s true, specifically in successful neurodivergent masking escapades.
I remember growing up feeling like the one disconnected, never sure how the constant interchange of drama and ideas unfolded so naturally.. and yet they did; constantly with neurotypical people!
People didn’t censor themselves nor screen themselves and at times may have even been vulgar and all was fine but if I screened myself into a frenzy I still came up short almost as if I had shown up to English class with math notes.
I longed for the acceptance of the in crowd and yet I saw the vanity and lack of depth present in many common interchanges..as well as the points of hidden depth in everyday people’s intercommunication, usually unseen by the in crowd themselves.
In a way this always made me a peace maker of sorts because I came to the protection of what people took for granted and I saw hidden beauty where others saw nothing.
Details oriented, often missing the forest for the forgotten tree shrub and yet I was well aware that that tree shrub is what forests were made of.
I knew it.. because I was that tree shrub..forgotten in the forest.
I remember sometime into my early twenties through various meditative techniques, cognitive behavioral changes and techniques as well as having been brought into a more healthy close friend community that I was somewhat learning how to operate in community even if it was community as married to my ‘monastic’ musings of the same. (Monasticism was the ideological template that helped open me up to a larger community of people. For better clarity my friends ran a community coffee shop and I lived with them for a while. I experienced genuinely what I would call ‘divine love’ in that family and the community that surrounded them )
Always seeing in the thing the thing the others didn’t see. Seeing the Transcendent value in the common place. Seeing the monastery in the community coffee shop or in the “home for wayward boys.”
I knew it.. because I was that tree shrub..forgotten in the forest.
I really was a lost boy and I revisit that often.
Ironically I could even say that the Messiah figure in my life has often returned me to Peter Pan like musings.
Surely it makes sense because the mature man will need to be willing to sacrifice egoistic preference for the greatest good and yet Pan becomes a crony corporate business man when he forgets his soul. The childlike imaginative in us all that becomes the healer of the aching body of the mind that forgot, it’s soaring soul!
Like the old gospel song said “I’ll fly away oh glory I’ll fly away!” sometimes returning to the simple childlikeness that eschews egotism without making a spiritual or virtuous activity out of it is that noble task rarely taken. The Pan man never lost his ability to fly because he maintained those ‘happy thoughts’.
How this relates to my life is sometimes I have felt genuine and I have felt the pressure to “get to work” as it were and to attempt to forget my happy thoughts, that place of no neurodiveregent masking in preference for neurotypical poker face.
Noone can easily describe or know how hard this experience can be. Much like having the FCC in your head at all time censoring everything your’e ready to say or do and having to change course and rechannel your energy typicalizing the neuro non typical many times feels like an oppressive act of internal self violence and yet this world is very violent.
I like to see how some of the biblical prophets only found divinity when they went “outside of the camp/ city gates” and this is how I have felt this past year and a quarter+ whilst I’ve shunned societal going ons, retreated ever inward and thought about how I might change society in the only way possible by helping it embrace its highest self by practicing what I wish to preach. The truth of the matter is that noone who changes and “becomes new” has become something novel but rather something ancient. “The good man brings forth treasures old and new.” and I guess I’m an old soul.
So are you.
G-d bless you on your path.
Musings of a Picture Frame Conversationalist. 