“Enter Shitman”

 

When I was a kid I had rescue dreams that I would sustain an injury and people would have to pay attention to me properly and care for me, like a little prince who was actually an angel. Until a few days ago I reckoned I had those thoughts about being airlifted out of my childhood because it was lonely, frightening, brutal, oppressive, sucked dead dogs dicks and was utterly fucked. I needed to be saved. But now with the even more recent appearance of the likelihood of autism diagnosis in my life the situation looks a bit different.

Yes, I was abused, yes, my parents’ incredibly chaotic lives and constantly changing plans inevitably resulted in devastating consequences for myself. Yes, I was terrorized by my father and even eventually abandoned by my mother. Yes, the insanity of changing schools 16(!) times set me up to be forever falling through the cracks. Of course I dreamed of some kind of powerfully focusing near fatal incident that would put me in a hospital bed and begin my journey to a life where I was treated as someone who needed to be looked after, not someone who was in the way, or a “back-dooring shitman”, or a “pretender”, or a “fucken little wog” or any of the cool nicknames my father gave me when he was tired or awake or there, or around.

To throw autism on top of that story changes it. Now I see that my parents couldn't deal with me.

Yes, their behavior was rubbish, but I also knew something else was wrong. I've always known it. Through decades of arduous process of reflection I've convinced myself that my own munted behaviors didn't come from nowhere, they came from being abused. I’ve taught myself that logically, reasonably, rationally, I shouldn't be hard on myself. I shouldn't beat myself up, still I've wondered: when does it end? When do particular kinds of social situations stop being excruciating? What is my apparent compulsion to say the thing that will turn a face to face interaction into an occasion of suffering? Why do I fail to maintain relationships until it's as if I've ended them on purpose?

For the longest time the story I told myself was that I had a childhood-trauma-induced mental breakdown in my 20s and it damaged my self confidence to an extreme, but it's been decades, and if this autism story is true, if that's my diagnosis, it will be life changing. I'm not going to become someone who is comfortable in a social situation where there are strangers. I need to know who I'm with to feel like I can relax, I need to see faces I recognize, but maybe now I won’t be so miserably paralysed. If I finally have a handle on what I am maybe I can plan my bullshit accordingly and perhaps my bullshit won’t be so endless.

I’ve had a few friendships in my life that fit a pattern: my partner in crime is more socially adept and they act as the buffer between me and the people situation. I can't rely on a friend always being there to act as my emotional support person.

Over the last few years I've been wanting to get into filmmaking and it hasn’t resulted in anything. It's because I can't ask for help, I need someone to do that for me. And if I do find a way to ask for that help, I'm not able to maintain the connection. The pandemic has made this very clear.

I can't believe I've somehow managed to do so many things in this life, where anything social is impossibly hard work. So there is hope. I am going to take this seriously. I'm going to seek out every kind of support there is. If need be I will get a parrot that sits on my shoulder and talks to people so I don't have to. If such a parrot is too expensive, what about one that randomly says fucked shit to take the pressure off me? Let’s be parrot solution oriented.

One friend said to me about this, “Aren't you just looking for an excuse?” But I ask you, other friends, what's wrong with excuses? I have a great excuse. Because it’s looking like a dog did in fact eat the absolute shit out of my homework.

It's looking like I finally got the injury I was dreaming about.