It just occurred to me now at 12:22am, as I stared at my bedroom walls all covered in stray kids posters why they are there now when I am 33 and not 20 years ago when I was a teenager. I was so busy then, masking, mirroring, cloning. I was so busy examining others and reflecting the parts of them I most loved, that I thought made them cool and would therefore make me cool and lovable. There was no room inside me for, well, me. Then, when all my friends were becoming them, I was collecting all the parts of them I thought would make them want to stay. I never hung posters then, or decorated my own spaces. I kept my room just so, and filled with the bits and pieces of the people I'd loved and collected. The parts of them I'd cut out like magazine pictures and pasted onto my shell like paper mache. I never loved a thing so genuinely that I wanted to fill my space up with it. So when I finally now at 33, have discovered what Autism means for me and what it gave to me and tool from me. I realise that I never learned to be me. Never discovered who I was. And now, burned out and recovering at 33. My walls are covered with posters from a band 16 year old me would have never dreamed of listening to. Not because I wouldn't have liked it, but because the people I loved ridiculed the genre. Now. Now I can see a thing that I love that comes from me. Because I love it. It's not a reflection for once. And it gives me hope that maybe I'm getting a glimpse of me.
