What does it feel like to be Autistic in a neurotypical world? When asked this question, I often liken it to being in my own personal fishbowl. Some have said that this sounds like a lonely existence, one consumed by hollow, harrowing silence.
I spent much of my school years silently observing the messiness of everything around me. There would be joviality buzzing amongst my peers, the current of play, the charge of curiosity, learning about whatever the education system prescribed that day as worthy enough to teach. Meanwhile, I felt like I was stuck in my own personal fishbowl; the shield of the glass allowing others to perceive me, the water thickening and distorting what I heard, and if I was to allow the outside in, the meeting of electricity to water would have catastrophic consequences. I felt incompatible with the world I’d been placed in, and thus, I was rendered silent.
For survival, I learnt to “mask”. ‘Masking’ is the exhausting exercise of performing for others in a way that reflects their behaviour, in order to “fit in”. You conform to the status quo around you, despite feeling intrinsically at odds with it. Being silent allows space for close observation, for me to chisel out my mask, craft my character, and then jump out of the bowl and into whatever context I need to exhibit my “self” in.
Problem is, as much as I, the fish, can pretend to be a monkey, a goat, a pigeon: I am just not made to be out of water. It is a suffocating disconnect. The need to retrieve back to my bowl, back to the comfort of my own solitary silence, is heightened by the pain of drowning in the dense, loud air.
Yet, what I have come to realise is that, rather than see my reality in my autistic fishbowl as a bleak loneliness, instead, it is when I am unmasked where the beauty of silence is realised.
My creativity flourishes in quietly observing the space between the pane of glass, separating me and the neurotypical. I still venture out to masquerade as required - after all, the world is institutionally structured to the tune of an ableist symphony - but now, I feel at a peaceful ease with my autistic existence.
I honour and treasure the exquisiteness of the quiet, of the silence of my fishbowl.