Come Sit With Me

It’s no surprise that I sit and think about autism a lot. I ruminate, I plan, I think and wonder.  I turn it over and over and over in my mind.  I mull on it. I try to figure out how to strategize my way around it, out of it. I’d barrel right through it, I think… if I could. If it wasn’t always in the way of everything.

Sometimes I sit with autism and it's a warm, comfy, soft, pillowed chair-and-a-half that surrounds me, envelopes me.  It's comfortable, familiar even, and makes me want hot chocolate with mini-marshmallows and warm peanut butter cookies. It makes me feel peaceful, and loved.

But some days, I sit with autism, and it's a hard, wooden, stiff, Puritanical chair, unforgiving and mean.  It makes me squirm.  I can never get comfortable and it creaks and moans as I shift around. I fight it, and I curse it, and rail at it. It makes me feel stupid. Like I should have a dunce cap on and turn to face the corner.

I only lie on occasion with autism, because it’s really a bed of nails, scratching and poking and blistering. The only relief in sight is to get up and walk away. It makes me want to give up, to run away, to not do this anymore.  It takes strength, and endurance, and peace to lie gently with autism without getting hurt, and sometimes, I have none of those things left within me.