Something occurred to me, the other day. Namely, that alexithymia has been a huge advantage for me.

Not because it’s confused me about my feelings, but because it’s forced me — literally forcedme — to rely on logic to navigate through life.

Okay, so that might not sound like such a great thing, considering how illogical the rest of the world is about stuff. Not being “in touch with my feelings” — heck, not even realizing I’m having certain feelings — sets me apart and puts me in the minority. It makes it harder to figure out whether people are really my friends or not. It makes it harder to figure out if I want people to be my friends. And it makes it difficult to tell what other people think of me, as well as figure out what I actually think of myself.

But that difficulty has been so…

Sitting alone

By the window sill

It’s late into the night

Wind is sleeping

People aren’t stirring

But her eyes are open wide

Yawning loudly

She checks her watch

First customer of the night

Adjust her straps

Folds her hands

And breathes in deeply

Hoping she’ll get another chance

To say goodbye

Walking down steps

Darting glances in each room

Full of sex

But short on love

She waits

By the front door

Hoping her death

Rides on swift wings

I’ve written some about this topic before, regarding the joy I feel when I see other Autistic people moving in Autistic ways, but today I want to write about how my own movement affects and reflects my emotions. I get a little sweary at the very end when talking about getting rid of the allistic (non-autistic) mask.

Movement

I am attempting to reclaim my own movement, trying to elicit decades’-old kinesthetic memory from my body.

How did I move as a child? How did I experience and express my feelings before I learned to primarily move the way other people do?

Feelings weren’t a big thing in my childhood house. Logic was prioritized over feelings, always. With Spock and Data as my childhood idols because they didn’t fit in with human society any better than I did, the anti-emotion message from my parents was only reinforced.

But then came my…

Dear Carrie,

I know that this format is horrifically overused, and if you knew that this ridiculously emotional fangirl was writing a silly ‘letter to a dead person that I have never met’ blog post, you would probably roll your eyes.

And, actually, nothing makes me prouder than the thought of you rolling your eyes at me. So I’ll take it.

Anyway, it’s now been one year and two days since you were taken away from us. It doesn’t feel like it’s been that long – it feels like it was only recently, a fresh wound, so raw that I still can’t watch you or look at a picture of you without bursting into tears. I was given The Princess Diarist for my birthday (in mid-January), and I only gathered the strength to read it in November – because hearing your narrative voice for the last time was just too…