Cellophane

(required listening)

It’s 2 am on the dot. I’m outside smoking a joint and listening to the sounds of people laughing and talking on a porch nearby. Their noisiness fill me up with a feeling I am struggling to articulate at this moment. I feel heartened by it, warmed up inside, like a moth drawn to the flame of togetherness they seem to kindle so easily. I also feel… immensely separate. Like a thin film separating me from them, this peculiar emotion keeps me at bay.

I can imagine myself in their positions: laughing, loved, probably a little drunk, fully steeped in the blend of energies and the magic of a singular night spent doing some of the greatest things a person can do with their time.

This gives me pause. Is there truly anything better than sitting in a circle and sharing time and space and laughter and stories with other people? Some of my most precious and treasured memories are this, in one form or another.

What underscores this new and strange emotion I’m experiencing is the same old hollow loneliness that’s been my companion since I was a little girl. You know the one: the sensation that at your core, you are deeply and permanently alone. It is a state you inhabit regardless of age or social standing or relationships or accomplishments or any of the other life events that may, for some, confirm a sense of belonging.

The space between where I am, behind this plastic film, and the images I see of myself beyond the barrier, blurred shapes of me-not-me dancing and twirling and laughing and bursting at the seams with life, haunts me. There is something so aspirational about my own self-image that it’s kind of heartbreaking—dare I say pathetic?

When I stopped pretending to be anybody, I didn’t realize that would bring me face-to-face with the sensation of being nobody at all—or rather, feeling like nobody at all. Who or what I am beyond the calculated masks developed over a lifetime of undiagnosed autism was… inconsequential to me, for a while. I figured if I kept digging, kept removing layers of masks, kept shedding the scripts I’d taught myself to survive, that eventually I would just arrive at myself.

The “real” me. The one I was promised underneath the mask. The whole, integrated me. The one who is at peace with all of her parts. Eventually she’ll just show up, if I continue to remove these layers.

Eventually.

Eventually, I stopped trying to remove layers and strip myself raw and force all of these intermingling voices to meld together and obey me. I realized that I was digging for treasure I wouldn’t find. There was no one, true, “real” me, wholly integrated, below the surface of all of these coping mechanisms.

Over time I’ve come to see this as a good thing, but going through it, I just felt like I didn’t exist. That’s all. I didn’t have a self because I was never given the chance to develop a “self” that wasn’t just several protective mechanisms in a trenchcoat.

How do you make friends when you don’t know who you are? I find myself weeping some days (I weep every day but for differing reasons) about the few precious friends I do have who seem very sure of who I am and that they love that person very much. I trust their version of me, and I aspire to it. I do not trust the versions of myself I constantly see represented in my mind.

Having an autistic experience of humans, for me, means I’m constantly swallowing my words to keep my most loving and tender and vulnerable feelings from scaring anybody off. How am I supposed to communicate to strangers that I think they’re beautiful and fascinating and I’m deeply curious about the landscape of their inner world?

The flowers are blooming

The answers are looming

It’s 10:30 am. I’m on the street corner, smoking. There’s so much life everywhere around me. The banging of hammers nearby. People walking their dogs, some of them saying “good morning” as they pass. The laughter of children on a playground at recess. Crows in the street and on the power lines, cawing and gazing suspiciously at me.

I wonder if the crows know how utterly unreal I feel.

I’m not sad about it, I don’t feel depressed. All of this life is so beautiful, heart-wrenchingly so. The world is on fire but here on this street corner on a Thursday morning, the world is just happening. It fills me up with that indescribable feeling again, the one that isn’t quite bitter and isn’t quite sweet and conjures up images of being wrapped in cellophane or rice paper.

Maybe I need to move out of the suburbs. It’s too isolating here. I want so desperately to have the city at my doorstep but I also know that I’m easily overwhelmed by uncontrollable sounds. Could I learn to live with it? For the payoff? These are logistical questions and therefore not very interesting to that cellophane feeling in my skin.

Austin Coppock describes the first decan of Capricorn as a place where “one sinks into the bones of the world.” This is the crux of my birth chart, where there resides my IC, Sun, Mercury, Mars, and chart ruler Venus. I think about this decan a lot and the implications of having so much of my nativity concentrated there. “The figures which roam this decan can root deeply into what soil they find themselves in, yet for this very reason location is critical.”

Location is critical. And at the same time, that old adage always rings true: wherever you go, there you are. I’ve been plagued by the idea that if I could just find the right place to root down in, if I could just stumble upon that geographical confluence of magical forces that makes everything correct, then my life would begin.

I know that my life continues beginning with each breath. I’ve experienced many beginnings to my life and will continue to. But this doesn’t heal the home wound. “When can I put my bags down?” will likely be etched on my tombstone.

Maybe we are on our way

Descending to our graves

And losing tomorrow by choosing today

Maybe there’s a way out

A single revision

For changing is living

And living is love

Would a new location fix me? Maybe. Maybe not. I also don’t think I’m gonna fix myself from where I am currently, geographically. Mostly, I just want to be an active participant in my life. I want more experiences that make me feel like the layer of cellophane between me and the rest of the world has been dissolved—not pierced or punctured, but melted away by the warmth of acceptance.

It’s noon. I’m walking to the coffee shop with my best friend and later I’ll go home to my spouse and child. These are cellophane-free relationships, they nourish me in their flexibility and openness and willingness to let me be who I am and celebrate it. I would never disparage them. But sometimes the contrast, when I walk out into the world, hits me like the soft whomp of a pillow to the face. Sometimes I am staggered by how simultaneously separate and desperately connected I feel to the thrum of humanity.

Maybe a different place would help. It won’t fix everything, but it could help. I’ll still be there, regardless. I don’t know if it will, in the words of Coppock, “set in motion the grossest of terrestrial forces,” but I’ve never know a greater terrestrial force than the restlessness within my soul.