Emotions

                I know pain.  I know the deep, agonizing pain of being ignored and ridiculed.  I know the pain of name calling, hands tapping on the desks and floor and anything else that attacks my senses.  I know the pain, the brutally honest pain, of being so completely alone I want to curl into a ball and hold myself and sob.  But I also know the physical pain of being hit or kicked.  I also know hunching over and covering my head as they hit me.   I know the pain and fear of having no idea if I would make it through recess without being hurt. I know the panic when they shoved me and the anger in myself when I hit them back.  I hate myself for those moments of anger when I lose my control and when I become just as bad as them.  People have told me that I need to fight back that I shouldn’t let anyone do that to me but when I fight back it feels like I become just as bad as they are.  It…It hurts.  It’s not even that pain that hurts it’s the feeling in my heart that I did something wrong, that I am somehow letting them win…that by reacting and by responding and hitting them or yelling or getting upset I have somehow given them a reason to do this to me, that I have made it almost ok for them to hurt me.  That in some small way I have made it so that I have no right to want them to stop.  That I am damaging myself by not having control.  Every word they say, every sound they make becomes a knife that cuts into my soul.  Every time they snap at me or laugh it just digs those knives in deeper.  But if I cry out, if I let them see that it is hurting me they are back 100 times worse only moments later.  And when the teachers don’t care, when they have their eyes closed to what is going on, it just hurts worse. 

Think about it like this:  Someone stabs you in the chest.  The wound hurts bad for a while but it heals.  But then every time you even think about it at all it tears it open again.  So every time you remember what happened it happens again so it never heals.  That’s what this feels like.  It’s not the actual event that hurts me.  It is the fact that I spend every minute of every day remembering it.  So I spend every moment feeling it over and over and over.  So I spend every minute of every day running through those events a hundred thousand times….WISHING I could go back and not react….WISHING that I could change what happened and knowing I cant.

My teachers constantly tell me that I am just as at-fault, just as bad, as the people who are being mean to me because I yell back, or because I snap at them ,or because I can’t work when people are talking.  They don’t see that I TRY to ignore them, and that I wish my brain didn’t get fixated on noises around me so badly I can’t focus on anything else.  They don’t see how I dig my hands together and close my eyes and cry because I know that I can’t help myself, because I KNOW I should be able to control my emotions but I just can’t….I try so damn hard but I can’t do it and them deciding that I am doing something wrong, them deciding that I am being “bad” or that I deserve to be punished for reacting….it HURTS.  It hurts because they don’t even punish the people who are mean to me, but they want to punish me for trying…they want to punish me for working as hard as I do and still not being able to be perfect.  Well, here is a news flash for them: I HAVE AUTISM.  I…I can’t control my emotions and I can’t listen to people make me suffer without wanting to….without wanting to make them stop.  And um…some small part in the back of my head wants to make them suffer and that….that scares me because I am terrified that little part in the back of my head will win and I…I’ll emotionally hurt someone and that REALLY scares me.  I have seen how little control I have I have seen how much pain words can cause and um….I don’t want to be that person.  I don’t want to be the person who is being cruel but I am always terrified that that’s….that that’s what I will become.  But if…if I have my say that wont be.  I am not going to let that happen I am not going to let my emotions overpower my brain and make me say something or do something I will regret.  It isn’t going to win.  It isn't going to be able to make me angry and it isn't going to be able to cause me pain forever.