hello, my name is a., and i'm autistic (anonymously, i guess, although not really). my name is a. and i'm thirty-nine; i've self-diagnosed - came out? realized myself as? saw myself as? what's the vocabulary here that's neither too clinical nor too... i'm stuck on the other too, really. not too self-indulgent? not too easy to dismiss? autism stands to me in those horrible crossroards between a disorder and an identity, not helped by the fact that in the diagnosis so young the first people who made use of it were not the autistic people themselves, but their parents and caretakers and teachers and helpers - will all that this entails...

ah well. i don't want to be retreading this ground here; many wonderful autistic people did it before me, and good for them. this is not a place about The Autism, capital letters, or neurodiversity as it exists in the world. this is the place where i - thirty-nine, queer, married, two children, all that jazz - will try to make sense of what changed in my perception of myself, in twenty-six letters of the alphabet of my second language, in tiny and big things, with no order and no responsibility to it.

the only promise i will make to myself here is to be as long-winded, as circuitous - or as elliptical and as flightly - in these little entries as i can be. one of my long-held, nagging fears that i gradually started losing after my self-discovery and self-naming is the indescribable feeling that my writing is not like other people's - that the very order i put my words in, the cadence of written speech, gives me away for the other somehow, marks me as somebody too alien - awkward - lacking in some way...

i grew up alongside the advent of the internet, and was a witness to many great blogging waves - the old livejournal, for one, which made for an explosion of many rather prominent figures in the social life of my country, before it became part of the great Going Under. for a little girl who spent her time singing long monotone ballads under her breath, composing them on the go, this dual feeling of being, in her early twenties, invited to the great feast of public journaling, and yet knowing that her own attempts at it are weird - not-like-other-people's - fraught with this great internal feeling of being seen, and not in a good way... well.

i circumvented part of it switching to english, this great refuge of fannish-minded teenagers everywhere, and pouring myself into the vast and occasionally welcoming shared culture that was not my own, and where my eccentrities could be explained away by the other, more palatable (to myself, mostly) kind of otherness. and it worked, and i'm still grateful for the joy and freedom of this decision, for decades of making friends and learning to think like myself. but what i'm trying to do now is to work my way into unlearning this voiceless fear; into embracing my voice as it is. decades of writing and not writing and whining about writing and wanting to write and not writing and writing, and i'm still here, so, i guess, this is a task too: to walk the line between honing and honoring the craft, as it is, and being myself in a way that has nothing to do with craft or lack thereof. i don't know if i'll succeed! i know that i'm going to try, twenty-five more times.