A Mysterious Manic Pixie Dream Girl or On the Spectrum
by Shan W.
“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.”
— Albert Einstein
Trigger Warnings: Self-harm, body dysmorphia.
I look in the mirror and watch acid dripping from the ceiling, split hairs and cook flesh.
The body in the mirror looking back at me is a complete mystery.
My new room faces a floor to ceiling built-in wardrobe with mirrors for doors. Every morning, naked, barely discernible from pale pink bed sheets, I fail to escape the staring contest the figure in the mirror demands.
“Huh! you blinked first,” she exclaims amongst maniacal cackles.
She never gets tired of the game. It doesn’t matter how many times I let her win. She’s never satiated.
Swollen fleshy slugs display the ‘lived in’ home they’ve developed underneath lower eyelashes. Bird nests of tangled twigs sit where her hair should be. White worms slither across hips boasting a rushed puberty and a subsequent love of all the foods 2010 mothers hid in padlocked sections of the pantry, the cupboard I would climb on a kitchen stool to reach.
She manipulates the sun from the window to draw vectors to these weeds, knowing this makes me look away sooner, knowing she can secure the win. Hair is straightened, collar bones pushed out, thighs hidden, waist emphasised, smile stretched across cheeks. Satisfied with my efforts she gifts me the script of the day. I run my lines between spits of toothpaste,
“You start work at 7:30am today. Your bus leaves from the bottom of your street at 6:55am. That woman with curly hair will be at the bus stop. You will already have Julia Fox whispering her new memoir through secured noise cancelling headphones by that point so a simple smile will suffice. You will answer the texts you keep avoiding to show her that you are a person with friends. You will have the credit card on your phone unlocked before the bus door opens because your Father told you at 12 that when waiting in line you should always have your action ready by the time you get to the front, no one likes a dilly dallier. You will say thank you to the bus driver when you get off said bus, casually, with the same musicality as the person before you. You will comment on how crazy the men on Married at First sight are this year as you place your blazer on the back of your desk chair. You will not tell them you don’t watch Married at First Sight and that you instead stay up until 1am watching video essays on why Yoko Ono did in fact not break up the Beatles. Throughout the day you will sit with straight posture, you will laugh along to the radio harmonising with the lady who sits across from you, you will smile at all the right times, you will say please and thank you when you ask questions but only once, because no one likes a pushover. You will say the right things. You will do the right things. You will be the right thing.”
I avoid her stare in the rearview mirror of the bus, avoid her in the silver spoon fiddled with on saucer, avoid her in the work bathroom counting the wrinkles on my fingers for something else to do. Three dominant lines per knuckle per finger, who am I who should I be who does she want me to be, two horizontal lines on the bend of the thumb, not good enough not good enough, five horizontal lines beneath each fingernail, ugly ugly ugly ugly ugly, one freckle on middle finger of right hand, rotten.
…
The receptionist has sent me the form Doctor needs filled out before my appointment three times. I thought about filling it out at least ten times a day for the last three weeks that I have been anticipating this visit but never did. He has the form printed and attached to a clipboard with a pen ready when I arrive ten minutes late.
Sitting on the edge of the lounge in his office, I take a metal wrench to the chest of drawers I’ve padlocked shut in the basement of my skull. Doctor takes care with each extraction, focusing on the items pushed to the very back of the drawers. I embark on discovery alongside him, pulling at forgottens, irelevants, misunderstandings, suppressions. He slaps tags labelled important on them before laying everything out before us.
He lingers over Karen, the school office lady who had my mothers number written on a sticky note on her computer anticipating the cleaner finding my forgotten laptop in the library, on the oval, in changerooms, at the bus stop, on the bus, on playgrounds, in bathrooms. He stacks hundreds of full notebooks that write and rewrite the same social situations. He blows dust off of the panic attacks I had at soccer training, at parties, at work, at family dinners, in exams, at lunch time. He collages pictures of friends spoken to until 3am everyday for months then suddenly never spoken to again. He gawks at the hundreds of books read, at the opinions on each one accounted for in extreme detail.
Finally, he comes across a diagnostic letter from my youth plainly stating
…The patient demonstrates significant issues with abandonment, risk seeking behaviours, emotional dysregulation and instability in relationships. Accordingly, I intend to treat these symptoms of Borderline Personality Disorder with Dialectical Behavioural Therapy…
This is the first extraction that incites a verbal response from Doctor.
“Oh well that’s obviously not true. You don’t have BPD.”
…
There is a rot within me that grows and grows, a scent that follows me with it, the odour becoming sharper each day. I invest in more expensive perfume to cover it. In workplace bathrooms strangers tap me on the shoulder and say ‘darling, I thought I would just let you know your perfume might be off, so sorry to embarrass you, I would just want someone to let me know in a reverse situation’. I have taken to carrying a pocket knife with me at all times so that I can run into these cubicles throughout the day, cut the rot out of me and stuff it into the bottom of my handbag. If I keep on top of it you can barely notice the evil I carry with me. I know how to handle it. I know when to cut and squeeze and flush that rot. I’ve gotten so good at hiding it. And then things start going well and I have that job five days a week and that uni degree and those books to read and those meals to make. The black starts to stain. I grow accustomed to the smell. I forget. I choke on that bite of apple and spit black into the face of those I love.
I get drunk. I say the wrong thing. I admit to feelings that make others uncomfortable. I admit to hurt that happened too long ago to have any relevance now. I misunderstand. I’m misunderstood.
Evil is always swimming just below my surface.
…
Carrol, who sits across from me in the office, commented on a peculiar smell on Monday. She complained of nausea, headache, squeamishness and stomach churning. Something about this smell, this spoiled, sickly, decaying smell was so unsettling to her she organised a meeting with HR.
“Gosh, yes, there is always something to fix around this place,” I suggest amongst giggles attempting to lighten the mood.
After I double check the office bathroom door has been locked for the fourth time I submerge my arm into my work bag. The skin under my fingernails finds it first. Wet chunks of rotted apple I've left in the bottom of my bag propel further and further under my nail beds. So much time has passed that a proclamation of liquid or solid would require significant scientific consultation. I indulge in a slow stretch of my fingers amongst the chunks of fleshy dead fruit. All that hard, satisfying, crunch, usually so perfectly wrapped in tight alluring stretches of pinks, reds and yellows now wet and putrid to the touch. I let its tears of decay melt into the pores between my fingers. I hold the lid to the sanitary bin open with one hand and scoop its rotten smelly guts into it with the other. I watch brown sludge pour over bloody tampons and stain the backs of bleach white pads.
This won’t achieve anything of course. Carrol will now simply transition into a complaint about the bathroom smelling. But something about the action of removing the six apples I’ve let rot in my bag, gives me satisfaction. The six apples I’ve brought to work each day in performance of nourishment.
I haven’t been eating dinner recently.
I just forget.
I haven’t been eating lunch recently.
The new medication makes it difficult to build up an appetite.
I haven’t been eating breakfast recently.
I don’t have enough time to organise it after snoozing my alarm over and over.
I bought banana bread this morning. Someone in year ten told me banana bread has more calories than a Big Mac. I think it's all the butter.
The grease splotched bag sits on my desk now still full, untouched. I know the satisfaction of being able to physically prove that I wasn’t lying, tastes better. Each meal skipped a physical piece of evidence to slip into the file. I think about running into her on the street and being so much smaller she can’t even recognise me. “See, I wasn’t lying, I’m not a liar, liar, liar, not rotten, rotten, rotten”.
I think about waking up to that figure staring back at me, bombarded by such an estranged visual I feel prompted to reintroduce myself. I wonder what name I would give her.
…
I am writing to confirm that on June 20th, 2024, I had an initial sixty-minute assessment with client: —, regarding the treatment and maintenance of their symptoms and concerns. This Letter confirms — diagnoses of
Attention-Deficit-Hyperactivity-Disorder
and
Autism SpectrumDisorder (Level1).
…
I have been avoiding social situations lately. So many truths I held close to my chest have withered away. I read all the articles my friends suggest, watch all the tik toks, heart react to every message but remain too insecure to respond.
I drag myself to a round of trivia. A friend asks why my Girlfriend couldn’t make it.
“Oh, she had to put her dog down today, she may have eaten heroin”.
The mood shifts. That was not the right thing to say. That is exactly why she couldn’t make it, a truth a month ago I would have kept to myself. In the seconds I had before answering I tuned into the rattle: “many, many lies and manipulations”. I must be better. I will not be a liar.
All night everything I say is stained with an interspersing of:
I’m not sure if that makes sense,
But what would I know,
Sorry, this is all probably incredibly uninteresting to you,
I’m probably not saying any of this in the right words, I should definitely read more about it,
Well, yeah this is stupid, I’m stupid, I’ll stop talking.
In High school, I won multiple debating competitions, mock trials and public speaking competitions where I was consistently commended in the section where you were only given five minutes to prepare. Now, I can’t offer a thought without quoting an academic and undoing everything I said. I don’t think I will ever have the opinion I am supposed to.
…
Some psychologists purport that BPD does not exist. Many psychologists believe people with BPD are untreatable. Many psychologists refuse to treat them. Having a diagnosis attached to your name can stop you from getting jobs and inspire stronger restraints during hospital stays. Feminist scholars have started to declare BPD the new hysteria, just another propaganda promoted by medical professionals to institutionalise women who disrupt the bourgeoisie's comforts. Trendy contemporary psychologists believe BPD is often misdiagnosed in women in place of Autism. They believe that women who are placed on the spectrum later in life face so much trauma from being denied necessary social and schooling supports that symptoms can present like BPD including an unstable sense of self, depression, suicidal ideation etc. but are actually the consequences of the burnout patients face following masking for such an extended period of time, just trying to survive.
I cried in my car after Doctor told me I don’t have BPD. I felt like he pulled the root of the rot out of me, like there was a new lens I could look through to understand myself, a neutral lens, like the photos it would capture wouldn’t come up black. I felt guilty that I was relieved. I felt guilty I couldn’t be the underdog success story for women with BPD. I’m not sure when I’ll stop crying about this but I am certain it isn’t any time soon.
At the end of my last psychology session he said offhandedly that it seems that the core of it all for me, seems to lie within a desire to both understand and be understood.
Don’t we all want that?
To understand and to be understood.
Surely, that desire isn’t particular to me?
To understand and to be understood.
…
Growing up, Autism and ADHD was the boy at the back of the classroom who threw chairs and tackled a teacher to the ground when he was tagged out in P.E. Autism was Sheldon Cooper on the Big bang Theory sleeping perfectly still in the middle of a bed unable to try out a new Chinese takeaway order. It was shy boys and girls who topped Maths and Science and got into engineering degrees on scholarships.
Autism and ADHD was not self deprecation. It was not an ability to present a thesis on Ottessa Moshfegh after someone asked if I’ve read ‘My Year of Rest and Relaxation’. It was not filling dozens of diaries a year with tear stained entries detailing vivid outlines of why I am in fact an alien. It was not cancelling plans I made so that I could lie in my bed with my headphones on, letting my kindle be the only light I would see for an entire weekend. It wasn’t needing to get my hours-long story out without interruption so that I could tell them every detail from the lift of an eyebrow to the scrunching of my nose, unable to discern which part would be important or not. It wasn’t smashing 20 beers at a party to get a break from myself. It wasn’t listening to the Mario Kart soundtrack on double speed to get an essay done on time. It wasn’t believing in destiny or understanding clouds as light catchers or feeling so moved by poetry I could be moved to tears in a restaurant because they left a bowl of oranges on display.
It wasn’t me
but today it is.
According to Dr Fitzgerald, professor of psychiatry at Dublin University it is incredibly likely that Albert Einstein had Autism. Being on the spectrum inserts an element of mystery into everything in my life. Although this piece reflects a collection of hardships I face as a result of this mystery, I aspire to his reframing of this plight as awe inspiring, beautiful, something that opens your eyes to it all.