National Poetry Month and Autism Acceptance Month (+ a poem)

April is National Poetry Month 📝 and Autism Acceptance Month ∞ (It is also my birth month according to the Gregorian Calendar, but my birthday anniversary is a few weeks out yet!). I am both a poet and autistic (albeit rather covertly, in the case of the latter).


Here is a poem back from 10/7/2013, when I was fifteen:


Have you ever looked at a tree
And just thought,
"Oh, what a beautiful tree."?—
Have you ever smiled and not wondered why?

Life feels like a sigh
Without the breath before,
Like a splash of rainbow color
From a single falling tear.

Sometimes the wind blows
And it brings down a forest,
But the wind is still beautiful—
Full of whirling leaves.

Some of the colloquial grammar variants used in this (see image below) are a bit irritating for me but, yes, let's please talk about this! 🎤🎯

And, yes, by many standards I am a 'chameleon'. 🌈 Sometimes that is intentional. Sometimes things simply are not visibly on the surface or people just do not realize what being on the Autism Spectrum can even mean. It is normal for someone's behavior to vary from situation to situation and for them to have more of a struggle with an issue at certain times than at others.

Chances are that many of the quirky, irritating, unusual, charming and/or wonderful things you have noticed about me are related to ASD.** 🦋 🥳 That is not to say that ASD explicitly causes them. Things in life generally are fitted better to a Venn diagram than a pie chart when it comes to categorizing them. Most (if not all!) people have idiosyncrasies of some sort. In a life full of variables having complex, multiple relationships, who is to say what is at the the root of each and every difference? 🔭 Not only are our quirks associated with various factors, but our worth as persons exists neither despite nor simply because of those quirks. 💎

I am an aspie for life (that is, unless our scientific understanding of what that means changes significantly).

** For example: hearing/language processing problems, light and sound sensitivities, much of my general and social anxiety, the fact that there are some culturally accepted social needs that I was shocked to find out that people had, my sometimes abnormal use or interpretation of tone of voice or facial expressions, the fact that those last two items are on this list even though I often exhibit very high emotional intelligence (hmm . . . "on the list" but "included in the list" . . .), my less-than-average propensity for eye contact, my need for high specificity, an apparently odd way of thinking about things, my visual memory, my attention to detail, my sense of flip-side humor, my persistence, the fact that I am so very irked by the fact that the items in (on?) this list do not seem to all fit a parallel structure, etc., etc.

IMAGE CREDIT: Autistic Creativity (December 9, 2017 post: https://www.facebook.com/Autisticcreativity/photos/a.1478031058956829/1595543040538963/?type=3&theater)