Page 2 of Saint

The memory was vivid. One I’d sought to entomb amongst several unpleasant ones from my upbringing. I banged my dome so frequently that my father bought me a helmet.

I looked like a damn fool, leaving the house looking like I was going for my first-ever bike ride nearly every day. The preventive measure was intended to protect me, but the helmet didn’t stimulate me as I needed it to. In the way of my desire to connect with a hard surface, it obstructed me from self-soothing.

Imagine.

A babe without a pacifier.

A monk without meditation.

A musician with no instrument.

A writer without a pen.

Anais Nin once said, “When I write, I devour my neurosis.”

With a helmet, I couldn’t devour shit. How was I supposed to settle the split nerves of my dome when my head was adorned with armor?

My parents meant well, but they didn’t understand me.

Robbed of the very thing that settled my neurosis, I turned to violence. My brothers and I fought as toddlers like teenage boys. All because of anger I couldn’t comprehend. All because of a helmet.

When I grew old enough to master removing the helmet, I took it off and returned to head banging. My soothing. The collision of my distressed dome against a hard surface silenced my erratic nerves. The formation of pain radiating from the point of impact outward distracted my senses. It was comforting until it wasn’t. The behavior lasted for as long as I grew tired of injuring myself.

I remember the day I shifted from one stimulative to another. We were on a plane, headed to some beach in my adolescence. The inconspicuous thumping of cargo as it was loaded, the knock of the wheels as they went up, the sound of the engine as it whirred, the rumble as the plane made its descent – it all rattled me. I’d lost my aspiration to collide my head against a firm surface, settling for rubbing it against my mother’s arm and scrunching my toes in my shoes.

The swap of those behaviors didn’t quite scratch my itch. I couldn’t rely on being in my mother’s presence all the time to rub against her, and Ramsay Miller?

Ramsay wasn’t having that shit. Sarah was his woman. He’d be the only one doing the rubbing against her. His words, not mine. In my father’s defense, it was inappropriate. At the tender age of ten years old, it wasn’t suitable for his middle son to be exhibiting such behavior. Unable to place my eccentricity, my family didn’t. According to my mother, I was one of a kind. Following my mother’s lead, my family accepted me as I was.

When we exited the plane that day, I found the beach. It became my new tool for soothing my sensory overload.

“And what did that banging do for you?” Impaling my memories, Dr. Gibson’s gentle voice requested more information.

“It was… quieting,” I shrugged.

Quieting the loudness of touch and the explosion of a whisper. My senses were tuned to a much higher volume than the average person. Dr. Gibson and I had been at this shit for several sessions, all prompted by an idea planted in my head by my older brother, Supreme, to speak to a shrink. All of it was inspired by my desire to understand myself better. I was ready to get to the bottom of it already. It felt like Dr. Gibson knew where she desired to ‘lump’ me, but she was holding back.

“Just tell me what the diagnosis is already.”

She shot me a look, slightly shifting in her seat. Her near-imperceptible sigh was noted before she spoke again.

“Have you ever heard of the term autism?”

So… I had an ism.

The fact that there was a name for my uniqueness was hardly surprising. On an episode of House, I vaguely remembered Dr. House stating something along the lines of when you pick a specialist, you pick your ailment.

Not that I saw myself as possessing an ailment. I hadn’t recently become aware of my variance from others. After experiencing it for twenty-eight years, I knew I wasn’t like other kids. I knew the entire alphabet prior to my first birthday. I knew how to identify every letter. I knew how to count to twenty. I had a huge interest in dinosaurs, stating their actual scientific names, and a profound interest in marine biology.

When I turned three, I knew how to read at a six-year-old level. Because of my propensity for knowledge, I started school earlier than my peers. Sporting such a gift, my parents lauded my academic achievements. They thought I was their special gift from God.

My local peers didn’t share such enthusiasm. Settling on the idea that I was strange, they ensured I was aware of their disapproval. Kids could be cruel in that way. As I excelled in academia, I failed at social skills, earning weirdo and freak as nicknames. Ones that my older brother, Supreme, had no qualms about throwing hands over.

His attempts to circumvent bullying with the threat of violence only led to people maintaining a healthy amount of distance from me. It followed that developing relationships wasn’t the easiest task. In fact, for me, it came far and few in between. I didn’t have friends. I didn’t have girlfriends. Being socially awkward made it difficult to form such connections.

It often felt like I’d been sent out into a world where everyone possessed a manual on how to conduct themselves except me. There were rules of communication, eye contact, things one didn’t say to another person, of gaging how to behave–whether it be to smile, show sadness, or laugh, or be emphatic–so many goddamn rules. Deficient of that embedded manual, I was forced to learn by observation and countless mistakes.

I’m not implying I was disadvantaged. I was. Socially disadvantaged. In an economic sense, that was never a problem. Not for my family. It made it easier to disavow the other needs I fell deficient in. Funny how that shit works.