We survived by the skin of our teeth.

Feb. 6, 2012 at 7:05pm with 122 notes

Reblogged from andromedalogic

What I have been trying to teach myself, with only partial success, is that being functional will in all likelihood mean not seeming functional. It’s a peculiar and necessary tradeoff— for me, right now.

Being functional means doing things in your own predesignated order, at your own methodical pace. It means, quite often, a five-hour period spent rocking and replaying the same song over and over, staring straight ahead loose-jawed or moving your hands in time. It means your speech is a minefield, often plagued by a choppy, halting rhythm, often slurred and studded with strange turns of phrase. It means sometimes not talking at all, and not giving a shit when your mouth emits cackly squirrel-like sounds instead of words, or can only reproduce those words you’ve recently read or heard. Actually, it means a lot of not giving a shit, because the few things you do care about will require 101 percent of your energy.

Being functional means you can do your chem lab but not decipher the seating chart they give out at the beginning. So you turn and ask the kid next to you, “Excuse me, I can’t interpret this. Could you tell me where I’m sitting?” It means that when you’re in the student center on your lunch break, reading a scientific paper about bacteriophages in root canals, you’re rocking and tapping your feet and flapping your hands in a new configuration every few sentences, just to process the information before you. And the students who sit down across from you leave prematurely, but that’s okay, too. It means swallowing a lot of pride, or what they call pride, because at almost 21 years old you’re not supposed to be like this anymore.

Being functional means asking the same professor the same four questions thrice each, and repeating back the answers. It means reading in detail the parts of your syllabi and lab manuals that most people ignore: entire schedules, rubrics, rules and procedures. It means wearing the same clothes Monday through Friday, getting progressively more disheveled, and showering only on the weekends. It means hardly ever looking presentable, or smiling, or making small talk. It means knowing and using the words “I can’t”. It means laying the impossible to rest, and taking up in its place the just-barely-possible: because there is a difference.

Being functional means, almost invariably, not being the person the world wants you to be.

You want me to be “high-functioning”? Let me.