do we believe in the power of love 

to conquer all?

hate doesn’t beg patience 

and demand generosity 

maybe i’d have preferred life in an asylum

in my bedtime mind pops 

my first foreign trip without my parents

there i am, eleven, 

living in a world i don’t want to live in 

still here, alexithymic through fear

decoding signations from the incarcerated adjuster

interpreted via reddit memes

between being diagnosed with a terminal illness, then undiagnosed, then diagnosed with autism, i spent a lot of time with therapists from age 38 onwards. i was first diagnosed with depression as a teenager. i remember waiting ages for a referral to therapy. finally getting there, jittering, a nervous sweaty wreck of self-harming, substance abusing, poetic teenager. i just sort of wanted to unload on someone about this one time, when i was eleven, that i was bullied relentlessly while on a trip to austria without my parents. the trauma of which i had just buried as deep as i could, before trying, flailing, desperately, to make myself an entirely new social circle at high school. and i’d since left high school and found myself in a similar predicament (although this only occurred to me 20 years later.)

that’s not really the sort of thing we do here, the therapist told me. i felt utterly humiliated.