I’m inhuman. What do I do?

The shame of being disabled

Content warning: this article comes with a content warning for mental illness.

Some of us were nonverbal. At least I’m not that.

I mean, sometimes I trip over a word, shove them together in a syllable. And sometimes I’m LOUD. You can’t be loud and nonverbal.

Some of us are loud. Not just in words. Often not in words. Sometimes in breath. Sometimes in fits. Sometimes in performances of fits and breathes that are produced by terrible actors.

My pulse is getting fast.

When I was a teenager, I

When I was a kid, I was a

I went to a school for special needs. My disability is simply called “slow processing.” Now, I tell people I have dyslexia or ADD. Sometimes it feels like that, and it’s easier to say. Sometimes, I stare at words so long I get frustrated and move on to other words. I have to double back and read the word I’m still having trouble with. Then the sentence clicks into place in the wrong order. It’s funny.

I’m “slow.” I have trouble making decisions. I don’t always understand the choice, and when I do, I don’t want people to think I’m imposing because I have already made them wait for me.

I often interrupt people. Impulse control problems, I guess. I just want to be heard sometimes but I know that if I wait until a person is done talking I’ll forget everything and then I’ll have to stand there and they’ll have to wait for me, and then I’ll forget, and the next person will talk and I’ll smile in a polite way because sometimes I make bad faces and people notice and they ask me why I’m angry and it’s embarrassing.

My face is really hot. I’m burying my fingernails into my palm and hoping the pain will make it stop.

I don’t like talking about my time at a special education school. In order to understand the physical sensations going through my body as I attempt to write, I’ll borrow from those who have done the work for me.

In 1984, Winston attempts to write down the events that took place one evening when he hired a sex worker in the proles’ district. To his embarrassment, he discovered that the woman he had hired was many, many years older than him. The book of course centers around his affair with a woman 13 years his junior, but never mind that for a moment. He is writing about the event in his illicit journal that no one (he hopes against hope) will read:

For the moment it was too difficult to go on. He shut his eyes and pressed his fingers against them, trying to squeeze out the vision that kept recurring. He had an almost overwhelming temptation to shout a string of filthy words at the top of his voice. Or to bang his head against the wall, to kick over the table, and hurl the inkpot through the window — to do any violent or noisy or painful thing that might black out the memory that was tormenting him.

Embarrassment isn’t really the right word here, is it? Embarrassment is what happens when you are caught with lipstick on your teeth or an unfortunate spill over your crotch. It’s accidentally calling a manual entry of numbers into a database a “hand job” and then laughing at yourself along with your co-workers. Silly little events that speak nothing of your character other than that you are exactly the same as the other billions of people who are capable of the exact same silliness.

But Winston isn’t embarrassed. He didn’t hire the sex worker on a dare: his buddies weren’t laughing as the antique regality of the good lady was revealed.

He was sexually and emotionally and socially and spiritually dead, and in a desperate grasp at a spark of life, he was shown just how pathetic his desperation was. He was afraid of being a husk of a man, and was left feeling like something other than human.

My experience in the special education system caused me to adopt a strange inclination for performance. Throughout school, I portrayed myself as three times more conscious and energetic than I was. I don’t know why. Kids around me often did similar things. It’s funny: being told that you have trouble expressing your emotions tends to lead to people over expressing. Simple jokes were acted out like Family Guy scenes, presentations were sometimes sung rather than spoken. I don’t understand why.

There was a running joke in my high school: if there was a loud noise from another class room, it was evident that someone was having a “sp-ed moment.” Objects were thrown, lines were read, art was made. So much art, actually.

One time, during a group social worker meeting (a thing that happened regularly in my school) I pretended to be having a panic attack due to anger. I was in full control of my breath, my tone, the way I was slumping against the wall, refusing to sit. Aware of how the two girls in the group with me were looking at each other with a “what the fuck?”ness I could identify only later on.

One time, I got shitty with an administrator in public because I didn’t like that we had to have a anti-drug talk.

One time, I confessed to a crush online during regents week, and on graduation day tried desperately to interrupt his conversation with a teacher because I really wanted to talk to him.

One time, I ran away and hid in the corner of a room and teachers had to come and yell at me and one of them grabbed me which is exactly something I would have done only I would have kicked and bitten and spit and screamed as well.

Just a few years ago, a girl who made my chest feel cold and bursting asked me if I was on the spectrum. I’m not.

I have never self-harmed. Not in the traditional way, anyway. Sometimes, like Winston, I have wanted bang my head against the wall or bite a finger off. Sometimes, I think to myself “I should die I should die I should die I should die I should die I should die I should die I should die I should die I should die…” and I never mean it, because it wouldn’t be a performance if I meant it.

I’ve always been so afraid of people seeing what I am, seeing the real me. A rasping, slimy, golem in a corner. Because what am I if not a trembling, terrified mass?

I rarely feel much anymore. That sounds like an exaggeration, but truly I have no idea how to even touch my emotional world anymore. That’s why I write. I have an imagination, and that’s lovely. But I swear that I have sobbed and wept without the slightest emotional sensation.

I have a flare for the dramatic, which is something I doubt many know about me. I’m genuinely unsure, I never developed extrospection the way my peers have. Even my stories live between the moments of incredible cliches most of the time. I should die I should die I should die I should die I should die I should die…

I know I deserve to live. I guess I “deserve” love, in some abstract way. I mean, no one owes me love, that I am sure of. Maybe a god or something owes me love. Maybe my dog owes me love. I think she’s too busy though.

It’s weird, at once knowing that I need to leave my little shame-repellent box if I want to live a life. And also feeling like I should have surgically stapled my lips and hands together years ago. I keep hoping I can simply never associate with people in front of whom I am so sure I have revealed my sub-humanity (sub-humanity. Self-hatred and fascism really are so closely related).

A while ago, I was dealing with a slump where I simply couldn’t extract myself from, you know, I should die I should die I should die I should die. And someone, a friend whom I am not totally sure I have earned, told me that she isn’t afraid of people knowing what she’s ashamed of. That she feels closer to the people who know her faults in that way. I want to be closer to this person, but I never want to tell her about the time I screamed at a teacher because I thought I was being funny or hit a younger kid on the camp bus for no reason I can possibly recall.

I don’t want to tell the girl that makes my chest feel cold and bursting that I don’t understand her words sometimes, and that I’m afraid she can see me missing the experience of being with her because I’m trying to seem like a human god damn being.

And there are certain things I can’t and simply won’t say. And I hope that no one needs to hear me say them in order to genuinely love me. And yet I know that’s not possible.

Many people I knew from school are living decent, “normal” lives now. One of my closest friends clearly still struggles with the disabilities that landed her in my school. Yet she maneuvers through the world with a kind of unconscious grace I aspire to only in my most fantastical moments. People like her. I like her. I’m not sure who wouldn’t like her.

She and I aren’t comparable, I say, because she didn’t have the same problems as me. As far as I know. (Though if she did, she necessarily wouldn’t tell me about them.) But if she were a golem on the inside, would I like her any less?

I don’t know what to do. I can’t get out of my internal sense that I will be hated if people know me: are able to once and for all judge me as inhuman. This is a death sentence. You know what people do to golems, don’t you?

And yet I know that this human skin is vegetative, and the only way to join the living is to simply be the golem.

Either way, I’m not human. So what do I do?