2022.19 Carnival

CN: social camouflage, metaphorical depiction of #neurodivergent behaviour.

The thing about cleverness
is that it’s easy to fool yourself
that this deft reconditioning
of your social vessel,
this precious crowd-proofing,
is the truth.

The thing about successful camouflage
is that it can hide you from the fellows
you never knew existed,
all of you mist-wreathed,
cheating the predators
of their next meal.

That thing where you look askance
at the loud ones, those who’ve cast
their leaves off, breathing freely
(if they ever hid their feathers in the first place)
is not what you think it is.

(None of this is what you think it is.)

The first time you climb out of your
diving suit in full view of company,
shrug off its weight to say:
here I am, those submariners who’ve been
signalling silently can join you,
stretching metaphors around the
galley table, saying “I feel so light!”

No longer over-interpreted, you are
translated into colours that make sense,
tumbling into wonder that the
lack of filters brings.
Me too, me too, me too;
a ringing chorus of validation,
or just company in peculiarity.

“There was never any of this when I was young!”
you say, and it’s a celebration of
the discovery of new words, the right words,
diagrams drawn by those who trusted
in the illogic of being alone.
And you are not alone.
And that is terrifyingly wonderful.
And vice versa.

And you’ve always loved new words,
hoarding them like sweets,
like boy band posters that left you cold,
like old dictionaries,
like clothes that coded you as okay,
like places where you could be barefoot,
like bookmarks,
like knives,
like interesting bits of wood,
like pebbles for the pocket,
like receipts rolled into soft-edged pills,
like facts about 17^th Century vegetables,
like intricate finger shapes,
like rocking softly,
like people who didn’t scoff,
like breakups,
like pain.

And your intricately implemented assonance
has drifted away in the face of the
remembered happiness and
what it feels like to stay up late,
timeblind behind the scenes with the other
creatures of peculiar plumage,
talking and diverging, and gesturing,
and saying sorry, and not saying sorry,
and speaking in parentheses (and
nested parentheses, and footnotes),
gleeful in water that takes your weight,
salted with memories of the near-hits
of your soggy past,
and this sentence cannot last,
but it’s good enough for now.

Tomorrow is shoes and modulated vowels
and eye contact and sitting still
but also not apologising.
No more apologising.
Maybe wearing a scrap of bright feather
nestled against your neck
or in your hair, talisman against
the difficult days, the normality,
the sweetness of seeing another
pair of eyes lighting, the small nod,
the awkward laugh, the chance to
seek out sweetness in the aftermath.

Image from a blog post from Hult Business School, entitled
Thinking differently: Researching neurodiversity in the workplace

I promised you a more cheerful follow-up to the last one, didn’t I?! Pandemic has been a living nightmare in some ways, but in others has been amazing for finding tribe online...