I’m not normal

I struggled a lot with fitting in growing up. That’s nothing new for a lot of people, and I’m sure it’s been said here before. I cry easily, I’m quiet, I don’t like big social settings, I hate sports, the list goes on.

I don’t know what caused them to do this, but my parents one day took me to get some scans done, as well as receive social therapy. It was stressful, and I disliked it, a lot. It made me feel even more of a freak than I already had. I’d been diagnosed with autism, to me, it finally clicked on why I just couldn’t be normal. But to my parents, my dad to be exact, it was just a word. And typically, that’d be cute, that’d sound like the build up to me saying “it was just a word because no matter what I’d be their kid”. No. To my dad, it held zero meaning. He’d still yell at me to act normal. He’d still lose his temper because I wasn’t doing things that, as he put it, “should know already”. This isn’t to say that I have a grudge against him, or hate him. I love my dad, but I know that he can, and will never understand me on a deeper level. As much as he wants me to be a copy of him, be like he was when he was a kid, I cannot. Because I’m not him, hell I’m not even his Jr. that’d be my brother. So the constant expectations and frustrations he has when I “refuse” to act how he wants me to, is exhausting. I try to act normal, the way people want me to, but it’s too much at times, because I’m not normal.

The worst part of this all is that I don’t have the strength to say this to my family. Even the thought of doing so has me break down in tears. I’m too scared to be confrontational over this. It’s likely that I will never let this reach the light of day until I either go die in a ditch somewhere or pass away of old age.

I apologize for pushing this on all of you. But I thank you for taking the time to read this vent of mine. It felt, if only slightly, cathartic .