This Is A Rant: My Clothes Are A Lie

Every evening when I get home from work the first thing I do is shed my office clothes and pull on a pair of shorts. It feels amazing. Of course I only do this if I’m home alone, or if I’m not planning on leaving the apartment again. If I’m going to wear shorts out of the house, I make sure to throw on leggings under them. A few weeks ago I went out in a romper without anything underneath and I’m still feeling anxiety over it.

It’s not like I’m a particularly modest person. I wear backless dresses and low cut tops and tight clothes. But my legs have self-harm scars on them, and when people see those they give me a special disgusted face that I don’t feel any particular need to see on a regular basis. Every time I leave the house I have to think about whether there is something that people will learn about me from my body that I don’t want them to learn.

Not only is this a pain in the ass, but it’s also emotionally taxing. I feel like I’m lying to everyone around me simply by wearing clothes that cover things I would rather they don’t see.

Who would want me if I didn’t falsify what my body is really like? I portray an image of youth, of athleticism, of health, and yet the moment you raise my hemline you’d find that my body is really marked by violence, self hatred, death, and ill health. I have found myself frustrated in the past about people giving off an image of being stable, having friends, being well adjusted, only to find out after becoming enmeshed with them that in fact they are deeply screwed up people.

It’s one thing to be with someone and slowly develop these fucked up scars after you’ve already trapped them. It’s another thing entirely to ask someone to fall in love with you when the moment they look at your body, your real body, your unhidden body, they see clear evidence of instability, violence, and self hatred. Who can love someone like that? Perhaps that is why I marked my body in the first place, to illustrate to people what it is that I actually am when they think they’re falling in love with something else.

But now that I’ve made it clear just who and what I am, made it clear for an indefinite period of time (because who knows when these angry red worms inching their way over my skin will disappear), I don’t know if I am capable of accepting the rejection, the disgust, the confusion, the fear, the pity, the anger. No one simply reacts by saying “yes. That’s you. That’s ok”. No one reacts like they would just seeing a pair of legs. There is no such thing as simply existing when your body is the site of damage.

There is an intensely broken feeling to all of this. Even though I have no desire right now to date or even be desired sexually, it’s really fucked up to feel like the only way someone could want me is if I hide myself. I know that I will always be wanted “in spite of” not because of. How can I feel like any sort of relationship (even a friendly type relationship) is based on openness and honesty and all the values that I care about when every day of my life I consider and carefully cover up certain facts about myself?

What kind of a human being am I if I feel that I have to bury things about myself to everyone I know (except a select few that I feel brave around)? What is wrong with me?

Intellectually I understand that what is fucked up is not me but is in fact a society that says we need to hide every ounce of evidence that we might have mental illness, a society that indicates that someone who self harms is unstable, possibly violent towards others, immature, attention seeking, and completely different from everyone else the world except others who self harm (because seriously who does that it’s so fucked up), a society that polices bodies.

But emotionally, I cannot stop feeling as if I need to expose myself just to see if anyone I know would still treat me the same. I can’t stop feeling this desire to scream to everyone that I have scars, that I’m fucked up, that I hurt myself. My body is not what you think it is. My body is not appropriate. My body is not healthy. My body, simply by existing, fucks with your norms and I don’t know if I’m ok with that because someday, maybe, I might want someone to just look at me and not have questions or fears or emotions, but just see me.

I don’t know that there’s a point to this post, just a fear. A fear of my body and what my body has become, of the permanence of scars. A fear of what people see when they look at me. A fear of the fact that I’m hiding because if there is one thing I hate in this world it is hiding the reality of my self. And somehow, I don’t think it matters how many people do see, how many people I am brave to. Because every time I put on a pair of pants and meet someone new, I’ve hidden something. I’ve chosen not to let them see a truth about me.

I suppose we all do this every time we meet people, but the physical act of covering something brings it home in a way unlike any other, and it’s a way that is intensely guilt inducing. It isn’t simply “not sharing”. It is actively hiding. It’s a choice, every single morning, every single time I change my clothes and I am so sick of weighing myself down with guilt over it.

Disability: Being Broken

Much of the time I feel broken. A fair amount of the time I don’t simply feel that way, I’m told that I’m that way. Not overtly, no, but in the way that people talk about mental illness, the way that people talk about people who don’t have good jobs straight out of college, in the way people talk about women who have experienced any sexual trauma…these things tell me that I’m broken. I once had a friend tell me that he could never be the parent of a disabled child because you would sink your whole life into them and they would still be subpar. As someone who has multiple birth defects and major mental illness, that fucked with me.

I’m told that I need to fix things about myself. I need to be less judgmental and more accepting. I need to stop reacting so quickly and harshly to things. I need to make my anxiety go away, and make my depression go away. I need to change how I feel about the world and myself, change how I perceive everything in order to be “happier”. I’m told that I need to change myself, fix myself, retrain my brain so that it’s different from what it is now and so that I behave differently in order to be whole and acceptable. I have been bribed and threatened by people who are well-meaning to get me into therapy to “fix” me.

And I now work in an autism program. And I hear the same kind of language. I’ve been reading blogs about autism and hearing about the ways that children are asked to ignore their own perceptions, feelings, and understandings so as to act in a way that is acceptable to others. I have begun to understand that in many ways, people to help those with autism still view autism as a disease that infects someone, a broken piece of their child that needs to be banished so they can have the real child back.

That’s how I feel when I talk about my eating disorder. People have literally told me to view the disorder as something separate from me, almost like it’s possessing me, like it’s broken and if I can just fight it away then I will be back and the disease will be gone. I’ve been broken or taken over by this bad thing, but if I could just get past it, throw it away, change it, then I would be normal and ok again.

Except that that’s not how mental illness or disability works. The way someone who is autistic views the world isn’t broken: it’s different. What is broken is the way that we treat those who see things differently or act differently. We expect them to move 99% of the way towards what we view as normal so that we can be comfortable, and then we make a 1% accommodation to adjust to them. We don’t allow that some people might be far more happy if they were allowed to act and think in a way that is radically different from the way we do.

As an example, I will always be more comfortable thinking in terms of my own safety and trying to avoid things that will be triggering for me: I will probably never be able to spend much time in a kitchen making food on my own. I will never cook for others. I will always feel more comfortable if others will simply accept what I say about my disorder and don’t question my experience. I will always feel more comfortable if I can move my hands when I’m anxious, or if I can twitch a body part when I have too much energy. Asking me to stop that doesn’t make my anxiety go away: it simply gives me no way to deal with it.

To take a more extreme example, for a lot of kids with autism, they have extreme sensory sensitivities. They can hear or feel things you or I never could. So they may never feel comfortable being in crowded or noisy places. And that doesn’t mean their broken. It doesn’t mean we should force them to deal with those situations. It means that we should accept what they can deal with, accept how they perceive as legitimate.

Instead of asking those of us who might perceive or experience the world differently from you to force ourselves into mental contortions so that we can look and act the way you might expect, maybe people should consider that we’re not broken. There is absolutely nothing broken about the fact that my brain likes to organize things A LOT, and thus it tends towards black and white thinking. There are useful elements to this and unhelpful elements to it. Telling me that it’s wrong will not make it go away, and even if I COULD stop acting in a black and white fashion it wouldn’t necessarily make me happier.

Making adjustments so that I can have time to think before jumping to black and white thinking, or encouraging me to rely on it in areas where categorization is useful but giving me some other tools to check it in my personal life: THOSE are helpful. They don’t try to fix me. They don’t tell me I’m broken or wrong in any way or that if I could just be more like other people or adjust my thoughts and my life everything would be ok. They do tell me that since I function differently than a lot of people I might need some help fitting myself and my perceptions into the larger scheme of things. Society is set up for the “norm”. It’s not set up for me. Which means I need some help getting myself to fit into the way society works. I need help functioning sometimes. But I can do that and still not give up the pieces of me that others view as broken. I can retain my mind and simply try to shape self and world to fit together.

Neurodivergence. We diverge from the norm. We’re not broken. We just fit differently. And it’s not all our job to make ourselves the right shape to fit into society, because sometimes we’re not that flexible. Sometimes society has to be flexible as well. I don’t want to feel broken anymore. I don’t want people to tell me I’m broken anymore. I have some more work to do to be able to function and to fit myself to society, but so do most people. I want that to be ok. I want it to be ok if I’m at a party and I say that I have to leave because it’s too noisy for me or because people are talking about diets. I want it to be ok if I show up to a party wearing fuzzy footie pajamas because I had a rough day and I need the sensory calming (see me up there in my onesie? That was the best party I’ve ever been to). There is nothing WRONG with these things. They don’t make me unhappy. What makes me unhappy is when people can’t accept that that’s how I cope. I am not a problem.