When You Are Different, To Exist Is To Rebel
It had been a beautiful day.
I had walked for hours on the beach in Dublin Bay with my binoculars and counted the shorebirds, my consistent and ever-vigilant companions. I had seen boldly coloured oystercatchers, always one of the first to send up an alarm call when I wandered too close to the flock. I had seen long-legged godwits plunging their slightly upturned beaks into the wet flank of the shore, while a hundred tiny dunlins wheeled across my path, their wings collectively stirring a push of air before them that momentarily stunned me into complete stillness.
And, just as the sun cracked like an egg on the rim of the Dublin Mountains, I had seen one of the most iconic winter sights of all: a large skein of brent geese carving their cross-shaped bodies like fletched arrows through the cold sky, interrupting the still of the evening with the bright shock of their laughing call.
It is the new moon and I have never seen the tide so low.
For the first time in my life, I had walked all the way from the West Pier to the Poolbeg Chimneys, halfway across the entire bay, entirely on the strand. I passed four suburban towns along the way, walking a wild parallel to my own life. I hadn’t even been forced to wade through a single tide pool, although I did have to leap hugely across a few streams that determinedly sliced their liquid bodies through the firm flesh of the sand.
Now, hours later, while waiting for the train home, with darkness creeping its giant body across the smooth surface of the day, an announcement crackles to life over the station speakers. It informs the sparse collection of bodies speckling the platform that there had been a rugby match in the Aviva Stadium that is causing unavoidable delays. It is also rush hour, when the city bursts itself open and gushes back into the catchment sprawl of suburbia and the surrounding commuter towns.
A collective groan rumbles around the platform, disturbing the stillness that had been collecting on my skin all day in tiny quaking beads of silver liquid, gathering into smooth pools behind my collar bones and the crooks of my elbows. I have never found it easy to carry the immediacy of nature with me into urban spaces. As hard as I have tried to hold onto the feeling of ease and belonging that it brings me, time after time, I step onto the concrete and watch as it spills through my cupped palms like water.
When the train finally arrives, the carriage is swimming with bodies; a compressed ocean of people left with no choice but to breathe each other in.
In preparation for the onslaught of sensory hell that I know will ensue on this journey, I take my noise-cancelling headphones from my bag and put them on as I step inside. I am immediately pressed against the doors as they close behind me by the swell of limbs and bags and breath. It is too late to turn back and all I can do is hold every aching muscle in my tired body rigid, focusing every fraction of my attention on maintaining a thin layer of empty space around my skin.
With effort, I turn my body slowly to face the dark window, doing my best not to brush off anyone as I move. I expand my mind and allow my attention to fill it, infusing my entire being with the orange glow of the streetlights as they whip by outside, filtering out the ghostly rows of reflected faces staring back at me from inside the carriage.
Every hair on my body stands on end in anticipation of being touched.
If it had still been bright out, I might have considered waiting on the platform for the rush to dissipate, as I had done many times before, but it is January and it would likely mean waiting an hour or more with the frigid air clawing at my face and hands, seeping its damp body through my clothes.
My skin and eyes are full of the fresh sea air and I am tired. I want to go home.
I have finally managed to control my breathing when the train eases into the next stop and the doors grate open to reveal a new tide of waiting bodies. They surge forward as one and I am momentarily pinioned between the oncoming wave before me and the crush at my back.
Within seconds, and without warning, two large hands materialise from behind me. They grasp me firmly by the shoulders and pull me backward, causing me to lose my balance. Once I am off centre, I am forcibly shoved aside. I stumble against a shocked-looking couple and apologise to them as they right me. I look back to where I had just been standing, shock slightly loosening my jaw and rounding my eyes into orbs, as a large, middle-aged man emerges into the space that my body had been occupying only a moment before.
He is now purposefully using his bulk to carve a path to the doors, barreling through the wave of people desperately trying to force their own bodies onto the already overstuffed carriage. He knocks me back again with his shoulder on the way, this time into the arms of some other strangers behind me. There is nowhere for my body to move, except into the space of other people.
It is now clear to me that this is targeted and I am unsure how to react without escalating things, but my nervous system has gone into full fight-or-flight at being touched by multiple people and I begin to shiver imperceptibly inside my thick coat. I feel a familiar tug as my mind slips gently out of my body. My throat contracts and I am aware that I have lost the ability to speak.
As soon as the train had pulled into the station, I had already been overwhelmed at the sight of the crowd on the platform, wondering if I could cope with the increased weight of humanity inside the little fluorescent box which was already setting my heightened senses into overdrive.
In that split second before the doors parted, I had decided to alight, having quickly calculated the increased risk of being touched or contracting Covid against the risk of getting off at this dimly lit station several stops before my own and waiting for the next train.
The dangers of being a woman travelling alone are never far from my mind, but all I knew in that moment is that I felt far less safe standing among this throng of people than I ever would standing alone in the darkness.
That chance is lost now.
It is too late to try to squeeze myself to the door amidst the press of new bodies pouring in from the platform, and I am not willing to use force in the effort. Whatever slim chance I had to remove myself from the situation has been forcibly taken by this man.
He looks harshly back in my direction as he pushes himself roughly out the door, his shiny cheeks blotched pink in fury. He is gesturing animatedly toward my head and mouthing the word “headphones” as he steps out into the darkness.
At this, I feel a wave of familiar despair and a new kindling of quiet rage as my shock and confusion immediately dissipate to be replaced by a perfect clarity. I slam heavily back into my body.
So that’s it.
This man believes that I am responsible for his actions, that he is perfectly justified in however he chooses to behave toward me, and what’s more, I deserve it, because I have committed the offense of wearing my headphones in public. The very same headphones which are the only thing that allow me to exist in this space at all without experiencing profound sensory pain and discomfort. What I already know from a lifetime of similar experiences has once again been made painfully apparent.
I have been targeted for having visible access needs.
My invisible disability had become briefly visible, yet still not quite visible enough to deserve understanding or accommodation. Instead, only just audacious enough, just transgressive enough of the neurotypical norms of “polite society”, to attract and warrant forceful correction in the eyes of this man.
Perhaps he had first said “excuse me”, or some other less delicate way of using his voice, before he decided to force the issue (I will never know), but hearing him would not have magically granted me, or anyone else in the carriage, the ability to clear a path. There had been plenty of other people in this man’s way, also unable to move within the crush of bodies, standing between him and the carriage doors, but he had chosen my body to violently displace. I am the one who’s right to personal space, he determined, was less important than his inconvenience, simply because I was the one wearing headphones.
What’s more, he felt entitled enough in his own estimation of the situation to deem this an unacceptable fault worthy of aggressive physical intervention, with no fear of consequences despite the public nature of the act.
Now, as his form shrinks into the dark of the platform, perhaps feeling righteous in his actions, perhaps feeling the bitter relief of an outlet for whatever anger lives within him, I feel a new sense of calm settle over me. In a spontaneous impulse to reject this narrative he has laid before me, I flip up my middle finger and let the silent gesture follow him into the night.
Beneath the familiar numbing weight of my perceived otherness, that uniquely unsettling feeling of unwelcomeness that has drifted over my form like a damp blanket, I am vaguely aware that others are likely to have witnessed me making this gesture within the well-lit, crowded carriage. This is something that would have brought me a feeling of shame in the past, as it had done my entire life any time I expressed anything resembling anger at the violation of my bodily autonomy, any time I had been reprimanded or dismissed for exercising my right to take up space in the world as myself, with my different and additional needs visible for all to see.
I realise now, with some surprise, that I no longer care in the slightest what they might think about my anger. I have spent far too long caring far too much about the way others might perceive me, not out of vanity, but in order to maintain my safety.
It is clear to me now that nothing, nothing, is worth living that way anymore.
This is made all the more real to me because I know that attempting to hide my differences will not protect me either.
Not long after my late diagnosis of autism at the age of 30, I read an article where I learned that the average life expectancy of people like me is roughly half that of the general population, with one study putting it as low as 36.
This is largely due to the astronomical suicide rates within the autisic community (with the results of one recent UK study even finding that many people who have died by suicide are actually likely to have been undiagnosed autistics), compounded by the too often fatal health implications of systemic social exclusion, abuse and neglect. This was a devastating realisation to have to come to terms with, especially after the post-diagnosis euphoria of finally finding a community to which I belong.
I was not just upset that my risk of dying prematurely by so many different means was higher than average, but because it brought home to me the true scale of the daily impacts of discrimination, the lack of basic supports and accommodations, and the devastating pain of identity erasure and forced assimilation on neurodivergent people (and other, often overlapping, minority groups) within our society.
A society which supposedly belongs to us too, that we are supposed to belong to.
The cold systemic disregard for people like me felt like a vast and strange kind of grief to grapple with. The realisation of the enormity of systemic oppression, and the millions of insidious ways that it penetrates your life, can feel like a vast maw of loneliness to be suddenly, unceremoniously pitched into — especially when the stigma connected with being who you are is so profound that most people find it difficult to even begin to grasp what you are talking about.
The truth is that I won’t be able to keep myself safe through the excruciating practice of camouflaging my autistic traits and needs, or “masking” as it has been termed in the neurodiversity movement. The mental, emotional and physical strain it causes to daily perform in a way in which I am not wired to means that, in a very real way, I would only be putting myself at greater risk.
So, this is the moment.
Standing amid the crush of bodies, every nerve inside me still screaming from the unwanted touch of a stranger, this is the moment where I no longer feel able to accept the narrative of my difference, my disability in the context of this society, being inconvenient to others.
Instead, I choose to wholeheartedly reject the assumption that my visible access needs somehow equate permission for me to have my boundaries broken and my bodily autonomy forfeited at the self-righteous alter of another, all in the service of a sanctimonious “norm”, which I will never be able to attain.
Here, the unwritten Golden Rule of society is clearly visible to anyone who has ever experienced what it is to be considered “different”, as it has always been to me as far back as I can remember.
Conform, or be destroyed.
By this rule, any person who has conformed is accepted and, as such, becomes an actor of the Social Order, with automatic permission to treat those who have not, or more often, cannot, conform to societal expectation, however they deem fit. Their decisions are often endorsed, due to their perceived “normality”, by those around them, and so, by society itself.
They may have followed this rule because it was easy for them, already fitting into the extremely narrow image of what is considered “typical” (having never been given reason to question their own right to exist in the world). Or, perhaps more insidiously, and perhaps more often, because they have had their own difference stamped out of them by that same system and now spend their lives ensuring no one else can have the acceptance which they were denied. Either way, the harm done to those who do not have the ability, or the desire, to conform is the same.
Today, at last, I will not accept the shame this man is offering; I know that shame too well already. Indeed, I know this man too well already. I hand his offering back to him with my flippant gesture and, with it, a hundred thousand offerings which came before it.
I wish him well on his journey, I wish him the consequences of his own actions, and let it all go with him into the night.
This man, with his small mind and his unwavering belief in his entitlement to take up space, even at the expense of others, will not deprive me of my right to exist, with all of my human needs, in the shared spaces of the world to which everyone should have a right to belong.
With this, I decide that I am here to stay, even if the simple fact of my existence is viewed as an act of rebellion.
As the train moves off, I take a breath, let it out slowly, and remind myself that I have had a beautiful day.
In a society seemingly designed to wring us dry of every last drop of authenticity and uniqueness, I will not relinquish the beauty of this day, nor my right to exist in it.
When they try to tell me not to exist at all, I will resist by doing more than existing. Despite it all, in this moment, I decide that simply surviving, as hard as even that may be sometimes, isn’t enough anymore.
Others within that train carriage, as it hurtles along the south Dublin coastline, see a person wearing noise-cancelling headphones, quietly avoiding eye contact and staring into space. Within me, old empires are crashing to their knees in a deafening cacophony of dust and destruction.
In their place, I persist: a living, breathing revolution.
- To learn more about the link between autism and suicide please click here.
- For more information about early mortality in autistic people, you can check out this report by the UK-based autism research charity, Autistica.
- If you find value in my work and would like to support me, feel free to clap for and share this article. I would also like to invite you to sign up for my newletter on Substack as either a free or paid subscriber at https://beingfiain.substack.com/
