Memoir – “Cowards”
Choke on me.
There are many people in the world and the first time you bump into someone and brush curious fingers against someone else is a universal experience. Humanity, as they are, seek out people who are similar and familiar to us. Among hundreds of thousands of people you pass by, there are very few you keep. People are cruel, it’s a fact and a lesson which is learned on repeat. I am terribly lucky and unlucky though, to have deeply learned my lesson and yet not at the same time.
My first lesson was as a child. I was bright eyed, warm and curious to a fault. It would take me years to realize the glances directed at me were tolerance and annoyance, barely concealed disgust. But I would not forget being being left out, told to play subservient roles, being made to dance the part of games where I was the most disliked and unwanted. I remember asking to play and being turned away only to see someone step forward next to ask and be received gladly. Like a beaten dog, a child will try again and again until the lesson is forced to stick and turns into distrust.
I was a strange child – I had to of been. I went up to new people, stuck out my hand and easily declared “Hi, my name’s Sillas!” I did it in first grade to a boy hiding behind his mother. I’d learn 9 years later that he was violently abused and bullied others besides me. I would do it again in 6th grade with a new boy sitting by himself and invite him to sit with me until he eventually found his own group. Humorous, how that boy befriended the first one. I would learn he was not kind, but he always was to me. I had a strong sense of justice, then. I had an innate hate for the intolerant and a kindness that outdated me. I’d get in front of other children and loudly tell them off when they were unkind.
But no one truly liked me. This was a bitter lesson of many.
I saw it in the gazes of teachers, of my classmates and other people’s parents. I was weird, a little off and inhuman. Perhaps I was unsightly with my hair swept back in a half updo with those terrible ties with two bulbs on them that clacked against my head obnoxiously. Or perhaps it was the way I asked too many questions and copied those around me.
In 4th grade, I copied an unkind joke another student did, exactly after seeing him do it. I was brought the next day inbetween my two 4th grade classes and talked to viciously. They refused to acknowledge the reason i gave – I did what I saw – and I was the only one punished. That happened quite often, with people believing I was rather dull and never believed my honest reason for doing things. I was a child who would repeat the thousands of things I saw but be the only one told I was at fault for it.
It’s not hard to notice the dichotomy, whether it was something innocent or mean, it only mattered who had done it.
I learned this when I, who was Aromantic without a word for it yet, was forced into giving a random name for a boy who I didn’t know and “confess” to feelings I didn’t have.
The whole cafeteria laughed at me.
Oh to be a confused 4th grader with a teacher holding up a ripped up letter with hate in their eyes and lips curled back in a snarl and the pwrimment imprint of a cafeteria of laughing faces. In retrospect, it’s rather bizarre why that teacher was so angry at an elementary schooler’s supposed crush. More pressingly, I wonder still what made her think holding up a ripped up letter to a child would be a good thing. That same teacher would continue to dislike me so deeply, that my nana would need to have a conversation with her when my younger siblings joined her class. She hated them simply for the association and yet the few things I can remember doing “wrong” were all things I learned from other people or a lack of social grace.
I was a child.
The isolation got worse after I gave that stupid letter (a suggestion from a supposed from friend in the first place), and so I turned to a series of books my neighbor and friend at the time suggested – warrior cats. I fell in love with it, obsessed over it and fell into media which allowed me to escape my life. Anime, novels as thick as my palm, they all became something I greedily devoured whole one after another.
I don’t necessarily regret the isolation as it became a love for media, openmindedness and a desire to understand others even more deeply. I advanced swiftly after that, but everyone would always continue to look at me like I was terribly dense, stupid and ignorant.
Often, I was right and it was the other person who didn’t know as much about the topic as I did. But, I am still terribly afraid to say something incorrect.
That same 4th grade year, a teacher who I believed to be kind snapped at me in front of the entire class. She was sick of hearing about my special interest as a child – wolves – and decided to take it out on me. Parents, teachers and peers are often a person’s first bullies. I sat back at my seat with tears in my eyes and tightly pressed lips as I rewrote my entire story, praying no one would notice my upset. They didn’t.
Humiliation is a terrible tool against autistic, neurodivergent children with hearts too soft. There is only tolerance when someone is aware of what is wrong, and hatred towards those that people don’t immediately know are autistic or neurodivergent. Often, those traits are viciously bullied out of children that were born girls. Tolerance is not kindness and it is not as forthcoming and genuine as people think they’re doing a good job of playing pretend at – and I am no longer a girl.
During my time at school, I would continue to be mistreated. My relationship with academics would be a bad one over and over again. I remember the faces of teachers and students alike, their faces over their names, and I still spiral in wondering if it had something to do with something inherently my own. Like nails clawing at a stone wall, each act of cruelty would be one scratch and by the end, my walls would be covered in deep grooves.
School gave – gives – me panic attacks. I don’t cry anymore when I feel like I’m dying, but they’ll be persistent and terrible whenever I make a mistake or am too open with people who dig shovels into old wounds. 8 years and counting, the anxiety never ends.
A child should not wish with their entire being not to wake up the next day or bawl in fear and anxiety when they cannot finish an assignment despite wanting to. And, through it all, no matter how pristine my grades were, how much of a “pleasure to have in class” I was or how quiet and well mannered I behaved, everyone would always think I was a bit stupid.
In 6th grade, no one in my math class remembered my name besides “book girl.” I had straight A’s and would pull out my book, that I always kept in my desk, inbetween notes. My reading score shot up, and my social skills continued to wither from where they’d barely begun to grow. I skipped seventh grade English and went into an advanced class, but I would struggle and be left behind as I was tossed into a new room with rules I hadn’t learned. If I asked a question about how to do something the others were learning that year, I’d get a look from a teacher and told “you did it today in class” and dismissed. When I asked someone near me, they’d look at me oddly, vaguely explain it and then I’d struggle to fill in the blanks. My entire life feels like filling in the blanks.
Straight A’s and poor social skills, I ran into someone in 8th grade who had sat besides me for two thirds of the year and didn’t remember that we shared the class. I was forgettable.
I wouldn’t learn until 17 years into my life that it wasn’t a “motivation problem”. The teachers that always said “you know how to do it but aren’t submitting assignments” weren’t quite right. I could see their annoyance, interlance and distrust in their eyes. I lost assignments, teachers did too, and I’d be ignored. How can someone ask for help without knowing they need it? Rather, I learned that I was stuck in executive dysfunction. On july 11th 2020, after fighting for two years to get tested for ADHD and brushed off, I got my diagnosis. For a small, shining moment, I thought it would help. Instead, the 504 head at my school said to me “You made it this far, so I think you’ll be fine.” I hated those words and I do now.
If a child cries in severe panic, wishes for death over being looked at with disappointment from an authority figure again and is in a school so big they never see their friends while their grades plummet from straight A’s – perhaps they’re not “making it that far” and won’t be fine.
For a second time, I think that it is exceedingly lucky those things happened to me and not someone else. I think they’d have drowned.
I learned a few things since then and from those moments. A child without enough play often experiences depression, reduced self regulation and poor resilience. A child who doesn’t know how to socialize is often outcasted and seen as weird. When you pair that with the effects of emotional abuse – you get a very unhappy child who internalizes those ideologies. I was a child with a heart three sizes too big, and numbness was a terrible plague. Numbness is often a result of feeling too much for a body to handle. Most of all I learned that people are cruel. Children, adults, all of them. Adults play at knowing what they’re doing, but they don’t. They pretend to help, do things they think may help, and then believe the problem is smoothed over.
Adults turn away a child who comes to their guidance office asking for help and asks them how seriously they need that help – and turn them away when the child undermines their problems.
My dislike for authority sparked and grew. People think authority issues are born from nothing, but they’re wrong. For someone to hate authority, it is often because a system around them has failed them.
I was lucky to be sent to therapy so early due to outside reasons, but that isolation would remain my entire life. What does it mean to exist if others cannot stand it? I am still unsure how to behave and react despite noticing behavior that people think they’re doing a good job of hiding. People are not as clever as they believe they are, but I have little patience for guessing games.
No good things come from it.
So then, what does it mean to be tolerable? I twisted and bent myself but I was passionate in everything people told me not to be. I loved anime, books, escapism, and delved so deep into my own head I discovered another layer of clouds you can’t see. I fixated on psychology, anthropology and sociology, hoping it would explain to me why I was the way I was and why others were the way they were. I analyze so much I overwhelm myself. I understood what led to my abuse, why I get short of breath at the slam of a door, why people fear what they do and behave the way they do. It did not save me – it never will.
From that all, I realized two things: I am not easy to swallow – and that I dislike others.
My childhood was a religious experience of desperation in understanding the science of my isolation. I fell like lucifer into the flames of hell and asked what I’d done wrong when the blame didn’t lie in my tongue but my clipped wings. If an angel questions too much, they fall – but how do you decide on that line. Is a demon cruel simply because they’re no longer an angel, or do they blacken until soot remains where their heart once stood and that’s their downfall. I don’t exactly have an answer, but I think I flew close to it like icarus did the sun. Empathy without limit is foolishness, cynicalism with no gentleness is violence, an unloved child is fascinated with a flame for the warmth it gives them, and winter is coldest when it’s harbored in your ribcage in the middle of summer.
The lessons learned from society and one’s own culture are as important as learning not to touch a hot stove. There is a possibility to learn the hard way for both things, and not all lessons stick unless they flay skin.
There will be thousands of people I’ll meet, hundreds of names I’ll hear in passing or never learn. I, like all people, will seek out safety in numbers with people like myself. But, I’ve found rats among foxes and vultures among crows. I tried to befriend snakes and was surprised when they bit me. Life is an ever evolving understanding of the world, and the less I’ve been able to trust people, the more I’ve acknowledged the way their eyes betray them. I used to believe that the saying that eyes were the window to the soul was foolish, but I think it’s because people have secret codes in how they speak and ignore obvious signals that are repeated by the masses.
I am a cynic and yet I am optimistic, I am painfully empathetic until something in me frays and I can’t be. I am an unloved child with a love for arson and have housed winter in the summer as well as been a greenhouse during heavy snow. People are contradictions, it must be a fact that’s learned and stuck to your teeth so you can remind yourself by running your tongue over the back of them. The lessons in my life were not easily learned – but like a stubborn rock shore against the sea, one thought remained with me.
What was wrong with me?
Everything, nothing, some pieces, most things – I implored the people closest to me in a desperate search for that answer. Only one of them, my therapist (unsurprisingly), made me realize something.
He said to me with a firm honesty that I prefer, “I don’t think you’re intolerable.”
.
.
.
Those words struck me more than they should have. “Why do you care so much about what they think? You don’t even like them, they’re not good people.”
How many times have I wanted simply to be acknowledged as something not being horribly wrong with me. I used to think I was like an apple that if you bit into, you’d find the core rotted. Why else would people hate me, after all, unless I deserved it? Especially my entire life.
I dislike the saying “there wasn’t something wrong with me but them.”
But, in my conversation with my therapist, who has worked with me since I was in 7th-8th grade, I acknowledged there was a kernel of truth to it. I will always acknowledge my actions and try to smooth the jagged, sharp edges of my pain, loneliness and trauma, as I refuse to perpetuate what has been done to me – that is simply my nature – but sometimes, hate from the masses is not about wrongness.
It’s about – “cowards.”
—
Two adults sit across each other, one worn from age and the other young but with eyes that still shine despite their darkness.
“Cowards…” They – I – startle as the word slips off my tongue, a repeat of what the man before them has pointed out. The man, Ara, nods.
Yeah.
“Really, how?”
“Because if they can’t handle you, that’s not a you problem. It’s them.” He speaks of empathy and kindness in the other person, a tendency to be too permissive with imbeciles. He is relieved when they bite back against the hands that strike them with sharp words where they are due. Do not tread on me, he wishes them to express more freely, or I will leave.
The words are a balm, an acknowledgement of not being inherently rotted. This is a person who has seen a kid cry, seen their anger and resentment, their despair and how they splinter and then snap and crunch under the pressure. He has watched their tendency towards lashing out and read about their panic attacks. But, he has also watched them grow, smooth their jagged edges and unclench their jaw even as their tongue bleeds. If an open wound is not the fault of the bearer, this man knows.
So, yeah. With a life represented by the tower and the chariot –
Fucking cowards.
