My Autistic, Dyslexic Journey to Myth.
She is not the type of autistic, sensitive person who stays silent in the dark. She dances at parties, laughing until the world turns into a turning, swirling kaleidoscope, too bright, too loud, until the sparkles of sensation spill into tears. Her mind hums like an engine caught between wonder and exhaustion, tracing thoughts that twist through their own labyrinth.
She can no longer remember the age she first read The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, only that she was a child, hungry for meaning. She still reads it now, eyes caught on noetic, that word between mind and knowing, between idea and being. She has always wondered what connects thought to the world, how truth feels when it moves through the body.
The days when philosophy grows too burdensome, she turns to W.B. Yeats to his haunted Irish landscapes and the tender ache of old words full of desire and mystery. I remember those poems, she says, how they sang me to sleep, how they told me that there was still magic in being alive.
Me? I’m a Myth.
She is also dyslexic. They once told her she would not, could not, write. But who could resist a body that feels like hers when stories unfold like films behind her eyes, and the words, however unruly, still find their way to her hand?
Her mind is a palace, intricate, echoing, full of locked doors and bright rooms. It can be fragile at times, trembling under the weight of too much light or sound. Yet even in its fractures, she builds beauty, turning the noise of thought into something that resembles myth.
She wonders about her body and her desire; about the strange ways intensity becomes both pleasure and pain. Is it normal, she asks, to feel aroused when the world overwhelms me? Perhaps it is simply the body’s wild way of saying I am here. I am alive.
Now, at forty-five, she has settled on the Scottish islands, a place she was told would never be possible. So many said no. So many things were meant to stay out of reach. And yet, she did it anyway. The sea sings against the edges of her life now, and she writes, she paints, she breathes.
She is me, unboxing herself one experience at a time. I create from the threshold, where the seen and unseen overlap, and emotion becomes its own language. Every autistic meltdown I experience is a heroic journey that becomes a myth to write about.
Elke's Heart 