Your Spooky Neurodivergent Friend-Group is Out There

Friendship is fickle. Sometimes they last your whole life, going unquestioned like the existence of the bottom seat of a chair, but usually most, if not at all humans, will experience a sort of "break" from people. Eventually, looking like a relatively lonesome period, whatever lonely means subjectively; holding space for people whose bodies, actions, and feelings are misunderstood, devalued, and placed into dangerous situations by people under the names of "caregiver", "community member", or "loved one."

As someone who experiences the ebb and flow of friendship, either on purpose or a tragic loss due to the inaccessibility to adequately meet each other's needs, sharp words exchanged, or just a general, neutral incompatibility to see each other past trauma reminders, I know how the cravings come. I know how the tempting face of social shame speaks to you as whispers beneath the floorboards. A slithering hand, offering an already soaked tissue that's been marked and marked by an isolated river. Wetness, belonging to a stream, not yet escaping to the ocean. Rejected waters, still trapped. Bubbling beneath the moss-licked bars, looking up at you from the neighborhood sewer drain.

What does friendship have to do with autism?

Well, what does it mean to be a human, dreaming up a perfect connection with a brain viewed as socially corrupted? Whose natural development of protection, stealthy sewed over the constructed label of "socially inadequate" by a society that far more encourages transactional, networking bonds, on the smooth slab of surgical metal? The flat, cold surface of a hedge funder's office window? And you, described to be a sledgehammer, are told that your mere presence is a danger to glass? That your conditions for care are too sharp, unyielding for casual, unmarked traditions: man's right to have certain commitments.

And yet, that's not at all entirely true; there are people out there, hanging onto your promise of you. Your face, either joyful or beautifully tolerated, held close to their chest, as they carry a book that's haunted by your future. A glimpse of you, seen in the striking, fog-washed mirror. A passing of you witnessed in the refrigerated parts of a grocery store.

But where are the people, the ones that find you wonderful? They are there, of course. In the places most easily reached by you - what does that mean? To be honest, it means whatever you'd like: whatever hugs you dearest. Whatever spoons the soup of your existence back into your mouth, when your heart is too broken and your stomach is too full.

They exist in the trenches of interest. The gullies between events to shared numbers. The low, moated paths that tunnel themselves around pages of the internet, to someone's foxhole. A safe place in their messages.

In order to find others, there must first be a finding of you. There must first be a priority to your own, little jollies in life; there are hundreds of cases, fictional or not, where a gaggle of kids comes to together under the scope of a mystery. Finding a demon. Committing a crime.

Where would Scooby's Mystery Inc. and the Loser's Club from IT be if they all stopped their continuous enjoyment of each other and examined it? Pester and poke at it, till it was like the world's version of camaraderie: full, yet filled with nothing. Spoiled by its un-fun.

My theory is that when people are bound to the foundation of general curiosity, they have the ability to flower with some of the most rewarding, beautifully un-advantageous ways of making and being a friend; I can't promise everyone will like you. But what I can, and will encourage, is for you to start at the place of pursuing. That you find, and explore, what soil you'd like to develop future friendships upon - mine, for example, just tends to be spooky.