Charlotte Amelia Poe

you will see everybody else and find yourself lacking

that people are cruel for the sake of being cruel

you will push yourself further than you thought you could survive, and you will survive.

you will survive.
you will survive.

please, if you do feel you or someone you know is autistic, chase that diagnosis and don’t give up until you have it. Don’t give up after you have it either. Autism, unfortunately, is a life of never giving up.

There’s this tiny part of me, often buried, that screams that I need to go.

It’s just—frustrating—for want of a better word, to see you move around this world so easily, while we struggle every day just to be perceived as ‘normal’.

Isolation is a big part of autism, and I will talk about it more later, but that was when it really began for me. I didn’t hang out with friends, and when family members or family friends came round I would go to my room—the only people I saw were my mum, my dad, Rosie and Joe.

I wanted an escape route. I didn’t want to carry on. For the first time, I actively wanted to die.

I was growing ever more isolated, retreating to my room and not leaving the house at all. It was the beginning of my agoraphobia, what I refer to as my Lost Years. They would stretch from the age of seventeen to my late twenties. It’s really upsetting to realise that I lost an entire decade to my anxiety and depression, but that’s what happened.

It’s really hard to put into words what it’s like to spend every single day indoors doing nothing. I know that sounds like blessed relief to some people, like, how lucky am I that I had nothing that needed to be done and no responsibilities, but the truth is that it’s so incredibly isolating and damaging to your mental health that I wouldn’t wish it upon anybody.