I am Not Impossible

I am Not Impossible

I am clinging to the memory of a failure right now.  
I am clinging to it for hope.  
It is a memory of staying at someone else's home, trying to be a very good guest, and failing, because I was trying to sleep, in their bed, and failing.

The bed was a charming nest of various favorite blankets... and I could not fall asleep with different textures on different parts of my body.  
I needed a single, smooth sheet against my body.  
And then I needed that sheet spread flat, so as to actually cover my whole body.
And then I needed that sheet tucked in, so that it kept covering the whole of my body when I moved over the night.
Then I could not sleep because of the different weights of the tangled blankets above the sheets, the different weights pressing differently on different parts of my body.
I needed to have the blankets spread so that each of them covered me evenly.
I needed to lose the twin-size blankets that were too narrow to make an even layer.
Then I couldn't sleep because, although I had even texture all over and even weight all over, there was no longer *enough* weight for me to relax.
And then... I needed to have the blankets all tucked in, so their weight didn't shift through the night.

And that...
after all that... 

...I could sleep!

We were astonished. 

By that point, not only was my host obviously indulgently humoring me, but I myself had become convinced that I was being "impossible", that my mind was going to keep on "fixating" on one triviality after another and my body was going to continue complaining for the sake of complaining to infinity and beyond.

But that was not true.  I needed what I needed, I needed all of what I needed, and I was in a situation that was many layers removed from what I needed.  It was that simple, and, it was that complicated.

The thing I remember most about the day, years later, that I learned that I was neurologically atypical-- the day so much of my life suddenly made sense for the first time-- was my boyfriend's incontrollable crying because now he was actually going to have to take my limits seriously.  
To quote Laurie Penny, "the hurt in their eyes when they realise you’re a real person is not something I ever want to see again."  She wrote that in "I Was a Manic Pixie Dream Girl", one of those lovely, life-saving pieces of writing that I cherish because I may not have written it, but I've certainly lived it.  (You think playing the ukelele is twee?  My legal name is Treebyleaf.  Welcome to twee on steroids.  I have to study books to learn to recognize normal the same way some other people on the spectrum need to study descriptions of facial movements to learn to recognize emotional expression.)

I still have to struggle with those around me and myself to believe in my own needs.  I still have to fight through layer after layer of very real wrongness to create any environment where I can function.  I still feel "impossible", and humored.

I still make it all worse, and more drawn out, for everyone. because I still approach every situation in which I find I cannot function by trying not to be a bother, by trying for the very least amount of change, adjustment after adjustment, instead of just coming in from the get-go insisting on setting things up in a way that I know will work from me.

It's been years since I learned what I need to sleep,
and I am still so tired out from it.