To be “heard” is to be visible, to be acknowledged as valued and appreciated.

Today is the 55th birthday of my incredibly articulate late-diagnosed autistic son.  Today he posted about marking the completion of his having to date traveled 32,120,000,000 miles around the sun.

His writing is thoughtful, moving, honest. But between his autism and what looks like is going to be diagnosed as a bad case of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, the only place he can hope to be heard is over the internet. He really needs to write his autobiography, but that’s a challenge I don’t think he can find the “spoons” to master.
He  ends his post with this final poignant statement:

Thirty-two trillion miles is a long way to travel, and that doesn’t even include the miles accounted for by Earth’s rotation, let alone the rotation of our solar system around the galactic focus. That’s a lot of mileage I’ll be accruing even as my autistic and myalgic fatigue increasingly keeps me confined within a one-mile radius here in downtown St. Johns.

The passage of every mile, be it on foot or on orbit, subtracts a portion of life. I’ve already traveled a considerable portion of the way toward my death, and now I’m closing in on the reality that I mostly will move only as the planet carries me around the sun. So, then, maybe all of this is why I’m here, once again writing into the great and yawning abyss of the web: as my real geographies contract, perhaps I’m reaching—flailing, really—toward those ethereal, untouchable geographies.

For now, anyway. Until I quit on it again, or everything else up and quits on me. Which, at some point, it will, and must. As it will, and must,  for everyone.

So it goes.

Here we go again.

Happy Birthday, Bix. I wish I had the magic that could take away your pain –existential and otherwise.