As a child I was convinced I was an alien.
I had been transplanted onto this orbiting rock called Earth to collect data on human behavior that evaded my understanding. The family I was placed into had no idea there was anything amiss. Sure, it was strange when my first word was uttered two years after the “normal” stage for toddlers, but there were hundreds of explanations before the conclusion of aliens. When the brother would laugh in my face and say I was switched at birth and didn’t belong in his house, I worried he knew more than he was letting on. Each time we argued caused a flurry of nerves within me, frightened that he would blow my cover and my mission would be a failure.
There was a spaceship somewhere that I never had to send any reports to because it was connected to the cellular makeup of my brain. Everything I saw, they saw. Everything I knew, they knew. And everything I didn’t understand–the complexities of human emotions and relationships, all the unwritten rules of Florida’s rural society, and why this deity named God really hated me–they were able to make sense of.
The mothership saw through my eyes the pastor at the podium raging against queers and gender confused monsters with spit flying from his yellowed teeth, and my alien species agreed with my innermost thoughts that the man may be a bit insane. Of course, I had to play the part of a good little girl with palms together and prayers spilling from my cracked lips in the human languages of English and Spanish (for an alien brain, it was difficult to switch from one to the other based on what specimen was in front of me, but I managed).
There was an alien sitting for each four hour service every sabbath, dressed in itchy dresses that made them want to let their natural talons rip through their nail beds and destroy the fabric. Their sharpened teeth hiding in their gums screamed for release, hungry for the throats of preachers spewing poison onto the congregation. When forced onto their knees to wash the feet of the church elders they wondered how the humans would react to their true form: a genderless, incomprehensible creature, palming dirty water onto their wrinkled skin.
I told all this to the psychiatrist at my autism evaluation at twenty-one years old, watching him hum and write in his notebook with scribbled notes. He was a nice man who made sure to catch himself when using the wrong pronouns for the entity sitting before him. It was reasonable that a meager human mind would slip up when faced with an alien, so I forgave him.
It is a common symptom, he told me, for autistic individuals to feel disconnected from conceived notions largely accepted by their fellow (hah!) humans. Things like gender, religion, and emotions are difficult for me to understand. But it wasn’t my fault, he said. My brain just isn’t wired like the rest–but not because I am an alien from a far away planet connected to a spaceship collecting information from my sensory inputs to implement into their masterplans.
The psychiatrist handed me an eleven page assessment ending with a list of diagnoses. Autism Spectrum Disorder, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, and Major Depressive Disorder. He had also written a note on religious trauma, but my eyes skimmed past it.
A part of me felt like a sheet had been lifted from its stifling grip on my life. Another part of me stares at my reflection in mirrors and wonders if this is just another step in convincing the humans around me that I am one of them. Perhaps, for the most critical intelligence that the mothership required, even I had to be convinced.
So I put on my clothes and make sure to brush my teeth and take my medication and pull on my binder and hook my keychain to my belt and go to my part-time job filleting fish for rich snobs. I make an effort to keep up my friendships and call my parents and message my siblings and post pictures of my coffee and books and the scenery and selfies where I look masculine enough to not hate the body I’m in.
Because maybe I’m just a person with an alternatively operating mind going through the motions like every other human on Earth. But maybe, just maybe, there is a spaceship somewhere in the ether filled with beings pouring over reports giddily, overjoyed at how covert I have gone in this world.
