When I was a kid, people who worked with me would show me a picture of a smiling kid and say, “He is happy.”

And I would wonder how they knew so surely.

The correlation between smiling and happiness does not exist for me. Getting such deep emotion from one stock photo is truly bananas.

The emotional soup in my autistic body asks it to always find a fitting form of movement guaranteed to be the exact opposite of what best fits any focus and good social grace. Writing can help me attempt a better look at my scattered thoughts and allow me to painfully assess what pushes to the surface. I can better sort out all the emotions when I see my words on a page. 

Walking in an autistic body is for me like floating in a stew of feelings. Fury pushes past and anger bubbles loudly. Chunks of glee and love drift by and brush up against me. Awash in this jumbled goulash of sensation, I have no tether to ground me to my true self.

Feelings that lots of people find easy to identify – like hopeful or frustrated – are for me inextricably wound together into one pile of steaming hot commotion.

Having looked hard at understanding my internal feelings, I can say I take issue with people who claim to feel discrete emotions. How can happiness exist without sadness? How can calm exist without stress?

I think that false binaries abound in the world’s feelings about feelings.

Write down what you seem to feel as you read this blog. Are you able to tell me it is just one thing?

My guess is that you can’t.

Seeing true feelings sometimes means sewing emotions together to form a patchwork quilt. This art, the art of separating emotions, requires skill in which I struggle. We attempt to distill our emotions so we can easily answer when someone asks the really trite, “How are you?”

What is the answer when someone asks you? Fine? Good? What do those words say about our emotions? Do stressed out people say what they really feel? Sometimes I think all the world has lost touch with emotions. We move too fast and only brush up against our true feelings.

What we need to do is slow down and find someone who can help us do the work of sifting through all the messy sensations in our minds.

Emotions are messy. We need therapists to do this work.