Social Inclusion blog by Aly...

Sticky tape, cardboard, some wool strands for hair and a pencil to draw a face - this is how to make friends. I can make friends, hundreds of them - but I cannot keep them.

 

Many turn out to discriminate against me and bully. Some don’t, they keep trying but eventually give up. I don’t get the relationship of friendship and there are no set rules.

Rule no. 1

Come for a cup of tea every two weeks, for the next 15 years, and we will sit in the greenhouse and talk about different varieties of tomato plants. I could be everything that a friend needs to be - but something more important than friendship will get in the way. Something that, in essence, is not more important than friendship: a puzzle, a painting, a piece of music, a pre-occupation with words, an obsession with car engines - all these things sit, like limpets, around my skull.

No!  - they are my skull.

 

I juggle the need for companionship and friendship with the fear of failure. Based on experience and the, seeming, inevitable - I rip and tear before it breaks. In my world I believe that I can do anything, And, apart from three things, I can. The first thing that I cannot do - is to  experience the world as society demands that I should.

Secondly, I cannot control the random sigh, laugh, yelp or sneeze of the person in the queue behind me.

 

Thirdly, I cannot fly.

I am in a box, listening to dust.

I am in a room, softly feeling my own breath stroke my wrist.  

With the profound, multiple, overt and subtle discriminations of my every day - It is difficult to feel that I belong. Society appears to need me to fit in, even if it kills me.

I can be included, but only if I lie and say “I know that tree how you know that tree”.

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