The (Im)Possibility of Seeing

"Topography_Old Trauma and New" by Robb Kunz

By the end of these pages, you still won’t see me. But I hope, perhaps—I so dearly hope—you’ll better see yourself. For each word, each sentence I write is but a ray of light illuminating me, my life, the world within and through my eyes. To read them, then, is necessarily an act of refraction, the bending of my light through the prism of you.

We are all of us, after all, suns, the center of our own internal universes, each with our own cosmologies, all of us governed by our own internal physics, the set of algorithms—both inherited and consciously and unconsciously acquired—through which we parse and process our lives, our worlds, each other, and this world we share.

I am terrified to write these words, to invite you to read them, to see me as so many others have been invited to see me before—others who have hurt me, both by seeing and by failing to see.

For so long, I have desired—impossibly, as I now believe—nothing so much as to be seen, to be truly and fully understood, and yet I have feared that seeing just as I have feared not being seen, as I have feared the erasure inherent in both—the erasure and fear I have known each and every day of my life.

When I am beheld but not (fully) seen.

Not known or, perhaps, comprehended.

The realities of being me—of being a trans nonbinary, agender, and autigender demiwoman[1]; of being autistic, ADHD, disabled, and queer; Jewish, gray demisexual[2], and a survivor of a lifetime of complex trauma and PTSD—are continually subsumed, my lived experiences forever superseded by the assumed certainty that they are necessarily contained within your own.

Is your life contained within mine?

Could I understand what it is to be you by interpreting you, your life through the prism of me?

Would your answers be different if you didn’t know what you know about me?

I have made your supersession easy, abetted daily my own erasure. How could anyone know what I wouldn’t or couldn’t tell them? For 38 years, through unabated fear and trauma, I have chosen to hide, to mask, to approximate safety in the only ways I knew how. But invisibility—the invisibility of preemptive disappearance and of assimilation, of (often enforced) conformity—is not, in itself, safety, but merely a strategy that can, at times, allow certain dangers to pass.

And, while I will not denounce hiding[3] or entirely abandon it, I choose visibility as often as I can. I choose openness. I choose unmasking, which could just as truthfully be called radical vulnerability, the simple naming of my fear to write these words, my difficulty with small talk, the pain of loud spaces and how they hamper my capacity to be present and attentive (how, perhaps, in such loudness, we might continue our conversation outside or later—or maybe never if I don’t want to), or even the confusion I feel when I see a multitude of potential understandings without knowing which one you actually mean or how it makes me feel—this not-so-simple act of deeply seeing and sharing myself, of honoring, in words and in actions, my feelings and truths, even when this honoring demands hiding or egress, even when it demands a tactful or not so tactful seeking of safety, or else a claiming of space I might never have claimed before. 

Because, for nearly four, whole decades, I was continually distorted by my friends and my family, by teachers, acquaintances, strangers, and myself, ceding myself to their stories, to my story, to the story I learned from them, which insisted I didn’t deserve a voice, didn’t deserve to have feelings or have them known, didn’t even have a right to exist in a life, a society, a world in which people like me were never visible, which never seemed to contain my own reflection. 

I never knew I could be who I am, only that I couldn’t be who I was supposed to be, that merely trying made feel defective, abominable, inhuman.

But I, too, have been guilty of such acts of story blindness, of not seeing that others are living their own, unique stories that might not fit within my own.

We enforce conformity and supersede each others’ stories, each others’ realities as a means of seeking safety, of managing some real or perceived threat from our traumas, from the authority figures in our lives, from change, from difference, from novelty, religion, peer pressure, from disruptions to our beliefs/expectations/way of life/our understanding of ourselves, life, this universe and how and where we find belonging within it.

Which can be as simple as a parent’s emotional or sensory dysregulation in response to their child.

Which is, perhaps, to say that their inner child feels unsafe when their kid’s behavior recalls the trauma of their own parents’ responses to their childhood behaviors.

Which is to say that I sometimes find myself fearing for my child.

Which is to say that I freeze, that I feel overwhelmed, that I feel my parents’ fear, that I hear their anxiously raised or hushed voices whenever my four-year-old, say, spills her drink or makes a sticky mess at home or is overstimulated, melting down, or otherwise making vulnerable identities and behaviors explicit—and explicitly provoking the stares, the judgement of others—in public[4].

Which is to say that my empathy is misplaced.

Which is to say that I, the traumatized, could, if I raised my voice (which I, unfortunately, have done twice) or conveyed in hushed tones my parents’ fear and shame, bequeath my own trauma to my child like an heirloom, like the heirlooms that have already been passed down to me.

My trauma is often hard to source, to trace to specific moments. But that can sometimes be the nature of complex—which is to say multiple, which is to say repeated, sustained, and cumulative—trauma (and also, therefore, of the trauma of frequent or continuous supersession and its invalidation). It can be difficult to pin down, difficult to inhabit, difficult to understand from within or without, especially when it lacks, as mine seemed to, any overtly traumatic events as its cause, any of the things we think of when we think of trauma.

But it is not without its violence.

If trauma, to use one example of what we’d all consider trauma, is a singular event of being split with an axe, then complex trauma is several billion paper cuts, individually scored across millions or billions of distinct (and, often, distinctly unmemorable) times—across a lifetime of times, perhaps. There is violence in this repetition, violence in its aggregation, but, mostly, the violence is cumulative, felt in our internalizing of these cuts, of the messages they send, in the way they interact with our stories, the way they continually deconstruct and re-construct our meanings.

Until, eventually, every scratch becomes a paper cut, deeply deserved.

Until, finally, we become our paper cuts.

Until we are a paper cut.

Until that’s who we are in this world, bleeding the love and patience of those around us, freezing or fighting or flighting or fawning at every suggestion of paper, at every scrap that could lengthen or deepen or otherwise expand our never healing wounds—that could renew and, by renewing, enlarge our pain.

I do not mean to compare complex trauma to event-based trauma, to erase anyone else’s pain. But that is the problem with points of reference, with appealing to something one might understand to explain something one might not. Often, a point of reference becomes a point of comparison instead of a window of understanding.

Language itself is metaphor, a system of universal signifiers for particular meanings. And sometimes this particularity is lost.

Sometimes, appealing to the common or the known (or the thought to be known) normalizes the uncommon and unknown.

But for many years, I didn’t know how to preserve particularity in language (or, in many cases, find any language at all)[5], and so I would appeal to what I believed could or would be understood. And I’d make my language like the language of others. And they’d respond with an “Everybody goes through that” or an “Everybody feels sad.” But they don’t. And I don’t. In me, depression is not sadness but pain. Excruciating, mind-numbing, soul-devouring pain. And being told I’m just sad, just like everyone else, just like you, that my depression is normal, only compounds the devastation of my pain.

To compare suffering is to diminish us all.

Part of what it is to be autistic in this world, to be an autistic person living alongside allistic (i.e., non-autistic) people is to be misinterpreted again and again and again, to be read into someone else’s story, seen through a lens that often wildly distorts us, our words, our actions, our intentions, our very existence.

To have the entire burden of others’ misinterpretations, their supersessions placed upon us, as if communication, understanding, and empathy weren’t necessarily two-way streets.

To have our own lived experiences invalidated, normalized, minimized, erased.

To be told that what I feel is what you feel is what everybody feels.

To have others declare that how my body receives and responds to stimuli isn’t actually possible.

To be forced to mask for them; to ignore the alarms of my nervous system, the pain of so much stimuli, of sensory input from within and without; to pretend to understand unwritten social conventions and statements I do not (e.g., do you want a real answer to your question or were you “just being conversational?” do I risk saying too much or too little? and—oh god!—I’ve said too much again); to hypervigilantly monitor my speech, my facial expressions, my body language, my T-Rex arms; to hold my entire body painfully still; to communicate and outwardly appear as unaffected or as socially clued in as those around me, who experience stimuli in a different, less incessantly blaring way than I do, and to do so simply for everyone else’s comfort at great cost to me.

(And so what if I preemptively protect myself by wearing noise canceling headphones or earplugs? so what if I soothe my nervous system by stimming, by rocking my body forward and back, by twisting my torso side to side, by wiggling my shoulders or biting my lips or bouncing my sitting leg or repeating a breathy, “bup bup bup bup bup bup bup bup,” mostly as quietly as I can (and for all the soothing sensations it creates)? so what if I make as much or as little eye contact as is comfortable for me in any given moment? why are such things so uncomfortable for others? why is taking care of my body so rude?)

And then to be or feel othered for masking for you or infantilized for stimming for myself, to be assumed to be immature, overly sensitive, rude, aloof, asocial, difficult, histrionic, robotically pedantic, and so many other things, when I’m merely existing as unobtrusively as possible within the given constraints of my sensory and bodily environments[6], when the truth is that my nervous system, the way I think, feel, process stimuli, and even how I communicate differs from accepted “reality.”

For me, it’s as if my body’s a vessel for the world’s misery and pain, my skin a permeable membrane, absorbing others’ energies and emotions, penetrated continuously by textures and smells and lights and tastes and sounds that never fade into the background (the itch of my clothing against my skin, the thrum of the air conditioning, the drip of a faucet), cumulatively overwhelmed by everything I experience with my senses (the flash of an angry tone across a restaurant, across a painfully bright room, where there’s a conversation I can hear more clearly than the one I’m actually having), by minutiae that neurotypical brains can often attenuate to and filter out, while mine cannot (thrum, thrum, drip, drip, thrum, bright!, thrum, drip, itch, itch, flash), and by the feelings in my sensory storehouse of a body, which are often precipitated by such stimuli (thrum, thrum, itch, thrum, drip) and which I often perceive as seemingly inexplicable bodily sensations I cannot understand (as my skin crawls, demanding without satisfaction to be shed, snakelike, or flayed, as my whole body buzzes like a swarm of angry bees, as it all pulsates electrically through me like middle schoolers spreading gossip, reverberating like echoes echoing echoes of some unknown but ever cascading shock, which can, all of which, cause yet more inexplicable bodily sensations), and which all, always, lingers for hours or days before getting processed (thrum, thrum, drip, buzz, drip, bright!, itch), creating a continual, utterly overwhelming backlog of new and old sensations, severed both from their origins and their meanings (thrum, thrum, drip, buzz, shed, whisper, whisper, drip, shock, flay), overstimulating and exhausting me, displacing me from my now inhospitable bodily habitat, eventually marooning me in a vapid, utterly lifeless bout of dissociation, of erasure both violently violating and self-protective, in a state of disconnected nothingness, a shelter from life’s unceasing sensory onslaught, where I can barely think or stand up and don’t even feel alive, in a period of autistic burnout, rife for further distortion, minimization, invalidation, erasure, grief.

And yet, as hard as this world makes it to be autistic, as much as society disables me, I’m thankful that I am. And proud. This depth of feeling, this sensitivity, this sense of being permeable—these truths of my nervous system, of that lens through which I think, process emotion, and communicate—are also a great joy that greatly enrich my life and, often, the lives of others.

When I can feel, deeply, what they’re feeling and mirror it with an empathy of presence and togetherness.

When I can sit and hyper-focus, not on an overabundance of sensory stimuli, but on a surfeit of complex information, on its synthesis into new connections, new understandings, new words.

When I’m overwhelmed with joy or love or excitement or passion or care.

When I am not constrained by what is, what’s expected, what’s normative and can re-vision the world anew.

But, mostly, I still don’t know how to be different, how to be seen or understood, how to exist in this story blind world as myself.

Except to be vulnerable enough to name my feelings and their truths.

Except to be brave enough to repeatedly proffer my innermost self, to share a me that can never be fully seen.

Except to create space, through such acts of radical vulnerability, for others to share themselves, too—to create space for the sorts of authentic and authentically vulnerable connections that cannot exist in silence.

These words are your invitation: join me if you dare.

For a long time, long before I came out, before I even had the language to come out, before I knew my differences to be anything other than impossible, men made me feel small, insignificant, defective in my presumed maleness.

And the more my endogenous testosterone drove me out of my body, the more I shrunk from the world, and the more my cis- male peers mocked me for it, for all the ways I wasn’t like them.

In middle school, high school, and college, I was called a fop, a woman[7], overly sensitive, too nice, and too much; made to feel lesser for my failure to take up space, for my discomfort around and confusion about their rambunctious, moshing, often harassing horseplay and (sometimes sexual) “pranks”[8]; dismissed as thin-skinned and ridiculous for refusing to participate in a performance featuring the misogynistic rewriting of lyrics; presumed weak for being quiet, shy, hesitant, and as invisible as I could make myself or else for crying or otherwise showing the depths—and existence—of my emotions; benched between innings for wimpishly whining (i.e., considerately asking) for a bandaid, for a way of containing my finger’s bleeding, when, in truth, I was unbothered by all but its spread.

In a group of men, I was always alone, diminished to nothing against the boisterousness of their collective maleness. Like a snail thrown into a mosh pit, as if my life were some grand, cosmic joke.

I often feel like that, like I’m in a Kafka story, only nothing so inexplicable has yet happened except for the mere fact that I exist, except for my constant expectation that I’ll suddenly, metaphorically, be arrested, put on trial, and executed for the “crime” of being trans and autistic, of being queer, Jewish, and a gray demisexual and yet, somehow, still alive. Except for how I’ve always perceived myself through others’ eyes, for how their words and actions have regarded me, for how they’ve made me feel.

Once, a male boss and our male coworkers got annoyed when they asked what part of a woman’s body I was most attracted to, and I truthfully, repeatedly insisted, her face, her eyes, even as they demanded the “real” answer, as if I hadn’t understood the question. And after I was bullied into giving another, still honest but less true answer that didn’t fit within their conceptions of beauty—curvy hips and thick thighs, which I often have an aesthetic attraction to and which, as I told them, hoping to achieve their satisfaction, I desired to have wrapped around my lower back, pulling me close—they reacted like liking thick thighs or the thought of being in their grasp was the funniest, most ridiculous thing they’d ever heard and mocked me for days.

Maturing into a society in which men are expected to be voraciously sexual, to experience an ever present and relentless sexual attraction, when I did not, forever unmoored me from the world. I doubted constantly my less virile but shyly curious libido, my inability to look at a woman as a sexual object, and, deeming those things impossible, assumed my aesthetic attraction to women, my curiosity about sex, and my desire for intimacy, for closeness were sexual, were what sexuality was.

Our social world revolves around sex, and I do not. I simply never understood how I was supposed to know I wanted to sleep with someone simply because of the way they look, when their physical body is only one part of the whole, when I am so rarely aroused by a body alone. But whenever I expressed any part of this, I was accused of being politically correct, of withholding, of lying.

And then I remember that I, too, have been story blind to others’ differences from me, superseding their experiences of sexual attraction, unable to see what they see, to feel what they feel, long assuming, even though I was clearly different, that their sexual desire must be like mine, that I could map my libido onto theirs because—like so many things, like gender, like neurotype, like seemingly everything—desire, in public discourse, in media, in society has but a single story that all individual stories must necessarily fit within, even (and, perhaps, especially) when they don’t.

Yes, part of what it was—and what it still sometimes is—for me to be closeted and masked, to hide myself, to suffer trauma in silence was a lack of language, a normative assumption of binaries and normativities that clearly didn’t include me but seemed to be all there were, was a supersession so continuous and from such a young age that I never believed my own reality.

And so I exercised what autonomy I could, sought what safety I could by trying to be who and what and how others’ told me I truly, necessarily was—by trying to be, to exist, to survive.

I survived.

And so I ask you now, truly, impossibly, to see me. To see me and, by your refraction, by my rainbow, know yourself.

Because impossibility is the abandonment of hope, the hopelessness of possibility,

And I choose hope[9].

I choose radical vulnerability.

We all deserve to be suns in each other’s eyes.

Here, I lay myself bare.

Do your best.

Distort me as you will.

[1] i.e., I am partially a woman, partially outside the gender binary, fluid between womanhood and having no sense of gender at all, and I understand gender, my gender—like every aspect of my existence—only through the lens of being autistic (as well as experience a partially gendered sense of sameness with my fellow autistic people, despite how different we all are)

[2]  It is exceedingly rare for me to experience sexual attraction in the absence of emotional connection, and, even when I do, it’s largely meaningless for me without emotional, intellectual, energetic, and aesthetic attraction (all of which I experience with far greater frequency than sexual attraction)

[3] a daily necessity for me and so many others

[4] which for me, as a child, was often publicly identifying myself as Jewish over my parents’ staunch objections

[5] Truthfully, I’m still not sure I know how. I’m still not sure, even now, to what extent such particularity is even possible. And yet I seek it all the same.

[6] Which might look panicked, which might see me covering my ears or cradling my head in my arms and crying from the sensory pain (a meltdown, as it manifests outwardly), which might see me distant, quiet, hard to engage, which might see my response be terse or overly loquacious or confused, not understanding the disconnect between rules and expectations and the behavior I’m seeing or being asked to engage in, which might see me go rigid in body and mind, unable to bend, which might see me unable to speak or even move (a shutdown, as it manifests inwardly), which might to you look like extreme, physical slowness, like you can actually see the cognitive dissonance of each individual choice, each step, each moment. Or I might appear to you totally fine, chatty, witty, social.

[7] the joke, as it turned out, was on them

[8] And reminded, always, how disconnected I felt from my body, how defective my disembodied self felt when I sensed their own budding virility or witnessed their dominance play, their derogating jokes, the horrible things they’d say and do to each other, like seeing them, over my objections, dip their scrotums onto the sleeping lips of someone with lower social status or wipe their penis on my bed to “claim” it and bully me into sleeping on my own floor

[9] I do not speak of the kind of impossibility that is a human growing wings, but that of experiencing their flight, of inventing it here on the page, of creating that real world impossibility through the abstractions of my words, through metaphors born from hopes not abandoned.

About the author

Phosphor Emery Alethes (She/They) is a trans and autistic writer and actor. She lives with her daughter and her dog in Eugene, OR, where she is a board member of Wordcrafters in Eugene. They have studied fiction at The Evergreen State College and Portland Community College and are currently at work on a memoir in the shape of essays/fiction hybrid. This is her first publication.

about the Artist

Robb Kunz hails from Teton Valley, Idaho. He received his MFA in creative writing from the University of Idaho. He currently teaches writing at Utah State University and is the Art and Design Faculty Advisor of Sink Hollow: An Undergraduate Literary Journal. His art has been published in Peatsmoke Journal, Red Ogre Review, Fatal Flaw Literary Magazine, and New Delta Review. His art is upcoming in Suspended Magazine, Glassworks Magazine, and Bare Hill Review.