Salut Papa By James Bordeaux

Movements from and since our call on the 16^th of April, 2026

I think I’m incredibly autistic – insofar as that is a word that usefully fits the unique fuzziness of my subjective experience to better it. I’ve always known – we’ve always known – that I am very different from other people around me. To begin, I conceptualised myself for a long time as existing in two simultaneous and separate modes. To bring this system, conceived in adolescence to navigate myself and the world, now into adulthood, I make reference to the mythic inspiration behind the musical My Fair Lady.

I am Galatea’s statue – of rock and stone that is beautiful according to its own natural rules and lattice structures. Cold, rigid, brilliantly calculated yet soft and supple, warm at times. I am Pygmalion’s love, so in fearful awe of people that I cannot help but become through the stone fleshly. I learn to feel and think as others do. I am not just the growing knowledge of myself; rather, I am also added to and transformed by the knowledge of, and engagement I have with, others who are not like me. Not solely in my personality or beliefs, as you say, is part of life, but truly the very shape of my thought, how it is generated, is changed. I am rock and man, neither makes me lesser or more, and I can never understand myself as just one or the other - I am a statue made living that was always so.

It is for these reasons that the word masking never really felt like it suited me. It never felt like a lie or something that I put on – being social was part of a holistic personal project that took a lot of thinking and effort, but somehow was also so natural. Therefore, as you pointed out, the fact that I’ve always had friends and have always been very good at making them, much better than you, you’d say, does not necessarily mean that I am not autistic. Not that you ever denied such a possibility, which I am incredibly grateful for. It just comes in many different forms, and we are always learning. In the social aspect, for me, it’s as if I could close my eyes and visualize a brand-new dance while already doing it – a self-structuring formation in instantaneous tandem with its execution so brilliantly smooth that it looks haphazard.

Admittedly, I can’t keep up anymore. I feel tired, depressed, and ill. I’ve started to lag more as I might with dreadfully high ping – the delay between the online server and my user inputs – while gaming. I think that’s made it more obvious for us to notice.

To give you another image, I turn to cars. Learning to drive has been a bit of a healing experience for me. I think it’s the closest I can get to explaining society and people to you, and why I find them very difficult.

When you drive, you first learn a set of rules. You then go on the road, and you realise that no one follows these rules very well. You feel betrayed and confused because people aren’t making sense, and that is dangerous and unpredictable. So, you suffer, a lot.

In life, you realise that there are rules for how to engage with people, but it’s all so… messy. Still, there is a sense that something is there. Unfortunately, you quickly learn that you are punished for asking why the others are or aren’t so, because you are in effect asking, excuse me, sir, how am I to be human. Worse, you are revealing that you don’t know.

Imagine how silly I felt when I forgot how an equal intersection’s priority worked with a car on each lane, after 42 lessons! After moments like these, you learn to ask mostly in ways where you can shield your ignorance. Plausible deniability and equivocations are wondrous things, I tell you. Inference is my white cane. 

I don’t know why or where this comes from, but for me, I realise that there are few worse things than thinking you understood and being called out on never having done so, or simply being unable to do what others can to their level. I’m trying very hard not to do or feel that way anymore. Still, on the question of humanity, you quickly learn never to ask, because most people have very mean answers for children, and children remember. 

And as I remember, through painful and stressful trial and error, as people judge you or shout, as you stop the car so you can spontaneously break down in mental mantras of I am no longer human while weeping next to your driving instructor, you eventually get good at driving. You can improvise, play around a bit, make it your own and have fun with it. Therefore, society, as I used to engage with it for a long time, is a system that everyone has a different version of, itself approximating a common system of rules – a monolith that we all say is there but that I could never see, but still feel the force of.

The systems that brought me to where I am today had their effects on me, good or bad. I didn’t know how to be or react. I went with what worked, whatever I and those around me judged that to be in every instance of my life. Now I see the (dis)unity of vision I once had, of imagined purpose or mode of existence, has become painfully reflexive. Therefore, before and behind me, I permanently see a plethora of paths. But among them all is something very hard and narrow.

You have told me how upset you get when I speak like an academic to you, that it is complicated and not good for conversation. I laugh with embarrassment, because you are right – I’m just too excited at my newfound knowledge and my need to share. Yet, last we spoke, you had also asked me to explain what I mean when I say I am autistic because I hadn’t made it clear. You said I should especially work through art – which you say lets me put into witness that which I may not be able to otherwise.

I say this because I have given you images and metaphors, systems and explanations. They have to be incredibly complicated because I am complicated, or perhaps worded better, they seem so because there is a certain novel-ness to me again, despite our beautiful 21 and a half years of family. Even so, they are still superficial models - a rough approximation of who I am. 

A big difference between people and driving is that though both are incredibly context-dependent, only one has a book I can memorize in due time. The other has me born behind the wheel and already playing catch-up with Michael Schumacher, none the wiser of how I got here. Social ability is a dance that I am good at, still, this is not to say that I have never snagged my dress on a nail I never saw, felt ugly and hid in the bathroom. In fact, it is a very common and trusty tool in my repertoire. And yes, though I am a Pymalic-Galatean complex, I really am just the person you see before you. Eventually, the error adds up into so large of a cloud that I can’t see who I was trying to observe or understand anymore – my friends, myself, the world.

My life’s folly has been overly thinking of everyone and myself through these systems. Do not get me wrong, they never stop being useful. Still, in truth, the only thing that you can really do to understand someone or yourself is to live with them. And living is something that is experienced, intimate, and messy and really painful and confusing.

I don’t want you to make the same mistake. It would only hurt your attempts to help me and my attempts to ask for it if we reduced my existence to something shallower through writings or art ad infinitum. In a sentence, I worry you’ll get hung up on my explanations rather than be with me in the moment as I am.

I wish, and I mean it from my heart, that you would listen to me a bit more clearly and engage with me better for who I am – to really enter into me. And though it is a two-person process, of me opening up and you learning, at the end of the day, there is nothing I can do to make you or tell you how to do that. You just have to pay attention to my being, even more so than in speech or writing. Our aim is to live among each other, explanations are supplementary, so help me let be.

I’ve always known – we’vealways known – that I am very different from other people around me. I don’t know if you realise just how much I took pride and shame in that, even I hadn’t. There’s a lot we have to learn and unlearn about me for me to be able to start living more happily, and I would like to do that with you, even if it is hard.

I’m really scared, Papa, and a hug won’t do anymore. I feel so cruel, as a son, to ask my parent that I want to be loved when I know you try your best and continue to do so. I hope that when you read this, you know that you love me – good father that you are – and that I know it too. Please, just hold me.