Another Neurodivergent Queer Writes A Blog!

28 October 2024
Lucca Daniel Green

As this rock is shattered
and I
would make it whole
if I
could with means unknown,

just as accretions linger
matching even my own when
these wounds leave scars—
just so make us whole,
all the parts divided healed

I have a weird thing about broken rocks, a kind of compulsion. I really want to make them whole again. I find as many pieces as I can, and then I figure out how they went together before they fell apart. It’s absolutely thrilling to me! The rush when things snap into place? It’s lush.

Isn’t it fascinating the way people externalize their own inner work like this?

The Handyman on Bob’s Burgers saved two halves of a waffle maker, along with hella junk, because he watched his parents fight and wanted them to be happy together—“that makes you the waffle!”

Me? I’m always trying to join elements that appear to be disparate into a solid whole. Foremost, my Self as a single entity rather than one shredded into many by traumas.

Where I noticed this integrative urge the clearest was with groups of friends. Why couldn’t my friends all be friends? It used to baffle me. Well… lol… I’m not friends with only one type of person, and church girls and emo girls don’t necessarily mix. I have friends who are devoutly religious, friends who are radical atheists, friends who don’t care about religion; friends with money, friends with none, and friends who pretend they have none; friends who dance, friends who watch dancers, and friends who hate the idea of dancing; friends who abhor country music, friends who listen to only country music, friends who dabble in everything, friends with obsessions for other genres, friends who define themselves for their eclectic music; friends in the desert, friends near lakes, friends on farms…. I mean I could go on for hours about the divisions between the groups of my friends. The only thing that connects us all is neurodivergence, but I didn’t realize that until a couple years ago. Back then I used to try to bring different groups of my friends together occasionally, but none of them ever stuck, like these rocks that refuse to stick together again.

But not all rocks are homogeneous to begin with. Not all rocks are the same rock. Some are layered by precious materials, others are conglomerates. For example, Unakite is composed of feldspar (pink), epidote (green), and quartz (clear to milky white). Many rocks even seem to have companions: malachite and chrysocolla, for example, or silver and gold.

It’s all a sort of puzzle. And I love a good puzzle. All the better if it’s three dimensional. Way better if it’s a living puzzle with autonomous pieces like a social group, a family, or a society.

Somehow we need to realize that we as Americans but most importantly we as a global species are like Unakite. Quartz is nice, epidote is beautiful, feldspar is neat, but all three come from and themselves together compose a single whole, just like each of us exist individually but only experience our existence within a single heterogeneous (that is, diverse) whole. Maybe feldspar doesn’t like epidote, but they love quartz who loves epidote, so they make it work. Most all straight guys used to loathe me as a matter of performing their identities. But once they were dating my friends? Suddenly I was alright, tolerable, even occasionally interesting. We need to realize we’re already a species like Unakite. And anyway recognize that those shattering our human rock do so for their own personal enrichment through a system of exploitation called capitalism. We must name the disease. As Sarah Gunning sings, “let’s sink this cap’list system in the darkest pits of hell.”