Imagine Autism

Imagine that you suddenly had a superpower - one day you woke up and found that you could literally hear people's thoughts. Everywhere you go, you'd hear what people are thinking, like they are speaking it to you.

When you walk into a room full of people, you'd hear their thought all at once. Like they are all trying to talk to you at the same time.

Your brain tries to focus on a few people's thoughts, but you find yourself unable to filter out all the noise. You find big crowds incredibly tiring because you cannot focus in all that noise. It sucks the energy out of you, like you're perpetually in a dance club trying to do your math homework. You spend most of your time indoors, going out only where strictly needed.

But you keep on trying, because you understand that you need to control this "noise" in order to function in society. After a few years of trying, your brain finally manages to filter out most of the noise except those who are within a few meters of you.

But big crowds still tire the hell out of you. You wished you could hear the thoughts of exactly who you want to hear.

But it seems that the sensory perception of thought doesn't work like that. It seems that your brain needs to work very hard to do all that filtering work, to remove what you do not need to hear. It's not like your senses can "target" someone - it's more like your brain functions like a superhuman firewall that monitors and filters every single piece of information coming in to decide if it's better you hear something, or you do not. If your brain had been doing something other than filtering, you probably would have been pretty intelligent. It kinda sucks.

You fight so hard just to function normally. Until one morning.

One morning you woke up and found that all the voices were gone. Not one single voice.

It seems that your brain had found it impossible to filter out single thoughts, and that all this filtering was a waste of energy. It seems that your brain has decided that being unable to tap into this super-power was better for you - it seems like your brain has given up fighting. At least you could now function like an ordinary person.

You wished you could keep some of that super power, but it doesn't work that way. But you do feel very relieved that it's all over. It's something you spent a lot of your life fighting, but not something you want to talk about. It's like an experience that made you so much more, yet you would be deemed so much less if you even hinted at it.

But sometimes you wonder, if there is someone in the world out there, who could live with having such super powers, hearing every single person's thoughts and responding to all their voices where nobody else could, living such impossibly extraordinary lives that you know deep inside you have given up trying to achieve.