You are walking to school in the dead middle of winter. The sun isn’t even up yet. There are no hills to complain about to future grandchildren though. Nice try. The walk is 10 minutes max, 5 minutes if you power walk. You want the walk to be over quickly and you want it to last forever. You love the crunch of newly fallen snow on the asphalt but you hate the extra layers piled up on your body to keep you warm. You feel so perfectly alone in the world when it is this early and this cold, but the upcoming demand of socialization threatens your autonomy every step closer to that building. 

Your nose is starting to freeze but you can’t wrap anything around your face because your breath will fog up your glasses and make the scarf wet. You’d rather deal with chapped lips all a day than a wet scarf for 8 minutes. You have 15 different flavors of Lip Smackers in your purse anyways. You buy one every time you feel sad. Also your friend Slurpy keeps eating them. You have to stay stocked up. 

You’ve just passed the church you used to feel so safe in once. But not anymore. It still calls to you, maybe this Wednesday will be different. Maybe you won’t be weird this time or challenge the wrong doctrine that seems hypocritical to you. Maybe you should stop reading the Bible and just accept what the pastors say. You won’t though. You are a truth seeker. You want to know how the world works, and how to exist in it by following all the rules, spoken and unspoken. You hate unspoken rules. That will never change. 

You’re walking too fast and you need to slow down. Your face is frozen but your armpits are starting to sweat. If they sweat too much right now you’ll smell all day. No matter how many showers you take, no matter how many different types of deodorant you use, you will be wet and stinky ALL DAY. Do other people notice? Maybe they don’t but that doesn’t change how uncomfortable the wetness makes you. How all the shirts made for girls right now barely cover your shoulder and bunch up inside your armpit. It's like a noose for your arms no matter what size you buy. Oh wait, you can’t buy a size larger, you’re lucky you fit into the largest sizes at some stores. Otherwise it's granny clothes for you. You don’t know how the larger girls do it so you don’t comment on their clothes because you know how unfair all of this is. You feel like you aren’t overweight, and you know you are very healthy. You barely eat honestly. But everything around you screams that you need to lose 10 pounds, 20 pounds, even one teen magazine last week said as much as 50 or you will be dead by 40! 

You’ve made it to the field in front of the school. Your boots press the snow below the dried grass. You’re always the first set of prints despite hating early mornings. You have to get there early so you can prepare for an entire day of noise and socialization. You need to exist in the empty school to get your bearings before it fills with bodies and obnoxious never ending sounds. You enjoy learning, you enjoy being around your friends but you can’t help being overwhelmed by it after too long. Heaven forbid anything deviates from your every day schedule. Your whole day is ruined if your bra is cutting into you just right or the tag on your new shirt is harassing your neck. You’ve considered murdering the boy who occasionally takes your chosen seat in the one class that doesn’t have assigned seating. Why would a class not have assigned seating?? What kind of monster does that? Day ruined. 

You’ve finally entered the building and your face begins to thaw. You head to the locker rooms that smell of mold and chlorine. You hate the smell but changing in the bathroom is impossible. You remember the swim team has practice and hope they aren’t already in the locker room. It's so humid when they are all taking hot showers. It’s positively suffocating. And those girls have no qualms walking around naked after they shower. “We get it! You have the perfect body for societal standards for 1999 but do you really have to compare boobies in the mirror for 10 minutes before getting dressed? They’re the same boobies you had last week I promise. Drink more milk full of hormones and you’ll have D cups by 8th grade just like me,” you think to yourself. The smell of 40 years of built up floor wax reaches your nose and reminds you that you have school mandated bullying later today in the form of “Dodgeball.”

You don’t have to hang up the makeshift dressing area with a towel today to hide your big ol’ embarrassing titties because you got to school before the swim team was done. You change quickly and use the hand dryers to try and decrease the size of the Great Lakes under your armpits. The cheap brown paper towels in the bathroom are actually the most waterproof substance known to humankind. You learn to bring Kleenex to school because they will give you a nose bleed before they ever take a spot of snot. 

Your first class of the day is Choir and you are especially thankful for this because unbeknownst to you right now, breathing exercises do wonders for your anxiety. Singing also calms you. However, today you are having extreme difficulty with the alto parts. You would prefer singing soprano as you have difficulty reading and understanding music. You have no issue with melody but all the popular girls are on that side and all your friends are altos. Today you just mouth the words and hope your best friend doesn’t notice. You love music, why won’t it just click? You understand the math and the science of it but for some reason there is a disconnect with it going into your ears and your brain processing when to start singing and how to sing harmony when you can only hear the melody. If someone could just explain what the formula was for the harmony, and how to apply it to your voice then maybe you could do it. But it just comes natural to everyone else. 

Choir is over and you get a note summoning you to the guidance counselor’s office to go over your job shadowing form. Despite knowing everyone has to do this your stomach drops like a cheap carnival ride that’s never met a safety standard it hasn’t failed. You hate the receptionist as much as she seems to overtly dislike you. She doesn’t approve of your single mom raising you, like either of you have a choice. She never believes you when you are sick. She avoids accepting your doctor's notes and makes it a hassle to turn them in. She treats you like a lazy liar every time you sign in late to school due to cramps or what you don’t yet realize are severe anxiety attacks that cause you nausea and migraines. 

Hopefully she is on her lunch break early and cooking little children in her house built out of candy so you don’t have to deal with her. But she isn’t. Too early for witches to eat I guess. She gives you an annoyed look as you show her the note and says you can go back there. 

You knock on the door and the guidance counselor beckons you in. She doesn’t seem terribly cannibalistic but she’s also never quite understood you. She asks you if you have chosen someone to shadow and if you have filled out the paperwork. You pull out your Trapper Keeper and dig through the disorganized jumble of papers. You really need to clean it out but you always forget. You don’t remember until you are scrambling to find your homework and your teacher gives you a dirty look when you hand them a crumpled piece of paper that took you 3 times as long to pull out as the other students. Hey, at least you got it done!

You hand the form to the counselor and let her know you will be shadowing a stand up comedian. She stares at you incredulously for a second “Are you serious.” And you say “No I’m not serious, that’s why I want to be a stand up comedian!” She doesn’t get this joke at all but you know you’re going to use this in your first routine ever because it is comedy gold. You even tell the comedian you are shadowing and she is really proud of you! 

You head to the restroom while everyone is still in class, no one knows when to expect you back anyways and you need to take a breath before you walk into a class late. You find a letter tucked behind the toilet paper that is second in waterproofness to the brown paper towels. 

“To Emily from Lola”

You don’t know anyone named Lola. You don’t even know any of the songs with the name in it. In fact you only know “Yoda” by Weird Al Yankovich and you won’t know it's a parody for many more years. You really are a sweet summer child right now and I love it. 

“Dear Emily,

You are not lazy, you have ADHD

You are not broken, you are autistic. 

You are not unhealthy, you're naturally bigger. 

You are not a defiant child, you have Pathological Demand Avoidance.

You are not psychic, you have extremely good pattern recognition due to autism. 

I know that only boys are being diagnosed with ADHD right now and you can’t possibly fathom how you have it since you act nothing like them. 

I know that right now you think all Autism presents like Jessica, the special needs girl a year ahead of you that can only communicate through screams, and laughter. Jessica, that has to be fed by a caretaker. Jessica, that rolls her head and eyes and drools constantly. Jessica likely has Autism, but she has many other developmental issues and Autism is spectrum. Jessica is one facet of this spectrum. And yet you will learn you have a lot in common with her. I still think about her sometimes and hope that if she is still alive today that her laughter is still just as contagious as it was every day in choir. She loves choir just as much as you do. 

Hmmm…. I probably should have led with the fact that this letter is not not from your time as that paragraph is a bit all over the place in terms of tense. English classes are not our forte. Too many exceptions to too many rules. We like things cut and dry with rules set in stone. That's autism for ya!

I’m sure this is very confusing for you but eventually there will be a bunch of anime shows that might explain how this is possible…sort of. Honestly I’m not even sure how this is going to work. But I do know that the only things I can tell you are things that will bring you comfort, but they won’t change your future. The timeline won’t allow those changes, but it does allow you a moment of comfort. You will forget the details of this letter but you will remember the feeling and you will give yourself more space to be yourself which is everything to us. 

Oh, right, “us” is probably confusing too since this is from someone named Lola. That’s our new name. You have always felt like Emily didn’t fit you and for a lot of reasons. You experiment with a lot of nicknames in high school but eventually we change it completely. It has been so completely freeing. 

You are also not wrong about feeling off about your gender. I know you are already questioning where you belong on the binary. You are proud of being feminine but you know you are much more masculine than most of the girls you know. Don’t let this get to you, eventually people like us give this gender a new name and we are able to identify as such. I wish you could identify as the gender you are now and spare yourself so much pain and heartache but I have to accept that I’m the one responsible for using my journey to help change the world. Your job is to go on that journey. It will be hard but you do an amazing job. 

I can’t change our future but if I can implant in you right now that your size and weight is not unhealthy or ugly. You are fat, and fat is normal. You do not need to go on diets, they actually do more harm than good. You don’t owe anyone society’s arbitrary view of what beauty is. Even if fat was inherently unhealthy you don’t owe anyone your health to be valued and taken care of in society. They glorify smoking and still provide care for the consequences of this chosen addiction while demonizing and gaslighting fat people. Perhaps I can instill in you a seed of knowledge about this: All fatphobia (the term we use now) stems from racism and demonizing black bodies. I know beyond a shadow of a doubt this has already set off a giant lightbulb in your head. You don’t know much about systemic racism right now, but it doesn’t take you long to start seeing the clues. 

On that note, um, I know you aren’t inherently racist but you are super ignorant throughout your twenties and say some stuff that you also deserve to be slapped for. No one does but thankfully some people put us in our place. My only advice, if it doesn’t change the future, is to STOP listening to so much hip-hop and rap by male artists ASAP. You don’t know what echolalia is yet but you have it real bad due to Autism and ADHD. You know how every time someone says the word “double” or “pleasure” and you immediately start singing the gum commercial jingle? We still do it! I really need you to decrease the amount of music that has the “N word” in it because we end up saying it a lot due to echolalia in the most inappropriate situations. Which is all situations because we are lighter than the beacons of Gondor. 

Also for some reason you seem to ignorantly believe that saying it with an “ah” is perfectly acceptable for too many years. I need you to stop that now, I’m still undoing the damage thank you very much!!

As much as I know we love lectures I should probably stop now. I don’t really know what will be allowed to stick and I don’t want to waste all of this opportunity on things you don’t understand yet. 

I need you know you are not b*tch. I know you’ve been called that numerous times by so many people. You are autistic and it causes you to be very blunt. Your motivation for that is to be helpful and honest. You are not well versed in tact yet but that does not mean you are trying to hurt people. You are trying to help people and you are not aware of the unspoken rules neurotypical (normies)  and allistic (non-autistic) people have for verbal interaction. In their world they believe you are trying to make yourself seem superior or make them feel stupid. They do not see your true empathy because you do not employ surface level empathy. Autistic empathy is a lot of work and it drains us to mask all parts of yourself. I know that I cannot stop you from masking yet, but if I can impart on you that you are NOT a b*tch, not now, not when you were 12, not when you are 25, and not ever.  

Ok, that's a little bit of a lie. You will be one to your mom…but only once. She puts you in your place and you NEVER do it again. To be fair your hormones come from a chaos realm 13 light years away for some reason. 

And stop worrying about your pits!! Seriously. Everyone is dealing with weird smells, hair in all the wrong places, and sweat leaking from everywhere. Your hormones are extra special but everyone else’s are cray-cray, too. Yes, you will hate that term and still end up using it unironically because of echolalia. Thanks, Autism!

I love you now and forever, 

Lola

P.S. Despite what I said about Hip-Hop, if you haven’t discovered MIssy Elliot yet go buy her CD now. Do not use Limewire, I repeat, STOP USING LIMEWIRE!”

You finish reading the strange note that you tell yourself isn’t from a future you, and the ink begins to soak into the paper until it is completely blank. Even the words begin to vanish from your mind like a dream you had the night before. You are only left with the feelings but can’t remember a single detail. 

You tuck the paper in your backpack along with a year's worth of homework and exit the stall. Just as you are about to leave the bathroom you notice the wads of cardboard towels under your armpits and hastily remove them. “That would have been embarrassing” you say to your reflection. Then a small voice in your head says “With boobs like that no one is looking at your pits” and you chuckle to yourself as you exit the bathroom singing “Double your pleasure, double your FUN!”