The Weight of Poison

Pick your poison. I keep returning to it lately, the way you return to a room you don't remember entering. It surfaces between other thoughts, uninvited, the way a phrase does when it has quietly become load-bearing without asking permission first. Most people use it as a shrug — a way of saying both options are bad, take whichever, it hardly matters. I have come to think that shrug is hiding something. The saying is not really about indifference between two bad options. It is about the fact that there was never a third one on offer, and that realising this is the beginning of something, not the end of it. This post is for myself as much as for anyone younger still working out which end of the phrase they are standing on. I am not writing it from above the problem. I am writing it from inside it.

Most of what I write returns, in one shape or another, to perception — the fact that my experience of the world, and I suspect most people's, is not built on the world directly but on a rendering of it. I have gone at this from several angles now: the perception of another person's intent, the perception of physical reality itself, the perception that governs how we read the people closest to us, the quiet bias that certainty smuggles in without ever announcing itself. What I have not written about directly, until now, is the version that runs the other way — not how I perceive the world, but how the world perceives me, and what happens once that perception is handed back and I am asked, implicitly, to wear it.

I have been called incompetent. Incapable. Disabled — the word used pointedly, in reference to my autism, as though it settled something. Each of those words has landed with more force than the sentence containing it should have carried, and for a long time I could not fully account for why. I think I can now. It is not one thing but two, arriving together and multiplying each other. The first is who said them. These were not strangers online, whose opinions dissolve on contact. These were people I had let in close, whose judgment I had implicitly weighted above the noise. The second is quieter and worse: the words did not introduce a new idea. They confirmed one I already held. As I wrote in The Question That Has No Answer, I do not carry an image of myself as a master of anything — no domain I can point to and say, here, this is where I am unquestionably capable. So when someone close to me said the same thing I had already been telling myself in private, there was nothing to defend against. The criticism did not have to break through a wall of self-belief. There was no wall. It walked straight into a room I had already vacated.

Here is where the poison earns its place in the sentence, rather than serving merely as a colourful stand-in for choice. There is an old idea, older than most of what gets said about self-improvement now, that the dose makes the poison — that no substance is inherently toxic or inherently benign, that the same compound in different measure is medicine or is death. What people rarely extend that principle to is judgment itself, but it holds there just as precisely. Every action you take will be read by someone as evidence against you. Every action you withhold will be read by someone else as the same evidence, from the opposite direction. Do the thing, and you will be mocked for trying, for overreaching, for not staying in whatever place you were assigned. Do not do it, and you will be criticised in equal measure for timidity, for wasted capacity, for having sat still while something was asked of you. There is no third path where you are simply left alone to be correct. The poison is not optional. What is optional, and this is the entire weight of the phrase, is which one you drink.

I do not think this is a bleak realisation, though it read as one to me for longer than I would like to admit. Once you accept that judgment arrives regardless of the choice you make, the choice stops being about avoiding judgment and becomes about something you actually have some control over — what you can prove to yourself in the act of choosing. Doing the thing anyway, in spite of the ridicule that was coming either way, is not a defiance aimed outward. It is a private accounting. It is you finding out, in the only laboratory available, what you are actually capable of, independent of what the people closest to you decided to call you on a day when they were not being careful with their words. Do, or do not — there genuinely is no try in between, no neutral setting where you get to withhold the attempt and also withhold the cost of having withheld it. The cost is charged either way. Trying at least buys you the data.

I am not writing this because I have resolved it. I am writing it because I am still metabolising the dose, the way you are, the way anyone still discovering themselves under a world that likes to parade its confusions dressed as certainties. What I can offer, since I cannot offer resolution, is the shape of the choice as clearly as I can see it — that the poison was never avoidable, and that the sting of being named incapable by someone close cuts twice: once for who said it, and once for how closely it matched what you already feared was true.

If you are young, and reading this because someone your own age, or worse, an adult who should have known better, has told you what you cannot do, here is the part I want to say plainly, without the essay's usual habit of circling before it lands. Whatever you decide — to attempt the thing, or to sit it out — you are the only person who will ever actually live inside the outcome. The people who called it from the sidelines, kindly or cruelly, will not carry it. You will. That can sound frightening on first read. Sit with it a little longer, because it is also the entire reason to move.

Nobody who tells you a thing is beyond you can actually see what they claim to see. A person cannot picture someone else completing a task they have privately written off as impossible, or that they themselves would fail at — the limit they are naming is a report on the edges of their own imagination, and it says nothing reliable about your capacity. Their verdict is furniture they are describing in a room they have never let you see the inside of. I wrote something close to this for myself once, over a decade ago now, long before the word autism was ever used against me, and it has aged better than most of what I believed at that age — the fuller version is still up on Goodreads if you want it. The core of it has not moved since I wrote it: it is far more bearable to have tried and lost than to spend years afterward wondering what would have happened had you let yourself begin.

That aloneness — the fact that the outcome, whichever way it goes, belongs to you and to nobody else in the room — is the argument itself. If the weight was always going to land on you regardless of which poison you chose, let it land on a choice you actually made. Reach for whatever you have been telling yourself is out of reach. Reaching guarantees only this: that the outcome, when it finally comes, carries your fingerprints on it rather than someone else's verdict standing in for your attempt. Pick your poison. Then drink it on purpose, and see what you learn about the thing that survives.