The last few days have been interesting. My therapist tells me I exhibit autistic traits—especially my cycling between highs and lows—and encourages me to read about it. I click-click-cick through links and ends up in a page that describes autistic burnouts, and tick-tick-tick, all boxes checked. Hypersensitivity to sound and light and touch and so on? Check. Staying holed up to block sensory stimuli? Check. Lose in social and executive (huh?) skills? Check. And the like. My lurking around in communities and forums tells me that a lot of people who exhibit autistic burnouts are also misdiagnosed, quite often, as depression.

I wonder whether my own diagnosis was a mis-diagnosis. I queue up an appointment with my doctor, who tells me that I am not autistic, that I am just depressed. My experiences, however, differ from my patient history. When I recount my experiences in the doctor's room, there are many things going on behind my narration—all the biases, mis-remembering, memories simply lost or repressed—a whole lot of stuff. And unfortunately, my patient-history is not tailor-made to suit the DSM-5. It is only much later, discussing Szasz and Laing with my friend, that I am told that I ought to believe in my own experiences too, rather than just the doctor's diagnosis. No matter how hard I try, and perhaps exactly because I try hard, the inevitable gap between me and the physician will always be there. The harder I try to minimise that gap, I will only widen it.

I end up spending a pretty penny on a pair of noise-cancelling headphones and a pair of sunglasses. I wear them to my usual spot with my laptop and book, switch them on, and the world recedes. I am not irritated by the people around, the sound of the air conditioner whirring, the vehicles on the road and their loud honking, the group of young men and women gesturing wildly and discussing god-knows-what, because I can no longer hear them. The world gradually becomes less of 'too much.'

A year or so ago I sat with a friend who shares many attributes of my personality at this cafè in campus. We were reading books, siting around a table, facing each other. I was shy of reading books in the public, although I always wanted to. But this time, with him, the inhibitions went away and I no longer felt weird in the world. Today, when I think about the world which is 'too much' for me and how weird it feels to inhabit this 'too muchness' of the world, I am reminded of how normal I felt that day sitting down with him. Maybe that is how normal people live their lives; those with no inhibitions, those who can dance in the clubs which blast music through weekends, those who are comfortable talking loudly—or talking at all, those who walk with their head level with the ground, those who can look at people without discomfort, those who do not have to walk out of dinners because the world is too much, those who do not want to stand in the corners of the group photos, those who can name people in conversations and not substitute names with 'that girl' or 'this boy,' those who know how to act in the world without having to consult books, those who do not complicate things by repeating dialogues and gestures from novels, those who can turn the world down without alcohol or weed.

My therapist tells me I ought to track my mood so that I can predict when the next set of low days are due. She tells me this is not something that can be cured. This is a way of living that has to be managed to fit into the rhythms of the larger world. My job is to 'take care.' This isn't surprising, to be honest. I've been called mad, I've been told my mood swings are terrible, I have broken down over the sound of a paper being torn.

As I stand across the barista, she asks the person ahead of me: “Anything else, sir?”