My Porcelain Scream

Imagine the surface is a face. Smooth, composed, coping. And imagine that sealed inside it, inaudible to anyone holding it, is a scream: my porcelain scream.

I was driving back home from a walk the other day, not really thinking about anything in particular, letting some music do the work that music does. Then, out of the blue three words arrived.

My porcelain scream.

They took me clean out of the moment. If I’d been walking they’d have stopped me where I stood.

When I got home I checked the lyrics, the way you do, half-expecting to find the line and underline it. The line isn’t there. I’d misheard it entirely. And somehow that made it better - because it meant the phrase hadn’t been handed to me by a songwriter. It had come up, from somewhere underneath, wearing a borrowed melody. Less a lyric than a calling. It sat with me for the rest of the afternoon, and it’s been sitting with me since.

Here is what it means, as far as I can tell.

You see, porcelain is a thing we prize for being unblemished. We hold it carefully in cupped hands. We admire the smoothness, the glaze, the absence of any crack. A porcelain figure is valued precisely because nothing has happened to it - because the surface tells you, convincingly, that all is well within. That’s the whole point of the object. The surface is the reassurance.

Now imagine the surface is a face. Smooth, composed, coping. And imagine that sealed inside it, inaudible to anyone holding it, is a scream.

That’s the image. That’s the thing I carried, I think, for a long stretch of years.

I won’t lay that period out in detail here. Partly because I don’t want to, and partly because I’ve come to believe that the detail isn’t where the truth of it lives. The truth lives in the gap - the distance between what I presented and what was actually happening a few millimetres beneath. I was, to all appearances, unbroken. To friends. To colleagues. Possibly even to myself.

And that, I’ve slowly understood, was not incidental. It was the fuel.

Because there are situations where your composure doesn’t protect you - it prolongs the thing. If I never visibly cracked, then nothing was wrong, and if nothing was wrong, there was no reason for any of it to stop. The smoothness of the porcelain wasn’t shielding me. It was inviting the next pressure. I held the surface together and offered up, without ever meaning to, the proof that I could take more.

I didn’t understand any of this at the time. I want to be careful here, because there’s a version of this story where I say what I allowed to happen, and I started to write exactly that and then stopped. I don’t think I allowed it. Allowing requires understanding, and I didn’t have it. I didn’t have the framework, the vocabulary, or the faintest idea that the thing I was doing - keeping the face intact at all costs - even had a name.

It does have a name. I just didn’t learn it until much later, and from a completely different direction.

Earlier this year, at the ripe old age of fifty seven, I was diagnosed as autistic. Late enough that most of my life has already happened by the time I have a lens to view it through. And one of the first concepts you meet, when you start reading about late-diagnosed autism, is masking.

Masking is the conscious and unconscious work of suppressing your real self - your real responses, your real distress, the way your nervous system actually wants to move and react - in order to present something acceptable to the world. You learn it early. You learn it because the unmasked version of you gets punished, or misread, or simply doesn’t land, and the masked version gets through the day. By the time you’re an adult you’ve been doing it so long you’ve forgotten it’s happening. You think it’s just you. You think the smooth surface is your actual face.

I’ve spent the last while learning that it isn’t. That the composure I always thought of as a personality trait - David copes, David’s fine, David puts a brave face on it - was a lifetime’s coping strategy I’d never been able to see from the outside. And when I understood that, something about those years rearranged itself in my mind.

Because the mask I wore back then, and the mask I’d worn my whole life, were not two different things. They were the same muscle. The same trained reflex. I was already, long before, world-class at presenting an unbroken surface over whatever was actually going on. I’d been in training for it since childhood.

This is the cruel hinge of the whole thing, and it’s the part I most wanted to write down. The very skill that had kept me functional - that had let me pass, get through, hold down the job, seem fine - was the skill that kept me trapped. The competence at concealment and the imprisonment were one and the same. My survival mechanism was also the bars.

I suppose for a good while the porcelain held. Then it started to craquelure - those fine cracks that spread across old glaze. The strain of holding the surface had to go somewhere.

It went into my body. The face wouldn’t scream, so the body did. Glandular fever first, then a diagnosis of chronic fatigue. I think now that this is what a porcelain scream sounds like when it finally finds a way out - not a sound at all, but an illness. The nervous system filing the complaint that the face refused to make. There were moments, too, when something cracked sideways - a flash of anger in someone who has never been an angry person, who barely recognises anger as one of his native states. The feeling was real. It just couldn’t get past the glaze, so it came out crooked, against objects, against my own health.

It broke catastrophically in the end.

That breaking was, I can see now, the first step towards everything that came after, and it was only later - much later - that I began to understand what those years had actually cost me. You don’t get the clarity while you’re inside it. The mask doesn’t permit it. Clarity is the thing the mask exists to prevent.

The past still visits me sometimes, in dreams. They’re not gentle. There’s a sense of something to be battled, and the outcome varies - some nights I lose ground, some nights I hold it, and on the nights I hold it I wake with the sense of a small victory won. When I reach back for a happy memory from that time, all I get is a shudder.

I don’t write this to shock anyone, though I’m aware some people will be surprised that I thought it, and more surprised that I’d publish it. I’m fine with that. The willingness to publish it is itself part of what the diagnosis has given me - a permission I didn’t used to have, to let the real thing be visible instead of the smooth thing. To let the surface crack on purpose, in public, and discover that the world holds you anyway.

I’m writing this from the forest at Anielin, just outside Warsaw. My happy place, about as far from any of it as I could arrange to be. The porcelain figure I used to be is still in there somewhere, I expect - that reflex doesn’t fully leave. But I can hear the scream now. That’s the difference. For all those years it was sealed inside a face that wouldn’t admit anything was wrong.

Now it’s just three words I misheard in a song, and a thing I finally know how to say out loud.