By Trevor Pacelli
Family and friends are essential in helping you remedy your traumatic memories; sharing those thoughts that are hardest to bring to light will lead you to the path of healing. Anyone on the autism spectrum especially should know this, as contrary to common stereotypes, those with ASD can feel sorrow and empathy.
I’m no exception. I’ve suffered from feelings of intense unrequited love, especially since I’m almost thirty-two and have never come close to having another woman see me as a potential life partner. I also have traumatic memories of specific instances of not being included during high school. Here are my experiences, and how I have learned to deal with them.
Unrequited Love - Two of my friends from high school dated for seven-and-a-half years by the time they were married, yet I just couldn’t feel happy for them because I had significant feelings for her since long before they started dating. Everyone raved about how the two of them were the cutest couple ever, and to add greater insult to injury, she never had a boyfriend before she started dating this guy, and they hadn’t broken up to this day after nearly fifteen years of being a couple. They were essentially a textbook example of a perfect Hollywood romantic pair.
Their wedding was an internal disaster for me. While I managed to look like I had myself together throughout the ceremony and most of the reception, their first dance together broke me to pieces. Watching them so immersed in one another with pure joy while everybody else admired their contagious love on the dance floor piqued my suffering from unrequited love. I had to retreat into the bathroom stall while everyone got out onto the dance floor; I was left essentially crying with heavy breathing and heart pounding.
I walked out of the bathroom, and the others from my table approached me; they had seen me stumble into a near-mental breakdown before retreating into the bathroom and probably heard me sobbing. They told the bride’s sister about it, so she took me outside to talk privately. I told her how I couldn’t let go of my old feelings for the bride (the sister already knew all about it), and although what she told me wasn’t necessarily helpful, the fact that I told someone who could understand where I was coming from helped a little.
However, I was still going through a lot of internal pain throughout that next week, and even to this day, it’s still an issue for me. But lately I have found that confronting those hard memories rather than trying to starve them helps on the path to healing.
Left Out in High School - I came to this realization through another somewhat related high school memory that I was able to conquer. It may have sounded like a great thing at first that I was cast in the school play, but I was the only one in the cast without a single line of dialogue. While everyone else in the cast had more than two minutes on stage and something significant to contribute, I was on stage for less than thirty seconds and did nothing whatsoever significant. In hindsight, I wish I had dropped out of the play when I had the chance. But a few years ago, when was writing my book, What Movies Can Teach Us About Disabilities, I wrote about this experience in the play to illustrate what it looks like when someone with a disability is included but not accepted. Putting my experience down on paper for my mom, the book's editor, to read, was a difficult ordeal yet was the necessary therapy I needed to move on.
How do I know this process worked? Well, my parents and I have season tickets to a local theater company, and over the past few years, the company funnily did all three musicals I did in high school. The first we saw brought back those hard high school memories over the next week, the most prominent being the play where I was shoved aside. With the second of my high school plays the theater company did, it was the same deal. But by the time we saw the last of those three plays, I had already written that section of my book, so I didn’t linger anywhere near as much about my awful play experiences, making me feel like I was freed at last from the memory.
So, if you or someone you know is on the autism spectrum, encourage them to use the tactic of writing down traumatic memories to help them process their feelings. Yeah, it’s going to hurt to put them down on paper, but it’s like surgery, you can’t heal to get to a better place until you first make the incision. I also recognize that for some of you, your worst memory is being molested or having a loved one die prematurely, and for those cases, healing from the hurt is a more difficult and involved process. However, exposing your emotions in the light instead of keeping them hidden is what I found is needed to stop the trauma from defining who you are.
Trevor Pacelli is a young adult on the autism spectrum and author of books on autism, disabilities, bullying and a new middle-grade sci-fi adventure novel. ​

By Trevor Pacelli
I recently took Michael Pollan’s Masterclass, Intentional Eating, which included Pollan's three philosophies of food:
1. Eat Food
2. Not Too Much
3. Mostly Plants
I came up with three similar philosophies about consuming artistic media:
1. Enjoy Art
2. Embrace Your Tastes
3. But Don’t Force Them
Enjoy Art
I recognize that art is subjective, as beauty is very much in the eye of the beholder. However, criticizing art objectively is a freedom you should feel free to exercise. After all, a two-year-old smearing paint around isn’t on the same artistic plane as a professional who’s been painting for fifty years spending toilsome hours on an anatomically accurate mural. To demonstrate my point, I’ll explain the mastery behind one of the artsiest movies of the last decade: Poor Things.
Its black-and-white fish-eye lens cinematography may make it look at first like a movie where the director wants to show off, but in this context, the cinematography style is used for a purpose. Since the main character, Bella Baxter, starts as a grown woman with the brain of a toddler, she at first sees the world in a distorted black-and-white way, but once she explores the world, everything turns to color, like she’s a small child discovering life for the first time. Then as she matures, those vibrant colors become more muted, and the fish-eye lens shots dissipate. There’s an actual consistent purpose behind this filmmaking trick, which allows Poor Things to pass as a work of art that can be freely enjoyed.
Embrace Your Tastes
Yeah, that’s right: don’t feel ashamed to watch something that’s a part of your tastes as long as it’s made with love, hard work, talent, and simple fun while respecting all potential viewers. This subject of feeling embarrassed about watching something outside of something like your age group reminds me of people who dismiss animation as “for kids,” which is part of what led to that awful trend of soulless live-action Disney remakes. Netflix did the same thing when they remade Avatar: The Last Airbender in live-action.
The day the first episode of the first season premiered, I decided to protest that remake series by rewatching the first episode of the original Nickelodeon series and continuing through the show. Man, I tell you: the original animated show just gets better with multiple rewatches and is more enjoyable for older viewers than for kids. I’d say the same about the preschool show Bluey. Anyone might quickly dismiss it because of who it’s made for, but the show knows how to create relatable slice-of-life plotlines that can entertain kids and make parents cry. Therefore, it doesn’t matter who something was made for, if a movie or TV show feels like a passion project with something valuable to say, then enjoy!
But Don’t Force Them
Yes, every movie has an audience, no matter how bizarre. Even Poor Things. At the same time, that means even if something is a massive crowd-pleaser or something others within your community love, nothing says you’re also required to love that movie. I once thought I had to take the word of the Oscars on what movies are the best, particularly in college, meaning I tried to convince myself that Shakespeare in Love is a better movie than Saving Private Ryan just because it infamously beat the latter for Best Picture. Boy, how wrong I was.
I also tried to force myself to love the movies put on a high pedestal amongst movie buffs and bought DVD/Blu-rays that included The Godfather, Schindler's List, and No Country for Old Men. Yet I could never just casually enjoy them as entertainment, so I ultimately gave those movies away. I still respect them for being phenomenal works of art, but they’re simply not for my taste. Therefore, I shouldn’t have to believe I must love them just because I went to film school. If you also can acknowledge the strong artistic merits of a good movie even if you didn’t enjoy sitting through it, then that’s okay. At least you tried.
How to tell whether a piece of media is truly art
While watching movies is indeed fun, knowing which movies are worth your time is hard. I too have struggled with this over the years, as there have been movies I once thought were masterpieces, only to realize in hindsight that I was wrong. Movies like Ex Machina, Arrival, Annihilation, and Hereditary were movies I soon could see for what they truly are: Overly pretentious with sloppy scripts and emotionally distant characters.
To help you know whether a movie or TV show is art or not, consider these questions:

• Is the protagonist a different person in the end?
• Do the protagonist’s actions prove this change is legitimate?
• Are the other characters shoved aside, or are they given full subplots connected to the main plot?
• Do the actors’ pauses properly imitate the realistic speech of real humans?
• Do the actors’ gestures communicate strong chemistry between the two, or do they feel like they’re merely talking "at" each other?
• Are the jokes forced?
• Does every scene support the plot?
• Are the characters’ actions justifiable, or do they just do whatever the plot tells them to do?

One last tip that helps a lot is to read the 5/10 reviews on a review site; lukewarm ratings often offer the most descriptive points about the movie’s flaws. If the review is specific enough about what a movie does wrong, then take the reviewer’s word, but if the critiques given don’t appear valid, or if the praises by good reviews feel more valid than the criticisms, then feel free to watch the movie or TV show. Over time, you’ll improve at knowing which media are truly art. Even better, you’ll develop a refined collection of favorite movies, books, and shows that bring out the real you.
Trevor Pacelli is the author of What Movies Can Teach Us About Disabilities, What Movies Can Teach Us About Bullying, Summer of the Fruit Virus and more.