MidReal Story
Misunderstood: A Tragic Breakthrough
Scenario: an autistic guy in his mid-thirties struggles in his everyday life because nobody understands his mental condition. his problems get worse every day until he gets crazy and commits a murder.
Create my version of this story
I hate noise.
It’s like a million tiny needles piercing my skin, and I can’t make it stop.
I’ve tried everything.
Earplugs, headphones, even a white noise machine.
But nothing works.
I can still hear it, no matter how hard I try to block it out.
The worst part is that I can’t escape it.
It’s everywhere—on the street, in my building, even in my own head.
I live in a small apartment on the second floor of a three-story building in the heart of downtown Los Angeles.
It’s not much, but it’s all I can afford on my salary as a janitor at the local high school.
The walls are paper-thin, and I can hear everything that goes on in the apartments around me.
My neighbors are always having parties or fighting with each other, and it drives me crazy.
But tonight is the worst by far.
I don’t know how many people are down there, but they’re all talking, laughing, and yelling at the top of their lungs.
I can hear every word, every sound, and it’s making me want to scream.
I’ve tried banging on the floor and yelling at them to be quiet, but they just laughed and turned up the music even louder.
I don’t know what to do.
I just want it to stop.
I’ve always been sensitive to noise.
Ever since I was a kid, I’ve hated it.
It’s like my ears are always on high alert, searching for even the faintest sound to invade my brain and break my concentration.
When I was younger, I thought I was just weird.
But as I got older, I realized that there was something different about me.
I’ve never been officially diagnosed, but I know that I’m autistic.
I’m in my mid-thirties now, and I’ve learned to live with it.
But God, some days are harder than others.
Like today, for example.
I woke up to the sound of the refrigerator humming in the kitchen, and I wanted to throw it out the window.
It’s a small apartment and the walls are thin, so I can hear everything that goes on outside.
The distant wail of sirens, the roar of traffic on the street below, and the footsteps of people walking by on the sidewalk.
When I’m at home, I try to keep the noise to a minimum so that it doesn’t drive me crazy.
But there’s not much I can do about the sounds outside.
I’ve tried wearing headphones when I’m out, but they don’t help much.
They just muffle the sounds a little bit and make me feel like I’m underwater.
So I’ve learned to live with it.
But some days are harder than others.
Today is one of those days.
It’s around 9:00 p.m., and the party shows no signs of slowing down.
If anything, it’s gotten even louder since it started a few hours ago.
People are shouting and laughing at each other, and the music is so loud that I can barely hear myself think.
I don’t know how much more of this I can take.
I have to be up early for work tomorrow, and I need to get some sleep.
But with all this noise, I know it’s going to be impossible.
As I sit on my couch in the dark, I can feel my anxiety rising.
This is my life now.
A never-ending battle against an invisible enemy.
There’s no way to win.
And no way to escape.
It’s a warm summer night in Los Angeles, and the city is alive with activity.
It’s around 11:00 p.m., and people are out on the streets enjoying themselves, talking on their cell phones, and doing whatever else they do at this time of night.
The sound of their voices echoes through the thin walls of my apartment and reverberates in my mind like a hammer pounding against my skull.
A small part of me wishes that I could be out there with them.
But I know better.
I’m not like other people.
Most people have no idea what it’s like to experience the world as I do.
But then again, most people have no idea what it’s like to experience the world as I do.
When I make a meal for myself, it takes every ounce of mental fortitude to withstand the barrage of sensory input that accompanies it.
The textures, smells, and sounds are so overwhelming that I often find myself paralyzed by indecision before I even begin.
Some foods make me physically ill just to look at them or smell them—a fact that has caused me endless grief over my lifetime—and others have textures that resemble something akin to eating a plateful of maggots.
No one wants to eat a meal infested with maggots.
But when I try to explain this to other people, they just look at me like I’m crazy.
They can’t understand what it’s like to experience food in this way.
It’s like trying to explain color to someone who has been blind their whole life.
They just can’t comprehend it.
And so they think that I’m being picky or difficult or stubborn.
What they don’t understand is that the sounds of cooking are like a cacophony of torture to my ears.
The sizzling and popping and bubbling and steaming all pierce my brain like tiny little needles attacking me from all sides.
Sometimes it feels like I’m being electrocuted from within.
And even when I’m not cooking myself, I still have to endure the sounds.
The whirring of the refrigerator in the other room as it kicks on and off at irregular intervals.
The clattering and jingling of dishes in the sink as I wash them by hand because I can’t stand the sound of the dishwasher running.
And in the background, the distant hum of traffic on the street below as cars and trucks pass by at all hours of the day and night.
It’s endless and inescapable and maddening.
But it’s not just noise that drives me crazy.
There are other things too.
Like when I clean my apartment.
I have to do it regularly to keep things organized and tidy.
I know that most people probably don’t care if their living space is cluttered or dirty, but I can’t stand it.
It makes me feel anxious and unsettled, like I’m being smothered by a thick layer of grime.
So I have to clean.
But when I do, it’s like entering a sensory war zone.
The smell of the cleaning products as I spray them on every surface, and the feeling of them on my skin as I wipe everything down with paper towels.
The smell of dust as I stir it up from all its hiding places, and the feeling of it on my skin as it settles back down again, coating everything in its path.
It’s enough to make me want to scream.
But I don’t.
I just power through it, because I know that I have to.
At least when I’m at work, things are a little bit better.
I love my job.
I’ve been working as a janitor at the local high school for over ten years now, ever since I finished college.
And in that time, I haven’t missed a single day.
Not one sick day, not one vacation day, nothing.
Because I love my job.
When you’re cleaning, you have to do just one thing at a time.
You don’t have to juggle multiple tasks or remember what order to do them in or anything like that.
You just pick something up and you clean it, and then you move on to something else and you do the same thing again.
It’s perfect for me.
It helps calm me down when I’m feeling overwhelmed by too many things happening at once.
Which is often how I feel in this world that we live in.
But when I’m at work, things are different.
There’s order to what’s happening all around me, and it helps me stay calm and focused so that I can do what needs to be done.
Every day when I come in to work, I start by cleaning all of the classrooms first.
That means vacuuming the carpets, wiping down the desks, and cleaning out the trashcans.
I spend about an hour in each room before moving on to the next one.
And when I’m done with each room, you can see that I’ve cleaned it.
The trashcan is empty, the whiteboards are smudgefree, and the desks shine with cleanliness.
It makes me feel happy to know that I’ve done something good with my time.
After that, I move out into the hallways.
It takes me about three hours to clean all of them from top to bottom.
And then finally, in the afternoon, after all of that is finished, they let me clean the bathrooms.
I like to save them for last because they’re usually the dirtiest part of the school.
And they’re also where most people go to relieve themselves—so if they haven’t been cleaned properly, everyone in the school will be exposed to their germs.
Every day before I leave work, I go back to each of these places and make sure that they’re still clean.
That’s how you know you’ve done a good job cleaning something—if it stays clean even after you’re done with it.
It makes me feel proud of myself to see how clean everything is and to know that it’s all because of me.
Most people at work are nice to me, even though they know there’s something different about me.
They don’t know what it is, exactly, but they know it’s something.
So they give me a wide berth and don’t ask me any questions or stop to chat.
They’re nice, but they don’t really want to be friends with me.
And that’s okay.
I have Sarah, and she’s all I need.
The only bad thing about work is when it’s over and I have to go back home again.
Because when you’re in school, there’s always some noise happening around you—people talking, doors opening and closing, footsteps on the floors, and so on.
