POEM: Please Hear What I'm Not Saying

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[Below is an awesome poem I found when I was a teenager. It spoke for me then, and it continues to speak for me today; as if I was the author. There is no other poem I so profoundly relate to such as this one. Surely, the original author must've been an Aspie. Who else could've written such a personally familiar poem? ...I've slightly modified it.]

Please Hear What I'm Not Saying

Don't be fooled by me.
Don't be fooled by the face I wear.
For I wear a mask, I wear a thousand masks;
masks that I'm afraid to take off, and none ot them are me.

Pretending is in art that's second nature with me,
but don't be fooled, for our sake don't be fooled.
I give you the impression that I'm secure,
that all is sunny and unruffled with me, within as well as without,
that confidence is my name and coolness is my game, and the water is calm and I'm in command, and that I need no one.
But don't believe me. Please!

My surface may seem smooth,
but my surface is my mask, my ever varying and ever-concealing mask.
Beneath lies no smugness, no complacence.
Beneath dwells the real me in confusion, in anxiety, in desolation, in dejection.
But I hide this.
I don't want anybody to know it.
I panic at the thought of my weakness and fear being exposed.

That's why I frantically create a mask to hide behind,
a nonchalant, sophisticated facade, to help me pretend,
to shield me from the GLANCE THAT KNOWS.

But such a glance is precisely my salvation. My only salvation.
And I know it.
That is, if it's followed by acceptance, if it's followed by love.
It's the only thing that can liberate me, from myself,
from the barriers that I so painstakingly erect.
It's the only thing that will assure me of what I can't assure myself,
that I'm really worth something.

But I don't tell you this. I don't dare. I'm afraid to.
I'm afraid your glance will not be followed by acceptance and love.
I'm afraid you'll think less of me, that deep-down I'm nothing, that I'm just no good,
and that you will see this and reject me.

So I play my game, my desperate pretending game,
with a facade of assurance without, and trembling within.
And so begins my parade of masks.
And my life becomes a front.

I idly chatter to you in a suave tones of surface talk.
I tell you everything that's really nothing, and nothing that's everything of what's crying within me.

So as I'm going through my routine do not be fooled by what I'm saying.
Please listen carefully and try to hear what I'm NOT saying.
What I'd like to be able to say, what for survival I need to say, but what I can't say.

I dislike hiding. Honestly.

Original author unknown.