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I have a theory that there is an entire world operating just beneath the one we can see. Not hidden, exactly. More like overlooked.

The visible world is loud. It keeps score. It counts followers and dollars and achievements. It asks us to measure our worth in output and efficiency. It tells us that everything has a price and that value can be calculated if only we find the right formula.

But beneath that world is another one. A quieter one. An older one. A world sustained by people who continue choosing one another.

It lives in the text message that says, "Made it home safe." In the friend who remembers how you take your coffee. In the neighbor who brings soup when grief has stolen your appetite. In the stranger who holds a door, returns a cart, offers a smile, or bends down to speak gently to a frightened child.

These exchanges are so small that they often go unnoticed. Yet they happen everywhere.

Every day, millions of people perform tiny acts of care that will never become headlines. They sit beside hospital beds. They drive friends to appointments. They lend twenty dollars knowing they may never see it again. They water a neighbor's plants. They leave encouraging comments on a writer's work. They answer late-night phone calls. They carry one another through heartbreaks, illnesses, losses, and ordinary Tuesdays.

No one keeps a ledger of these things. No one rings a bell when a lonely person feels less alone. No one publishes a quarterly report on compassion.

And yet I suspect this quiet economy may be the one that keeps the world alive.

Because when I look back on my life, it is not institutions or markets that carried me through my hardest moments. It is people. A hand reaching toward mine. A voice saying, "I'm here." A meal I did not have the strength to make myself. A kindness that arrived before I knew how desperately I needed it.

Again and again, I have been sustained by people participating in an economy that asks for nothing in return except that goodness continue moving through the world.

Perhaps that is what makes it so difficult to see. We have been taught to notice transactions but not gifts. We know how to count profit, but not generosity. We measure productivity while overlooking tenderness.

And still, the goodness persists.

It moves quietly through neighborhoods and group chats and waiting rooms. It passes between friends across kitchen tables. It travels through communities, families, congregations, recovery groups, classrooms, and park benches.

It is woven into the fabric of ordinary life.

The world would have us believe that selfishness is the strongest force among us because selfishness is loud. It demands attention. But goodness is patient. Goodness rarely announces itself. It simply shows up.

It shows up with casseroles and handwritten notes. With borrowed cups of sugar and rides to the airport. With laughter shared between strangers. With people staying a little longer, listening a little harder, carrying a little more than they have to.

And when you begin to notice it, something remarkable happens.

The world starts to feel different. Not perfect. Not safe from suffering. But held during pain.

You begin to realize that beneath all the noise, beneath the fear and anger and endless competition, there exists a vast and beautiful network of people caring for one another.

An underground river of kindness flowing through every community. Most of us have been carried by it at one time or another. Most of us have contributed to it without even realizing.

And perhaps that is the greatest wonder of all: that the world is not held together by the things we measure, but by the things we give away.

A listening ear. A shared meal. A helping hand. A moment of grace.

Love moving quietly from one person to another. The goodness economy has always been here.

You only have to know where to look.

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Sometimes I wonder if one of the reasons people react so strongly to late neurodivergent diagnosis is because they misunderstand what is actually happening.

When someone discovers they are autistic, ADHD, or otherwise neurodivergent later in life, people often respond as though a new problem has suddenly appeared. The diagnosis enters the room and all at once it becomes the thing under scrutiny, as though that piece of paper or that new understanding is what changed everything.

But from my side of the experience, nothing could be further from the truth.

The problem already existed.

The consequences already existed.

The exhaustion already existed.

I spent years carrying consequences for things I could not explain. There were relationships strained by misunderstandings, projects abandoned halfway through, routines that worked beautifully for a week before collapsing without warning, and an ever-present sense that everyone else had received instructions for life that I somehow missed.

I did not move through those years untouched by my neurodivergence simply because I lacked the language for it. In many ways, I think I was more affected by it because I lacked the language.

Without an explanation, every difficulty became a question of character.

Why couldn't I keep up?

Why couldn't I maintain what everyone else seemed able to maintain?

Why did ordinary things leave me exhausted?

Why did certain sounds, expectations, interruptions, or demands feel so overwhelming?

Why did I need so much recovery time after experiences that barely seemed to register for other people?

The answers I was given rarely had anything to do with neurology. Instead, they sounded like judgments.

Maybe I wasn't disciplined enough.

Maybe I wasn't trying hard enough.

Maybe I cared less than everyone else.

Maybe I was too sensitive.

Maybe I was difficult.

Maybe I was making excuses.

When you hear those explanations often enough, they stop sounding like accusations and start sounding like facts. They settle into the foundation of how you understand yourself. Over time, they become the lens through which every failure, every struggle, and every disappointment is interpreted.

For years, I believed I was failing at being a person.

Not because anyone sat me down and told me that directly, but because it seemed to be the only explanation available. If everyone else could do these things and I could not, then surely the problem must be me.

What I did not know was that I was trying to navigate a landscape I could not see.

I think about maps sometimes.

Imagine spending your entire life trying to find your way through a city using the wrong map. Every turn seems to lead somewhere unexpected. Roads appear where none are marked. Landmarks refuse to line up with what you're seeing. You become lost over and over again.

Eventually, you stop blaming the map and start blaming yourself.

You assume you're careless. You assume you're bad at directions. You assume everyone else must be better at navigating than you are.

Then one day someone places the correct map in your hands.

The city does not change.

The roads do not change.

The obstacles do not disappear.

You are still standing exactly where you were before.

But suddenly things make sense.

That is what diagnosis felt like for me.

Not the discovery of a new problem, but the discovery that the problem had been misunderstood.

The overwhelm I experienced wasn't evidence of weakness.

The burnout wasn't evidence of laziness.

The executive functioning struggles weren't evidence that I didn't care enough.

The difficulty with demands wasn't evidence of stubbornness or defiance.

Those experiences had always been real. What changed was the story I had been telling about them.

And stories matter.

The story that says you are lazy creates a very different life than the story that says your executive functioning requires support.

The story that says you are too sensitive creates a very different life than the story that says your nervous system processes the world differently.

The story that says you are difficult creates a very different life than the story that says you have needs that have gone unseen.

For me, diagnosis did not remove responsibility. If anything, it gave me the tools to engage with responsibility more honestly. I could finally stop fighting battles that were never mine to win and begin learning what actually helped.

I could stop asking why I wasn't someone else.

I could start learning how to be myself.

That shift has changed the way I speak to myself. It has changed the way I understand my past. It has changed the way I think about burnout, relationships, work, rest, and worthiness.

Most of all, it has changed the question I ask when I am struggling.

For years, the question was, "What is wrong with me?"

Now the question is, "What do I need?"

The answer is not always easy. Sometimes it is frustrating. Sometimes it asks me to acknowledge limitations I would rather ignore. Sometimes it requires accepting realities I wish were different.

But it is a kinder question.

And more importantly, it is a question rooted in truth.

The problem already existed.

The diagnosis did not create it.

The diagnosis simply gave it a name.

And sometimes having the right name for something is the difference between wandering in circles and finally finding your way home.

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Confusion crawls in careful, glassy circles, claiming coherence is counterfeit,

though each return of the thought arrives slightly refracted,

as if seen through dampened glass, smudged at the edges of certainty, and coherence

answers—cool, pale, unevenly lit—

that it has always been this fractured brightness,

even when it once felt clean and aligned

Loss loiters like a lenient, dust-thick shadow,

saying nothing remains, nothing remains,

though the repetition softens into something almost velveted, almost gentle,

and presence pushes back with a warm, stubborn pressure,

insisting something still lingers here in the low places of attention,

though here keeps loosening its coordinates each time it is spoken

Apathy arrives as a softened, hollowed architect, unbuilding intention

in slow, chalky gestures, leaving behind powdery outlines of what once held weight,

though each return of the unbuilding is less absolute,

more weathered,

more tired at the edges,

until even absence begins to feel like a kind of muted construction

Dissonance drifts like a double-voiced choir in a dim cathedral of air,

the tones humid and overlapping,

each pass through the soundspace slightly warmer,

slightly closer,

slightly less distinct,

until disagreement no longer splits cleanly but folds into a bruised harmony that refuses to resolve or collapse

Friction folds thought against thought in rough, sanded layers,

each repetition scraping differently

—sometimes sharp as flint, sometimes dull as worn stone—

until questioning becomes a textured surface rather than a clear motion,

and meaning moves across it like something half-blind but persistent

Longing leans, loose and luminous, like a pale tide under moon-washed air,

always reaching toward something just beyond the softened horizon of perception,

though what it reaches for keeps shifting,

sometimes warm,

sometimes distant,

sometimes only the feeling of direction itself changing its scent

Exhaustion exhales across everything in heavy, slow pulses,

like warm fog settling into low ground,

thinning what it touches without fully erasing it,

and each return of it feels more textured,

more layered,

as if fatigue itself has depth, ridges, sediment, a geography of diminishing brightness

Distance descends like a diplomatic mist—cold, fine-grained, silvered at the edges—

offering separation that still allows touch to feel imagined,

and protection that still carries the taste of removal,

and with each return it feels closer to the skin while simultaneously dissolving further from certainty

And so the spiral continues without announcement:

confusion circling coherence in glassy widening loops,

loss brushing against presence in softened,

dust-lit passes, longing tracing and retracing pale arcs through dim air,

exhaustion layering itself in slow sediment, until nothing truly repeats, only reappears in

altered temperature,

altered weight,

altered light

Not resolution, not closure, not ending—

only the ongoing return of what never arrives the same way twice,

as if memory itself has become a shifting atmosphere rather than a fixed path.

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Love in absentia

is still love.

No one tells you this plainly enough.

They tell you grief is clean and brief,

a season passing through,

a prayer whispered at a graveside

before the world asks something new;

but there are losses without endings,

without coffins, dirt, or stone,

the kind that leaves a mother standing

in a crowded room alone.

Because absence is not silence.

It has footsteps. It has shape.

It lives inside the body

like a wound that won't fade with age.

It waits beside me in the grocery store,

in traffic lights at dusk,

in every sudden moment

when memory turns reflex more than trust.

I still see things I want to show you.

That instinct has not died.

A book you would have carried home,

a joke that would have made you cry

with laughter loud and breathless

the way you used to do;

and for one fractured second

I still reach instinctively for you.

Love does not become less real

because it has nowhere to land.

It still lives in folded laundry,

in muscle memory of hands,

in setting out too many plates,

in pausing at your favorite songs,

in the quiet recognition

that my heart still counts you where you belong.

People say that time is healing,

that distance softens grief,

but time has only taught me

love survives beyond relief.

It changes shape, perhaps, grows quieter,

less visible to view,

but it still blooms relentless

in everything I do.

And motherhood is stranger

than I ever understood,

because once you’ve loved a child completely

it alters every neighborhood

inside your soul forever.

Every hallway, every room

still echoes with the memory

of the lives that used to bloom.

I remember sleepy foreheads,

little socks across the floor,

one of you always asking questions,

one forever asking more

time before bed, one more story,

one more drink, one final song;

how impossible it seemed back then

that silence could grow this long.

Now years move like weather systems.

Cold fronts. Floods. Droughts. Rain.

Still I speak your names internally

like a litany against pain.

Still I love you without witness,

without audience or applause,

because real love does not vanish

simply because the world withdraws.

And if somewhere in your spirits

there remains a thread of me,

I hope it feels like warmth returning,

like standing near the sea;

I hope it feels like being known

without needing to explain,

like finding an unlocked doorway

after years out in the rain.

Love in absentia

is still love.

It is love with nowhere to rest,

love that survives on memory,

love that outlives its context,

love that continues reaching

even after being left.

And I have carried it carefully

through every silent year,

still setting a place for you

inside my heart,

still hoping someday

you will appear.

The most meaningful gift of life is time. Time to love. Time to grieve. Time to become. Time to reflect across the situations of your life — circling ideas, building scripts, understanding motivations, tracing the rivers of your own becoming.

We are taught to fear reflection. “Don’t look back,” they say, as though memory itself is weakness. But that kind of thinking is often privilege dressed up as positivity. It belongs most easily to those whose past does not continue living inside their present.

For many people, looking back is not indulgence. It is survival. It is pattern recognition. It is grief work. It is the slow and sacred act of trying to understand how we became who we are.

There is a difference between living in the past and listening to it. One keeps us frozen. The other teaches us where the river changed course. Sometimes reflection is the only way to name what happened. To understand why we stayed too long. Why we broke apart. Why we learned to shrink ourselves. Why certain wounds still ache when touched.

And what will you do when the people you love most only exist in the past anymore? Will you balk at reflection then? Or will it suddenly become sacred?

Because grief is an act of looking back. Love remembers. Love revisits. It clings and sticks. Love returns to old conversations, old photographs, old versions of ourselves and asks them to speak one more time.

We kneel beside memory like an altar. We replay laughter to hear it breathe again. We hold the past gently because sometimes it is all we have left of someone. No one condemns reflection when we call it mourning. Then remembrance becomes holy.

So perhaps looking back was never the problem. Perhaps the discomfort comes from what reflection reveals: patterns, wounds, injustices, tenderness, survival, longing, love.

To reflect is not to refuse life. It is to honor it. To say that our experiences mattered enough to be understood. That the people we loved mattered enough to be remembered. That our lives are worthy of examination, not just endurance.

The most meaningful gift of life is time.

And one of the most human things we can do with it is look back — not to stay there forever, but to gather wisdom, meaning, and love from the places we have already been.

A poem.

There are people who move through life like highways at midnight,

windows up, radio loud, refusing to glance into the rearview mirror because they have mistaken forward motion for healing,

because they have never had to carry ghosts that sit down beside them uninvited at red lights,

never had to feel memory bloom suddenly in the body like weather returning to a coastline.

But I have lived differently.

I have stood knee-deep in the river of my own remembering,

hands full of photographs softened by time and grief,

watching old versions of myself drift past like houses carried off in floodwater,

wondering which one was finally the person who deserved tenderness.

People say don’t look back

as though reflection is some kind of rot,

as though the mind circles old wounds because it enjoys suffering,

instead of because hurt demands language before it can loosen its grip around the throat.

They do not understand what it means

to replay conversations in the dark searching for the exact moment the current changed,

to hold an old sentence under the light like a shard of sea glass, turning it over and over,

trying to understand whether it cut you accidentally or on purpose.

And what arrogance it is to condemn remembrance

until the dead begin living inside your chest like lit candles you cannot bear to extinguish.

Because eventually everyone becomes holy through absence.

One day the voice you love most will only exist in recordings and memory,

arriving suddenly through the static of an ordinary afternoon while you stand in the grocery store choosing fruit,

and grief will place its hand softly against the back of your neck

and turn you toward the past again.

Then what?

Will you call reflection weakness then?

Will you shame yourself for revisiting old winters, old kitchens, old laughter spilling across the table?

Or will memory become sacred at last?

I think of mourners touching photographs like prayer cards,

of mothers repeating their children’s names into empty bedrooms just to hear the shape of love aloud again,

of widowers sleeping on one side of the bed for years because absence has weight and contour and temperature,

of all the ways human beings return, return, return

to the places where love once lived.

The truth is that memory is not the opposite of living.

It is evidence that we have lived deeply enough to be changed.

And perhaps this is what reflection really is:

not drowning in the river,

but learning its currents well enough to understand how you arrived here at all.

To look back and finally see

the child trying to survive,

the body carrying too much silence,

the person mistaking endurance for safety,

the moments of beauty that existed anyway — sunlight on sink water, laughter through exhaustion,

someone reaching for your hand before either of you understood how temporary everything was.

The most meaningful gift of life is time,

and one of the most human things we can do with it

is sit beside the river of our own becoming

and listen carefully

to everything it still has to say.

A poem.

Why was I the field set to flame,

why did love arrive and leave me changed?

Why did he take what he could not keep,

and leave me here with a grief so deep?

My children grow beyond my reach,

beyond the life I still would teach.

Like roots that stretch through stone and night,

I reach for them with all my might.

They say survive, as if that name

can quiet everything that came.

But I still wake with aching truth—

a stolen life, a stolen youth.

And still inside, despite the pain,

something refuses to be tamed.

It whispers through the wreckage: “see—

this was not meant for you. Not me.”

Why was I chosen for this fire,

for love that turned into a wire?

For hands that held, then let me fall,

and took my children, took it all?

I walk through rooms that feel too wide,

with empty arms I still cannot hide.

Their names still echo in my chest,

a prayer I cannot put to rest.

The world goes on like nothing broke,

like I am only grief and smoke.

But I was mother, I was home—

not meant to be this far alone.

And still I rage at every door

that will not open anymore.

At systems cold, at truths denied,

at how I loved, and how I tried.

If I survive this breaking tide,

it will not be because I lied—

but because somewhere in my pain,

I still believe I’m whole again.

Angry like the rain—

not loud at first,

just a pressure in the sky,

a heaviness gathering behind your ribs.

Then the break.

Sharp, sudden—

everything falling at once,

no clean edges,

no way to hold it back.

It hits hard,

like it has somewhere to be,

like it’s been waiting.

And afterward—

the quiet isn’t peace,

just the sound of everything

still dripping.

Then don’t mist it.

Don’t tiptoe around it like it might break.

If the ground is ready—

it needs a storm.

Let it build first.

That tightness in your chest,

the clench in your jaw,

the thoughts you keep swallowing—

that’s your sky going dark.

Don’t silence it.

Name it.

Out loud, if you can.

“I’m angry because—”

and then don’t edit what comes next.

Let it come fast, messy, unfiltered.

Write it. Say it. Move it through your body.

Stomp, shake, pace, press your hands into something solid.

Anger isn’t just a feeling—it’s motion that got stuck.

Then let it break.

Not controlled. Not pretty.

Rain doesn’t apologize for how hard it falls.

Cry.

Yell into a pillow.

Hit something safe.

Let your body finish the sentence your mind keeps interrupting.

Because watering the ground

isn’t about force—

it’s about release.

And when it passes—

when the storm spends itself—

you don’t force the growth.

You wait.

The soil will soften on its own.

Is the ground of your life fertile with promise—

or just tired from holding everything together?

Don’t answer gently.

If it’s ready, you’ll feel it—

that restless, electric tension,

like something underneath you is done waiting.

So don’t drizzle.

Get angry like the rain.

Let it gather—

all the times you swallowed your needs,

all the moments you shrank to survive,

all the almosts, the not-yets, the “somedays.”

Let it darken the sky of you.

Then break.

Not polite. Not measured.

Let it hit hard—

truth after truth after truth,

pounding the ground until it finally gives.

“I deserved more.”

“I needed help.”

“I’m done waiting.”

Say it like thunder—

not to destroy,

but to crack open what’s been sealed too long.

Because fertile ground

isn’t soft because it’s been protected—

it’s soft

because something finally broke it open.

So rain.

Hard enough

that something new

has no choice

but to rise.

April arrives adorned in blue; soft campaigns and polished slogans, puzzle pieces and passing acknowledgments. Awareness, they call it. As if knowing autism exists is the same thing as understanding what it means to live inside it.

So let me ask you—

Were you aware?

Were you aware that some of us wake up in our thirties and realize, all at once and in fragments that refuse to settle, that we have been living slightly out of sync with the world?

Not newly different—just newly named.

That the dissonance had always been there, humming beneath our lives like a frequency no one else seemed to hear, and suddenly there is a word for it, and suddenly there is a grief for all the years we spent trying to tune ourselves into something we were never meant to be?

Were you aware that conversations can feel sharp? Jagged, even?

Not metaphorically—but physically.

That words can come too quickly, overlap, collide, stack on top of each other until meaning gets lost somewhere in the noise?

That while someone is speaking, we are not just listening, we are tracking tone, cadence, facial expression, implied meaning, the timing of our response, the appropriateness of our reaction, and by the time we are ready to speak, the moment has already passed?

That a single conversation can leave us feeling scraped raw, like language itself has edges and that social interaction can cut like glass?

Were you aware that light and sound do not simply exist for us—they press in?

That fluorescent lights do not just shine, but flicker and hum, drilling into the skull until thought itself feels interrupted?

That certain sounds—dishes clinking, overlapping voices, a sudden burst of laughter—can feel like they pierce the skin rather than pass through the air?

That our bodies react before we can explain why; shoulders tightening, breath shortening, a quiet panic rising from somewhere we cannot name?

Were you aware that exhaustion does not always come from doing too much, but from being too much in spaces that were not built for us? That being perceived can feel like standing under a spotlight with no script?

That an ordinary outing requires invisible calculations:

• Where will I sit?

• How loud will it be?

• How long can I last?

• What is my exit?

• And that when we return home, it is not just relief we feel, but collapse?

Were you aware that routines are not preferences, but architecture?

That we build our days carefully, piece by piece, not out of rigidity but out of necessity? That a plan is not just a plan—it is scaffolding. And when plans change; suddenly, casually, without warning, it is not inconvenience we feel. It is the scaffolding collapsing mid-step, leaving us suspended, in freefall, trying to rebuild while already overwhelmed?

Were you aware that many of us live with a quiet, constant second-guessing?

That every room can feel like one we have entered incorrectly? That we replay conversations long after they’ve ended, searching for the moment we got it wrong?

That this questioning follows us into relationships where we feel too much, into friendships where we cannot quite locate ourselves, into everyday interactions that leave us carrying confusion like a small, persistent ache?

Were you aware that emotions do not always arrive with names?

That sometimes they come as sensations first: a tightening chest, a buzzing under the skin, a sudden urge to disappear. And we are left translating not just the world, but ourselves?

Were you aware that what you call “coping” is often performance?

That we learn scripts, gestures, rhythms of interaction, not because they are natural, but because they are expected? That we practice being palatable? And that over time, we can lose sight of who we are beneath what we’ve rehearsed?

Were you aware that many of us were not protected by our differences but endangered by them?

That autistic people are statistically more likely to be victims of violence, more likely to be misunderstood by authority, more likely to have our behaviors interpreted as defiance instead of distress?

Were you aware of Elijah McClain,

who was stopped while walking home, his difference mistaken for danger, his humanity overlooked in the span of a few fatal decisions?

Were you aware of Lacey Fletcher,

whose death laid bare what neglect can become when no one intervenes, when care is absent, when systems fail, when a life is left to disappear in plain sight?

Were you aware of Otis and Leon—

children whose lives were taken by the very people meant to protect them?

Not lost.

Not wandered.

Not accidental.

Killed. By their parents. Who then killed the family pets and turned the guns on themselves in a final act of cowardice.

Folded into headlines that too often search for explanations before they offer outrage.

Were you aware that we cannot even name them all?

That there is no single list, no complete record, no place where every autistic life lost to violence, neglect, or preventable death is gathered and remembered?

That some of them exist only as local news stories, buried in archives, their names never reaching beyond the places they were lost? That others were never identified as autistic at all—their differences unspoken, their realities unrecorded, their lives misfiled into categories that do not tell the truth?

That even in death, many of us are still misunderstood?

Were you aware that wandering or elopement is not disobedience, but a form of seeking?

That many autistic people move toward something—quiet, space, relief, regulation—and that the world is often not built to keep us safe when we do?

That for some of us, the world is not just uncomfortable—it is unsafe?

Were you aware that before understanding, there were labels?

• Sensitive.

• Difficult.

• Dramatic.

• Lazy.

• Too quiet.

• Too intense.

• Uncanny

• Robotic

• No empathy

• Cold

• Unfeeling

That we absorbed these words and let them shape us, carried them like quiet truths we could not disprove?

Were you aware that diagnosis, later in life, is not just an answer but a reckoning? That it brings relief, yes, but also grief for the years we were unsupported, misread, and forced to survive in ways that cost us something we are still trying to name?

Were you aware that autism is not a single story?

That it is not always visible, not always convenient, not always softened into something easily understood?

That it is a lifetime of translating a world that does not quite meet you where you are and learning, slowly, how to meet yourself there instead?

Awareness is a beginning.

But it is not enough to know that we exist. To truly understand, you must imagine what it feels like to move through a world that is just slightly

• too loud,

• too bright,

• too fast,

• too unclear

You must imagine for yourself what it is to carry that dissonance quietly, everywhere you go. To live in a body that is constantly negotiating with its environment. To move through systems that were not designed with you in mind. To wonder, again and again, if you are the problem or if the world has simply never learned how to hold you.

So I’ll ask you again:

Were you aware?

There is a sinking, stoic feeling that comes with needing help, though I do not have a clean word for it. It gathers somewhere in my chest—dense, quiet, insistent—until I can feel it pressing inward, shaping the way I move through the world. It makes me smaller inside myself. It suggests, without ever quite saying it outright, that I should take up less space, that my needs are something to be managed privately, softened at the edges, tucked away before they inconvenience anyone else. If I sit with it long enough, it begins to tell a story: that if I tried harder, pushed further, endured just a little more, I might become the kind of person who does not need anything from anyone at all.

I have spent years trying to become that person, rehearsing independence as if it were a kind of moral achievement, something I could earn through discipline or sheer will. I learned how to override my body, how to stretch myself beyond what felt sustainable, how to ignore the quieter signals in favor of louder expectations. And for a while, it would even seem to work. I could build something that looked stable from the outside—a rhythm, a structure, a life that resembled the ones I saw around me. But there has always been a pattern to it, one I did not fully understand until I began to recognize its repetition.

Every time in my life that I have pretended I did not need anyone, my life has eventually come crashing down around me. Not metaphorically, not gradually, but in ways that felt total and disorienting, as if something essential had given out all at once. It happens in cycles, roughly every five years, though the exact timing matters less than the inevitability of it. There is a point at which my body seems to intervene, where whatever I have been holding together begins to loosen and unravel, and I can no longer maintain the version of myself I have been trying to inhabit.

Autistic burnout is not gentle. It does not arrive as a quiet suggestion or a manageable inconvenience. It is consuming, disorienting, and, at times, incapacitating in ways that resist reframing. I cannot push through it. I cannot discipline my way out of it. I cannot convince my body to cooperate simply because I want it to. There is no version of effort that overrides it once it has taken hold.

I do not have the luxury of pretending that I am limitless.

My body and my mind stop me, and they do so with a kind of finality that has, in the past, felt like failure. When I was still measuring my life by independence—by how much I could carry on my own, how little I needed from others—these moments felt like personal collapse, like evidence that I had not tried hard enough or become strong enough or learned how to function in the way I believed I was supposed to.

But I have started to wonder if that framing was never quite right.

What if my body is not failing me? What if it is refusing something that was never sustainable to begin with? What if these moments, as disruptive and painful as they are, are also a kind of insistence—a refusal to continue living in a way that requires me to disappear my own needs?

Because when everything does fall apart, when I reach the point where I can no longer hold it all together, there have been people there to catch me. Not in a way that is cinematic or perfect, not without history or tension or the complicated layers that exist in any long relationship, but in a way that has been consistent enough to matter. Consistent enough that I am still here.

My family—especially my parents—have become part of that catching, though it is important to say that it was not always simple. There were years marked by misunderstanding, by distance, by the quiet friction of not quite seeing each other clearly. There were moments where I did not feel fully understood in the reality of my experience, and moments where they, too, were trying to make sense of something that did not fit easily into the frameworks they had been given.

And yet, over time, something shifted. Not all at once, not in a single conversation or turning point, but gradually, through a series of choices to stay, to listen, to adjust, to try again. What we have now is not the absence of that history, but something that has grown around it—a kind of care that feels steadier, more grounded, more attuned to who I actually am rather than who I was trying to be.

Now, when I say that I need help, there is no interrogation waiting for me on the other side of that admission. I am not asked to prove the validity of my diagnoses or to justify the limits of my body. My needs are not held up against some invisible standard of productivity and found lacking. Instead, there is a kind of quiet acceptance, a willingness to take me at my word, to trust that I understand my own capacity.

They help in ways that are both tangible and difficult to fully articulate. They help financially, in moments where the absence of that support would create a kind of instability I cannot easily recover from. They help in the practical, everyday ways that make a life livable—ways that are easy to overlook if you have never had to account for how fragile that livability can be. And they help, perhaps most importantly, by believing me. By accepting that when I say I cannot do something, it is not a failure of effort but a recognition of reality.

There is a kind of safety in being believed without having to perform your suffering. There is a kind of love in being supported without having to earn it through exhaustion or proof.

Learning how to receive that kind of care has not been simple. If anything, it has required its own kind of unlearning. To receive is to allow yourself to be seen, and to be seen carries the risk of being misunderstood, of being perceived in ways that do not align with how you understand yourself. For a long time, it felt safer to anticipate that misunderstanding, to preemptively shrink, to need less rather than risk asking at all.

But I am beginning to understand that receiving is not passive. It is relational. It is a choice to remain in connection even when that connection feels vulnerable, even when it requires you to let someone witness the parts of your life that are not polished or self-sufficient or easily explained.

For years, I believed that strength meant needing less—that if I could reduce my needs, contain them, manage them quietly, I could become more capable, more stable, more worthy of the life I was trying to build. But that version of strength was never sustainable for me. It always led back to the same place, the same unraveling, the same forced recognition that I cannot live that way without consequence.

Independence, as I had come to understand it, is a story my body refuses to let me finish.

What I am learning instead is something closer to interdependence, though even that word can feel too formal for what I mean. What I am reaching toward is the understanding that care is not a deviation from how we are meant to live, but a fundamental part of it. That needing others is not a failure of character but a condition of being human.

What my parents offer me exists within our family, but it is not limited to it. It echoes something larger, something that I have begun to recognize in other spaces, in other relationships, in the quiet ways people show up for one another without making a spectacle of it.

Mutual aid is often spoken about in the language of movements and organizing, framed as a political practice or a community strategy. And it is that. But I have also come to understand it as something much more intimate, something that lives in the everyday decisions to help, to offer, to stay present in each other’s lives without requiring justification or repayment.

It is not charity, which creates distance between the giver and the receiver. It is not conditional, dependent on worthiness or proof. It is an acknowledgment that our lives are already entangled, that our well-being is not separate, and that supporting one another is not an act of generosity so much as it is an act of recognition.

Disabled people, in many ways, have always lived within this understanding, even when it is not named as such. We build networks of care because we must. We learn how to navigate each other’s needs, how to offer support in ways that are responsive rather than prescriptive, how to remain present even when the world around us insists on self-sufficiency as the ideal.

The language that is often used to describe this—dependence—misses something essential.

Because what I am experiencing, what I am learning to accept, does not feel like a diminishment. It feels like a more honest accounting of what it takes to live a life, especially a life shaped by limits that cannot simply be pushed aside.

I am still unlearning the instinct to shrink in the face of my own needs. Still learning how to ask without apology, how to receive without immediately searching for a way to compensate, how to trust that being supported does not make me less capable or less whole.

It makes my life possible.

And when I look at my parents now, at the ways they have chosen to show up for me—not perfectly, not without the weight of our shared history, but with a consistency that has reshaped my understanding of what care can look like—I see something that I did not always know how to name.

It is not control, though it involves attention. It is not obligation, though it involves commitment.

It is protection, offered without condition.

A kind of love that does not interrogate. A kind of love that does not demand performance. A kind of love that meets me where I am and stays there long enough for me to believe that I do not have to earn my place within it.

And slowly, in the presence of that kind of care, I am beginning to understand something that once felt impossible to accept:

I could not do this alone.

And maybe none of us were ever meant to.

It began,

as so many spells do,

not with thunder or warning, but with warmth—

with a voice that felt like soft light poured carefully over the sharp edges of my life,

with words that arrived sweetened,

deliberate, as if chosen not just to be heard

but to be felt,

as if he had studied the quiet hollows inside me and learned how to fill them

with something that resembled care

so closely I did not think to question it.

He spoke in a way that made the world narrow, gently, almost mercifully,

until it was

just the two of us standing at the center of it,

and I remember thinking that this must be what safety feels like,

this steady presence, this careful attention, this sense of being seen

not in fragments, not in passing, but fully, wholly, as though I had finally been translated

into a language someone else could understand.

And when he told me I was different from the others,

I held that like something sacred,

when he said no one had ever known him the way I did,

I let it root itself inside me,

when he laughed softly at the people who had hurt me and promised he never would,

I mistook the narrowing of my world for protection rather than the beginning of its closing.

And when he called me his one and only, that seemed to carry the weight of something permanent,

something chosen,

something rare;

I did not stop to wonder how easily the words came to him,

how they settled on me like something meant to be believed rather than questioned,

how quickly I began to shape myself around them,

as though being his one and only required a kind of devotion I had not yet learned how to measure,

and his words settled on me like faith, something unquestioned and quietly absolute, something I carried without asking what it might cost me to believe it.

There is a particular kind of tenderness that does not bruise at first,

a careful shaping of reality that feels,

in its earliest forms, like devotion—

small corrections offered with a smile,

gentle reframings of memory,

questions that arrive not as accusations but as quiet suggestions

that perhaps I had

misunderstood,

misremembered,

misfelt;

and because they were wrapped in affection, in patience, in something that looked so much like love,

I accepted them, one by one, like gifts I did not yet know how to refuse.

It is easy, I think, to trust a voice that never raises itself,

to believe in harm only when it is loud enough to echo,

and so I did not recognize the way his words began to settle over mine,

layering themselves carefully, persistently,

until my own voice felt less

like something I could reach for and more like something I had once misplaced

and would surely find again if I only searched hard enough.

He would say things like, I’m only trying to help you see clearly,

and I, wanting so badly

to be understood, to be good, to be right,

would turn my thoughts over in my hands until they no longer resembled what I had first held,

would offer them back to him softened, corrected, reshaped into something more acceptable,

and when he nodded, when he smiled, when he told me yes, that’s what I meant,

I felt relief bloom inside me, warm and fleeting, like approval mistaken for peace.

There is a soft erosion that happens when your reality is gently rewritten,

when each certainty is met with a softer,

more reasonable alternative,

when your instincts are not denied outright but questioned just enough that you begin to doubt

their reliability, their validity, their worth,

until eventually it feels easier

—kinder, even—

to defer, to trust, to yield.

And yield I did,

not all at once,

not in some dramatic surrender,

but gradually, in ways so small they felt almost invisible—

a hesitation before speaking, a second-guessing of memory,

a growing habit of asking, is that right? is that how it happened?

as though my own mind required confirmation, as though I had been entrusted

with something too fragile

to hold on my own.

By then, the sweetness had begun to change, though I could not name it,

had thickened into something heavier, something that clung instead of comforted;

still, I stayed,

because leaving something that once felt like salvation

feels, in its own way, like betrayal—

because I remembered the beginning

and believed, stubbornly,

that if I could just return to it,

if I could just be the version of myself he had first loved,

everything would soften again.

He did not need to raise his voice;

by then,

he did not need to—

the work had already been done in the quiet, in the careful shaping, in the repetition of doubt

so steady and so patient

it had begun to sound like my own thoughts echoing back at me,

and I carried them with me,

these borrowed words, these quiet corrections and haunted synapses,

until they settled into the spaces where my certainty used to live.

Made themselves indistinguishable from truth.

He put me on a pedestal so high I could no longer touch the ground of who I was,

something to be admired but never held, something to remain whole and gleaming without fracture,

and when I began to falter beneath the weight of it,

when the height hollowed me out and I could

no longer balance

inside the version of me he had built,

he did not move toward me, only stood and watched as I came apart,

as I crumbled slowly into pieces that no longer resembled anything sacred,

as the ashes of me fell quietly where I had once been expected to stand,

and still he did not reach for me.

There is a moment, though it rarely feels like a moment when you are inside it,

when the spell begins to falter

—not shatter, not break, but

loosen slightly at the edges,

a small resistance rising up where there had only been

compliance,

a flicker of something that feels almost like remembering,

though you cannot yet place what it is,

and for me it came not as clarity but as discomfort,

as a quiet, persistent

unease

that refused to be soothed by the same words that had once brought me

such relief.

And still, even then, I wanted to believe him,

wanted to believe that the man who called me his one and only could not also be the one

who was slowly teaching me how not to trust myself,

because to hold both of those truths at once

felt

impossible,

felt

like trying to keep water cupped in hands that had already begun to tremble.

By the time I understood, truly understood,

the sweetness had long since soured,

had curdled into something sharp and unyielding,

and I could see, with a kind of clarity that arrives too late to prevent the harm,

how thoroughly I had been rewritten,

how carefully my edges had been softened,

how completely I had learned to doubt

the very instincts that might have led me out sooner,

how he had called me his one and only while knowing,

even then, that he did not love me,

how the words had never been a reflection of truth

but a tool, a sharpening, a spell,

and how I had lived inside them as though they were something solid,

something real,

long after they had already hollowed me out.

Breaking the spell was not a single act of defiance,

not a clean, decisive moment of

walking away,

but a slow and trembling reclamation of language—

a relearning of what it meant to trust the first voice that rose inside me

before it could be corrected, before it could be

reshaped

into something more acceptable.

It has taken years to untangle what was said to me

from what is true,

years of speaking softly to myself in ways I was

never spoken to then,

years of practicing belief in my own

perceptions, my own

memories, my own

needs,

as though they are something worthy

of care

rather than something to be refined.

And even now, there are moments when the old words return,

familiar, persuasive, dressed again in the softness that once made them so easy to accept,

but I have learned, slowly, imperfectly, to meet them with something else—

with my own voice,

still unsteady but no longer absent,

with the quiet, radical act of saying,

no, that is not what happened,

no, I am allowed to trust myself,

no, I do not need to be made smaller to be loved.

The spell did not break all at once.

It unraveled, thread by thread,

until what remained was not silence,

but the beginning of something I am still learning to call

my own voice.

Connection as an autistic can feel unsafe, and sometimes understanding comes too late. I am learning to find clarity and trust myself even in the midst of social erosion.

Not just someone to talk to, but someone I could meet—mind to mind, idea to idea—without the quiet undercurrent of being evaluated, corrected, or misunderstood. Someone who might understand the way I move through the world, or at least respect it.

I have spent years learning how to recognize when something feels “off.” Not because I was naturally good at it—but because I had to be.

For most of my life, I didn’t realize that the subtle discomfort I felt in conversations had meaning. I assumed confusion meant I was missing something. That if I just listened harder, thought more carefully, tried to understand better, I would eventually arrive at the same place as everyone else.

But I wasn’t missing anything. I was feeling the shape of something that wasn’t being said.

Autistic people are often described as lacking social awareness. But I don’t think that’s entirely true.

I think many of us are aware—deeply aware—but we are taught not to trust what we notice unless it can be explained in the same language everyone else uses. And when the language is built on subtext, hierarchy, and implication, that leaves us at a disadvantage.

Because what do you do when something feels wrong, but no one will name it?

What do you do when someone is kind—but also condescending? Friendly—but also dismissive? Engaged—but only as long as they remain the authority in the room?

You learn to doubt yourself.

I have had friendships that lasted years—decades, even—where I later realized I was not being treated as an equal.

I was pressured into a sexual situation with a friend and her husband, only to be told later that they felt it was a form of assault. Assault against me! I was flabbergasted and all the more confused by the situation when that detail came out years later. Why did they feel as if they assaulted me? Were they manipulating me that whole night? The whole friendship?

I was manipulated in my marriage, where pick-up-artist techniques were tested on me, and even after I fell in love, I endured verbal and emotional abuse. My children were taken during separation and divorce, leaving me to navigate loss and grief while still trying to understand who I could trust.

I have had a friend from school who, looking back, had been subtly mocking me for years. I didn’t realize it at the time. I didn’t understand why certain interactions left me feeling off. Only after self-identifying as autistic in my late twenties did the memories rush back and make sense. It wasn’t me. It was them.

There is a particular kind of grief that comes with this. Not just the loss of a person, but the loss of what you thought the relationship was.

The conversations you believed were mutual.

The connection you thought was real.

The safety you assumed was there.

And when that illusion breaks, it doesn’t just change how you see that one person. It changes how you see yourself.

You start to ask questions like: How did I not see this? How many other times has this happened? Can I trust my perception at all?

And slowly, without meaning to, the world becomes less safe. Not because everyone is unsafe—but because you no longer know how to tell the difference.

This is how social isolation begins. Not always through rejection, but through erosion.

Through repeated experiences of being misread, talked down to, or subtly positioned as “less than.” Through realizing that what feels like connection on your end is not always mirrored on theirs.

So you pull back. You share less. You test more. You stay quiet where you once would have spoken freely.

Not because you don’t want connection—but because connection has come with a cost.

And yet, there is something else happening, too. Something quieter. Steadier.

A kind of recalibration.

Because over time, I have started to notice something: every single time I later realized a dynamic was unequal, I had already felt it.

Not clearly. Not confidently. But it was there.

A pause.

A flicker of confusion.

A moment where something didn’t quite land right.

I didn’t lack awareness. I lacked permission to trust it.

So this is what I am learning now:

• I am no longer interested in friendships where I have to prove I understand my own mind.

• I am no longer interested in conversations where curiosity is replaced with correction, or where disagreement becomes hierarchy.

• I am no longer willing to override my internal sense of “off” just because I cannot immediately explain it.

This does not mean I trust no one. It means I am learning to trust myself first. To let understanding come in its own time. To let patterns reveal themselves without forcing clarity too soon. To accept that not every connection is meant to deepen.

And maybe most importantly— To believe that there are people who will meet me as an equal.

Not as a problem.

Not as a project.

Not as someone to interpret or fix.

But as someone to know. I still want friendship. I still believe in it. But I am no longer willing to lose myself in the process of trying to keep it.

And if that means my circle becomes smaller, quieter, more intentional, then maybe that isn’t isolation.

Maybe it’s the beginning of something safer.

Happy Anniversary, My Love

The roses sit on the windowsill

of your hospital room.

I’m the first who’s ever bought you flowers.

Do you know how needed you are?

Do you know how your presence steadies mine?

And now you are the fragile one —

laid bare,

winded,

human.

The best anniversary gift you’ve given me

is this:

the grace of caring for you

as faithfully

as you have always cared for me.

🌹

Friends,

Last week, Steven was rushed into emergency abdominal surgery for a rare internal hernia. It was sudden and serious. We are incredibly grateful the doctors caught it in time and that he is now home recovering.

He will be out of work for at least six weeks.

Steven is our main breadwinner. He is also my primary support at home. Because I’m autistic, I’m only able to take on short-term contract work, which means our financial stability depends largely on his income. With him unable to work, we’re facing medical bills on top of rent, utilities, groceries, and follow-up care.

This isn’t easy to share. Steven is the person who shows up for everyone else. He never misses work. He helps family and friends without hesitation. Now he needs time to heal, and we need help carrying the gap his absence from work creates.

I’m raising funds to cover his medical expenses and our essential living costs while he recovers. If you’re able to give, it would mean more than I can say. If not, sharing this or keeping Steven in your thoughts helps too.

We’re thankful he’s here. Now we just need a little help getting through these next six weeks.

Below is the link for the GoFundMe but you can also support us by buying a subscription to either of my Substack publications.

https://gofund.me/fcfad082c

Thank you for your ongoing support. It truly means everything to me.

Author’s Note

This essay draws from my experience of being late-diagnosed autistic and ADHD and revisiting my psychological evaluation years later. I include both a clinical rewrite and a neurodivergent-affirming reinterpretation to show how language shapes what we are allowed to know about ourselves. This piece is not an argument or a guide, but an act of translation — offered for anyone who has lived with difference in their body long before they had words for it.

For most of my life, none of this arrived in my mind as concepts.

There were no words like autism or neurodivergence or executive dysfunction. There were no diagnostic criteria, no checklists, no clean explanations. There were only sensations — internal, cellular, wordless.

I could perform connection, but I couldn’t rest inside it.

That difference followed me everywhere: socially, romantically, educationally, professionally, legally. I didn’t walk through my life thinking something was wrong with me. I wasn’t hunting for a deficit. What I felt instead was dissonance; a persistent, embodied sense that what life was and what life was supposed to feel like did not align inside my body.

People described work, love, friendship, and belonging as if these things had a natural rhythm. My nervous system responded as if everything required vigilance. Effort. Bracing. I learned how to move through the world by watching, copying, anticipating. I could do the things — show up, participate, succeed on paper — but I never softened into them. I endured.

Difference didn’t arrive as an idea. It arrived as tightness. Exhaustion. Overwhelm. A low-grade alarm that never fully shut off. A constant and determined vigilance.

It lived in my cells long before it lived in language.

I didn’t begin to suspect autism because my life collapsed in some obvious way. I began to suspect it because my body never stopped telling the same quiet dissonant story.

Around 2018, the word drifted closer. By 2019, I was convinced, not because of a clinician, but because I found a list online: traits of autism in women. I can’t find that list now. There’s so much more information available that it’s been buried under better graphics and newer frameworks. Whole websites and coaching systems built for late diagnosed people like myself.

But at the time, that list didn’t feel like education. It felt like recognition.

It didn’t argue with my lived experience. It didn’t tell me I was mistaken. It matched the way my nervous system had always moved through the world. I wasn’t looking for an explanation. I was looking for something that didn’t contradict what I already knew.

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When I eventually underwent a comprehensive psychological evaluation in 2021, I wasn’t sitting there inventorying my past. I wasn’t narrating every relational rupture or professional burnout. The evaluation wasn’t asking how it felt. It was measuring, observing, scoring.

I showed up with a binder full of experiences, something still resting on my book shelf, but they didn’t ask to see it. Instead they observed me from the outside looking in.

Years later, when I reread the report, I decided to do something unusual. I rewrote it twice.

First, I condensed it, (with the help of AI) preserving its tone, its authority, its cold clinical language. I wanted to see myself exactly as systems often see people like me.

Here is that version.

Psychological Evaluation Summary (Condensed Clinical Language)

Name: Lindsay Douglas
Date of Testing: 11/05/2021

Lindsay Douglas is a 33-year-old individual who self-referred for psychological evaluation to assess cognitive, emotional, personality, and neurodevelopmental functioning. Procedures included clinical interview, behavioral observations, standardized cognitive and achievement testing, self-report inventories, and autism-specific assessment.

Behavioral observations indicated sporadic eye contact, repetitive motor behaviors, restricted interests, and emotional lability. Cognitive testing revealed Average to High-Average intellectual functioning (FSIQ = 126). Academic testing showed strengths in reading and spelling with a significant deficit in math computation. Executive functioning measures suggested global impairments across attention, planning, initiation, organization, flexibility, and emotional regulation.

Self-report measures indicated Severe depressive symptoms, Moderate to Severe anxiety, and lifelong attentional and impulsive difficulties consistent with ADHD. Sensory assessment revealed low registration, sensory sensitivity, and avoidance. Autism-specific assessment demonstrated deficits in social-emotional reciprocity, nonverbal communication, and restricted interests.

Personality assessment reflected dependency traits, emotional instability, interpersonal dysfunction, maladaptive coping strategies, and substance use concerns.

Diagnoses:
Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, Combined Presentation
Autism Spectrum Disorder, Level 1
Generalized Anxiety Disorder
Major Depressive Disorder, Recurrent, Moderate

Overall results indicate neurodevelopmental disorders with significant emotional distress, executive dysfunction, sensory processing abnormalities, and maladaptive personality features contributing to impaired functioning across domains.

That report was not wrong.

But it was not complete.

Because nowhere in that language was there room for why my hands moved the way they did — to regulate, not to distract. Nowhere did it say that returning to familiar topics grounded me. Nowhere did it say that my so-called rigidity was how I survived environments that overwhelmed my senses. It did not say that I had learned to perform normalcy without ever feeling safe inside it.

So I rewrote it again.

This time, I kept the findings, but I translated them into a language that included my internal experience. I’ve added bold and italics for emphasis.

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Neurodivergent-Affirming Interpretation

This evaluation reflects a nervous system that is highly sensitive, deeply perceptive, and easily overwhelmed by unstructured or overstimulating environments. Cognitive testing indicates solid intellectual capacity, with particular strengths in verbal reasoning and processing speed. Difficulties with math and executive functioning are not indicators of low ability, but reflect attentional variability, working memory load, and the effort required to sustain focus in systems not designed for this cognitive style.

Sensory processing patterns suggest heightened sensitivity and a need for intentional regulation. Repetitive movements, focused interests, and predictability function as stabilizing strategies rather than deficits. Emotional intensity and anxiety are best understood as responses to chronic overstimulation, unmet support needs, and prolonged invalidation.

Social communication differences reflect a distinct processing rhythm rather than lack of awareness or care. Executive functioning challenges align with ADHD and autistic burnout, not lack of motivation or effort. Overall, this profile reflects a neurodivergent individual whose distress is contextual, relational, and systemic — not intrinsic.

Support needs center on accommodation, predictability, sensory regulation, and environments that allow for pacing, clarity, and recovery.

Reading that version didn’t give me new information.

It gave me permission.

The diagnosis didn’t explain my life. It translated it.

Late diagnosis doesn’t arrive as clarity first. It arrives as grief. Relief. Anger. Tenderness. A reorganization of memory. You don’t suddenly understand everything — you suddenly understand that you weren’t imagining it.

That the friction had a source.
That the effort had a reason.
That the alarm wasn’t a personal failure.

I did not come to autism through theory or deficit. I came to it through embodiment.

Through the feeling of standing in rooms that never quite held me. Through relationships I could sustain but not inhabit. Through a body that never stopped negotiating with a world that felt one step too loud, too fast, too much.

Language arrived late. But the knowing was always there.

And once I stopped asking myself to override that knowing, once I stopped treating my nervous system as something to correct, I didn’t become someone new, I became someone I could finally rest inside.

I could write so much more about my late diagnosis and evaluation but I want the evaluation language to speak for itself. What has given my life meaning has also brought grief. What has prompted the best mental health in my life has also left me more isolated and lonelier than when performance was my coping mechanism. Going from thinking and believing that change was right around the corner for me if I just tried hard enough to understanding things would always be this hard isn’t exactly an insight that breeds confidence.

If you are navigating late diagnosis and have an overwhelming sense of grief as you stare at the cold clinical language presented to you after an evaluation, you are not alone.

Thank you for reading.

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A little step,

a sweet embrace,

a hand to hold,

a smiling face.

The breath between us,

the shining sun,

earth's great mysteries,

every one.

We're not so different,

you and I.

We're part of earth,

and sun, and sky.

We're part of life,

and birth and faith.

We're part of illness,

pain, and death.

If we could see

how close we are,

there's not much difference

between near and far.

If we could hold our

hands out, wanting;

finding meaning,

leaving haunting.

Maybe there is hope for us.

Starting over.

Building trust.

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Otis.

Leon.

Two small suns,

stories just beginning,

dawn left unfinished.

Small shoes by the door.

The world keeps moving.

Silence answers first.

They were alive only days ago.

Big hearts, big needs, big smiles.

They were precious, they are precious.

They seize this moment to stare into the cameras and murmur words like, “We understand why they did it.”

As if understanding is a balm.

As if explanation is not already a blade.

They gnash their teeth, gnaw on the bones of disabled lives, picking them clean for meaning.

They consume every damnable reason they can find—fatigue, overwhelm, systems stretched thin, anything that might make it reasonable to murder Autistic children.

Their mouths are full of empathy for the killer.

Their hands are empty of justice for the dead.

They speak of burden.

They speak of strain.

They speak of tragedy as if it arrived by weather, uninvited and blameless.

As if it did not crawl out of a culture that has long rehearsed which lives are expendable.

Their breath is hot with eugenic malice, even when they call it compassion.

Especially then.

Because what they are really saying is this:

some children are too much.

Some lives ask too loudly to be kept.

Some endings are easier to swallow than the work of care.

They do not mourn Otis.

They do not mourn Leon.

They mourn the inconvenience of loving a disabled child in a world that refuses to change.

They want the story to end where responsibility begins. They want mercy without reckoning. They want to look away while still feeling kind.

But there is nothing kind about a society that understands murder before it understands disabled life.

There is nothing humane about a grief that circles the killer and never reaches the child.

Autistic lives are not cautionary tales.

They are not arguments.

They are not metaphors for collapse.

Autistic lives should have punctuation.

They should finish.

They should not be cut short so the world can keep its hands clean.

My lovely readers,

Thank you so much for One Year of writing, reading, laughing, pondering, and reflecting here on Substack. Because of your wonderful readership, I have decided that a monthly roundup newsletter is something that would be beneficial to post. Something to gently roundup all the different things I’ve been working on and letting you into my world and the various goings on within.

I will link you to my most recent posts this month. I will also be linking some of my favorite creators and writers here as well who have inspired me this month. Lastly, I will be introducing my new podcast: Love Letters to Society. A place where I can reflect out loud about current events, new discoveries, and read some love letters to you, my readers.

I had hoped to be presenting you all with something more substantial for my first roundup post, but on second thought, I’m realizing this will actually be a really beautiful post.

Please keep commenting on, reading, and sharing my work. It means the world to me. thank you!

1,047

That’s the number of words I’ve written for my poetry book I would like to self publish either by the end of this year or early 2027. It feels good to get started! Writing is a discipline and a skill and something I always found came easy to me. I’ve found a home here on Substack where traditional social media failed me and exiled me. Here, I can be myself. I can be divergent. I can be weak. I can fail and still succeed.

Right now my poetry book is simply titled ‘POEMS’ but I am open to suggestions. So please feel free to comment your ideas for the name of my poetry book below. I love thought provoking and interesting wordplay!

Thank you for your support in 2025. It means the world to me that 498 people subscribe to read the words that I write on an ongoing basis. May love and light bless each and every one of you in 2026. Here is to a wonderful year!

January’s Posts

In case you missed any of my posts from January. It was a poetry heavy month this year. Thank you for reading and enjoy.

In case you didn’t know, I also write Open Letters and poetry to my two estranged teenage daughters on my other publication, Dear Two Daughters.

Dear Two Daughters

Borrowed Warmth

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5 months ago · 4 likes · Lindsay Douglas (they / them)

Dear Two Daughters

Baby Dreams and Christmas Trees

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5 months ago · 4 likes · 2 comments · Lindsay Douglas (they / them)

Inspired Reads

The following is a list of posts and their writers that have inspired me in some way this past month. I will link to the given post and give a short description of why I am promoting them and what inspired me.

#1. In this article writes intricately about gender as a colonial construct. She bridges the gap between feeling and language, subtly weaving you into her perspective, especially as an Autist.

The AutSide

The Last Person Before Gender, the Fractured One, and the First Child of the Next World

Gender was not always real. It was imposed, made into law, turned into a cage. But what was created can be unmade. There was a time before gender—there will be a time after. We are the ones meant to carve the path between them…

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a year ago · 13 likes · 1 comment · Jaime Hoerricks, PhD

#2. In this post, spoke about grief in such a beautiful, reflective way. I found myself near tears, not only of grief but of joy and laughter, a few times throughout. Her writing is refreshing and thoughtful.

WorkmanShit

I Turned Myself Off for One Year - and All I Got Was Lousy Enlightenment!

The coffee was still warm when I became a half-orphan. Is there even a word for that? The Germans have one: Halbwaise…

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5 months ago · 79 likes · 121 comments · Neela 🌶️

#3. In this excellently crafted article writes about Project 2029 and asks what it would look like for progressives to plan with the same seriousness as their opposition. It invites collective, grassroots work toward a concrete agenda for the next administration.

Tom’s Substack:The Voice of the Resistance.

Project 2029:

They had a nine-hundred-page blueprint ready before the election even happened. Nine hundred pages of exactly what they would do with power, who would do it, how it would happen, which regulations would fall first. The conservative movement spent years on this. They paid people. They organized working groups. They built something comprehensive and rut…

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5 months ago · 94 likes · 63 comments · Tom Joad

Love Letters to Society: New Podcast

I’m quietly working on a new audio project called Love Letters to Society — a podcast where I speak aloud the kinds of reflections I’m usually writing here: about culture, current events, technology, art, grief, and the strange emotional weather of living through this moment in history. It’s not commentary or debate, but a series of thoughtful letters — acts of noticing, witnessing, and care. I’ll be releasing the first episode next month, and I’d love for you to listen if this kind of slow, reflective space feels nourishing to you.

Thank you for your ongoing support. I am looking forward to making this year even more special and memorable than last year.

I will be working on releasing some poems from my new book here and there. If you care to support my writing, subscriptions or donations are always welcome.

With care,

Lindsay Douglas

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She carries questions
like pockets full of shells
some smooth,
some still humming with the sea.

She did not gather them on purpose.
They found her
while she was busy looking at clouds,
while her hands were empty
and open.

Each one is small enough
to be overlooked,
yet heavy with elsewhere.
A geography of listening.

When the world grows sharp,
she presses one to her ear
and hears not answers,
but tides;
arriving, leaving,
arriving again.

They tell her nothing urgent.
Only this:
wonder is not a problem to solve.
It is a place to stand.

And so she walks on,
pockets softly clinking,
leaving a faint salt-song behind her,
the future leaning close,
trying to listen.

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The sound that stayed

I was thirteen when the towers fell—

watched them fold on a classroom TV,

ash blooming like a second sky.

No one called it trauma then.

No one called me anything at all.

I was undiagnosed,

a body tuned too high,

absorbing impact without insulation.

That night, my fear leaked out of me

while I slept.

Shame came later.

It always does.

Now I wake to death in my palm

a man shot in the street,

names scroll faster than grief can form.

Violence delivered before breakfast.

I carry it with me to the kitchen,

twist open a can of biscuits

and the pop splits the air

my nervous system dives for cover

like it always has,

like it learned to do in 2001.

Gunshot.

Collapse.

Compressed dough.

The body does not rank horrors.

It only knows sudden endings.

It only knows the world can rupture

without asking permission.

Somewhere between the towers

and the timeline,

between the wet sheets

and the warm oven,

I am still trying to teach my body

that morning is allowed to be safe.

Maybe that’s why the phone feels dangerous.

Too many collapses.

Too many sounds that stay.

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This is Part III of a three-part series on pleasure, gender, and survival. To read Parts I and II, please click below.

This series began with a freeze.

With joy that learned to halt in order to survive. With desire treated as evidence, touch treated as threat, and the body taught early and repeatedly that staying present could carry consequences.

The first essay named the moment joy froze: when desire was criminalized and sensation became surveilled. The second named the structure that required that freeze. Purity culture not as belief, but as technology—a system that trained bodies to override their own signals, outsourced discernment to authority, and punished deviation while calling it care.

What comes now is not recovery. It is what happens when a body that has been trained to erase itself begins, slowly and unevenly, to receive different information. There is no healed body waiting at the end of this process. There is no after.

I was taught that pleasure comes later. After healing. After repair. After repentance. After the body has proven it is no longer dangerous, no longer disordered, no longer in need of correction. This story depends on the idea that healing ends. It does not.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, writing from a Potawatomi worldview, reminds me now that care is not something completed and set aside. It is a practice of ongoing reciprocity—something tended, something returned to. Healing, in this sense, is not a destination but a relationship. One that deepens rather than resolves.

There is no moment when the body graduates from pain into joy. There is no healed body. There is only continued tending. For autistic bodies especially, healing is not linear because regulation is not linear. Safety does not arrive once and stay. It flickers. It comes and goes. It must be re-established again and again through lived experience, not intellectual reassurance.

Pleasure is part of that tending. Not as reward. As condition.

Pleasure Is Information

For an autistic body, this is not metaphor. It is a nervous system reality.

Pleasure is tactile, affective information that signals to the nervous system that safety has arrived. Not everywhere and not permanently. But here, now.
Enough to stay. This is co-regulation.

Polyvagal theory describes how the nervous system continually scans for cues of safety or threat, organizing our capacity for presence, connection, and rest accordingly (Porges). When desire has been criminalized and touch has been punished, the nervous system does not forget how to want.

It just learns to protect itself. Joy doesn’t disappear. Joy freezes.

Frozen joy doesn’t thaw because someone explains that things are different now. It thaws through repetition; through experiences that contradict old training without demanding trust all at once. Again. And again. And again.

This is why somatic practice without pleasure does not heal autistic bodies. It conditions them.

Somatic work that excludes pleasure—movement without desire, stillness without safety, breath without choice—becomes athletics. Fitness. Endurance. Another site where the body is asked to perform regulation without receiving it.

Regulation without pleasure is not neutrality. It’s just discipline with softer language.

Regulation Without Co-Regulation Is Self-Erasure

There is a dangerous misunderstanding embedded in many contemporary trauma frameworks: the idea that regulation is something one should achieve alone:

• Self-regulate.

• Manage your nervous system.

• Contain your responses.

• Soothe quietly.

For bodies trained under purity culture, this instruction lands on already-fertile ground. We were taught to self-monitor. To override sensation. To disappear without disruption. To erase.

When regulation is severed from relationship, it stops being care and becomes containment. A privatized solution to what is, at its core, a communal need. Co-regulation is not optional for autistic bodies. It is how safety becomes real.

Research on affective touch shows that safety is registered not only through sensation but through context: through whether touch is mutual, attuned, and free from coercion. The nervous system listens not just to hands, but to meaning. To intention.

Without co-regulation, regulation becomes another way of erasing need. Of erasing self. Without pleasure, somatic practice becomes obedience. It is behaviorism turned inwards.

Gender as Regulation

For me, pleasure could not survive inside the gender I was assigned.

This is not because femininity itself is wrong, but because the version of femininity I was trained into required constant performance. Constant vigilance. It demanded modesty that erased sensation, softness that did not allow need, submission that collapsed vulnerability into silence. It trained me to be legible rather than real.

My nervous system could not regulate while performing legibility. Accepting my gender did not simply mean coming out as nonbinary. It meant letting go.

Letting go of inherited forms of femininity that restricted my ability to be present in my own body. Letting go of gestures, postures, and expectations that required me to stay small, agreeable, readable. Passive.

Those traditions did not preserve femininity. They diminished it.

Femininity and masculinity are not forces that act on bodies. They are constructs—projections humans have built and mistaken for truth. When enforced narrowly, they demand compliance at the expense of sensation.

A narrow view of gender produces narrow nervous systems. When I stopped asking my gender to resolve, my body stopped bracing. Pleasure did not fully arrive in my life until my gender did. It not only gave me my identity, but it gave me permission. It identified a need I didn’t know I had.

Divergence as Home

My nonbinary and Two-Spirit identity is inherently divergent. It does not resolve, stabilize or aim for coherence. That divergence is not incidental to my healing. It is central to it.

My nervous system requires spaciousness. Ambiguity. Permission to move without explanation. Before I came to terms with my gender, pleasure would arrive and then retreat. Touch could be regulating one moment and destabilizing the next. My body was trying to survive inside a form that did not fit.

Transition, for me, was not merely cosmetic or theoretical. It was deeply somatic. I needed to change parts of my body to inhabit it safely. I needed my reflection, my shape, my presence to stop signaling danger to my own nervous system.

Only then could pleasure begin to stay. This is why my transness cannot be separated from my capacity for joy. Because pleasure does not happen alongside my gender, it depends on it.

Pleasure Is Relational

And pleasure is not solitary. Co-regulation requires another living being—human, animal, or ecological—willing to meet the body without demand. The nervous system learns safety through being received.

When my partner recognizes my gender gently, not as a performance, not as self-correction, not as re-stabilization, then and only then does my body not brace for impact. When my body does not brace, desire does not have to freeze. Joy can reveal itself. Pleasure can begin.

This is not gender affirmation as an ideology. Its co-regulation as physiology and practice.

A Practice, Not a Possession

I am pansexual. I am nonbinary. I am in an open, ethically non-monogamous relationship with my long-term partner.

These are not declarations of freedoms I exploit. They are accommodations for my fragile nervous system. They are accessibility for my disabled nervous system. They create conditions where refusal is legible. Where desire is allowed to change. Where pleasure is not required to prove anything.

Even now, pleasure is not guaranteed. Some days it arrives. Some days it doesn’t.

Healing continues either way.

What I am unlearning is the belief that pleasure must justify itself—that it must signal recovery, progress, or wholeness. Pleasure does not owe trauma a narrative arc. Pleasure is not indulgence. It’s information. It’s the embodiment of knowledge. The manifestation of creative power. It’s the evidence of thawed joy.

It tells the body when it can soften. When it can stay. When sensation no longer requires collapse or compliance. Survival that excludes pleasure is survival that expects disappearance. Self erasure is suicide for autistic bodies.

No After, Only Alongside

This series began by naming frozen joy. It moved through the systems that demanded that freeze and punished its refusal. It ends here by refusing the lie that healing must finish before joy is allowed.

There is no after.

There is only the ongoing work of building conditions where desire can arrive safely—where gender can remain expansive, where regulation is shared, communally, where pleasure is trusted as wisdom.

There is no healed body.

There is only a body in relationship to others.

A Blessing for Unfinished Healing

May pleasure walk beside your pain.
May safety arrive in moments and be enough.
May your body be believed when it hesitates.
May regulation be shared, not demanded.
May gender remain wide enough to hold you.
May joy return not as proof, but as companion.

Amen.

References

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Milkweed Editions, 2013.
https://milkweed.org/book/braiding-sweetgrass
https://www.robinwallkimmerer.com/

Porges, Stephen W. “The Polyvagal Theory: Phylogenetic Contributions to Social Behavior.” Physiology & Behavior, vol. 79, no. 3, 2003, pp. 503–513.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12954445/

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