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I want my own eyes back,

I want to see clear,

I want to forget

the shape of my fear.

I want to see beauty

and not count the cost,

to know what was taken

is not what I lost.

I want to wear dresses

and not wonder why

a stranger might look

and decide I said yes by the way that I smiled.

I want to be lovely

without being blamed,

to know I am worthy

and still remain safe.

I want to say no

and have no defense,

to know that my no

does not mean consent.

I want to trust people

without checking the door,

without asking myself

what they might want more.

I want to meet kindness

and not search for strings,

to stop expecting

the hurt that it brings.

They gave me their vision,

their cruel point of view,

and somehow I carried

their hatred as true.

I started to see

what they wanted me to see:

a body as danger,

a woman as prey.

I learned to be smaller,

to soften, to hide,

to keep all my beauty

locked up inside.

I built myself walls

and called them my shield,

but walls keep out danger

and keep hearts concealed.

I don't want their eyes.

I don't want their view.

I don't want their darkness

to tell me what's true.

My body is mine.

My beauty is mine.

My yes is my yes.

My no is my line.

I am not an invitation.

I am not a threat.

I am not what happened.

I am not their regret.

So give me my vision.

Give me my sight.

Let me see softness

and not only night.

Let me look forward.

Let me look back.

Let me look at myself

and know what I lack:

Nothing they took

could determine my worth.

I have been here

since the day of my birth.

So I will keep looking

until I can see

the person beneath

what they taught me to be.

I want my own eyes back.

I want to see true.

I want to see myself

without seeing you.

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I have spent a lot of time thinking about what rape actually does to a person. Not just what it does to the body in the moment, and not just the obvious things people associate with trauma afterward. I mean what it does to the way you understand other human beings, the way you understand yourself, and the way you move through a world that used to feel relatively ordinary.

I don't think I was the same person after I was raped in 2012.

The first thing I remember changing was my hair. I cut it all off. At the time, I don't think I could have explained exactly why I needed to do it, but looking back, I understand that I had stopped feeling any pride in my appearance. I felt like I had been too alluring, too sexual, too noticeable. Some part of me had begun to believe that there was something about the way I presented myself that had contributed to what happened, even though I knew intellectually that wasn't true.

I didn't want to be attractive anymore. I didn't want to draw attention to myself. I wanted to take away whatever I thought had made me vulnerable.

That is one of the first things rape left me with: the belief that being desirable was dangerous.

It seems irrational when I say it now, but trauma does not always produce rational conclusions. It produces protective ones. My brain was trying to find a reason for something that should never have happened, and blaming my appearance gave me the illusion that there was something I could control. If being attractive had made me vulnerable, then perhaps becoming less attractive would make me safer.

I wish that had been the end of it.

In 2013, I was raped again, and this time the person was someone I knew. He was a coworker. He told me there was a party at his house, and I believed him. I went over because I thought I was going to spend some time with people I knew, smoke some weed, and have an ordinary evening. When I arrived, there was no party. There was just him, drunk and waiting for me.

He attacked me.

I came home afterward to my husband and my two children. My husband knew where I had gone, so there was nothing suspicious about me coming home. There was no reason for him to look at me and know that anything had happened. The first thing he said to me was, "What's for dinner?"

I don't remember that moment as something my husband did wrong. He didn't know. That is what makes the memory so strange to me. Something enormous had happened to me, and then I walked back through the front door and the ordinary machinery of my life simply continued. My children still needed dinner. The house was still there. My husband was still there. I was still supposed to be a mother and a wife.

The world had not changed for anyone else, but it had changed for me.

After that, I started thinking differently about friendship. I started thinking differently about coworkers and about what it meant to go to someone's house or be alone with a man. I began questioning whether I really knew the people I thought I knew.

I had learned that danger did not necessarily announce itself as danger. It could wear the face of a friend. It could be someone whose name was already saved in my phone. It could be someone I had worked beside.

That lesson followed me.

Then it happened again in 2016. Another person, not exactly a stranger but not someone I would have considered a close friend either, took advantage of me when nobody else was around. Drugs became the excuse afterward. He was high. He didn't know what he was doing. He didn't know I didn't want it.

But I knew what I was saying. I remember saying no. I remember saying please don't. I remember telling him to stop touching me.

I guess the drugs affected his hearing.

There is something deeply disturbing about having someone explain your own violation back to you as though their intoxication somehow erased your words. As though being high means you stop being responsible for hearing another person's refusal. As though my "no" somehow became less real because he didn't want to acknowledge it.

By then, I was beginning to understand that there were different kinds of danger, but they all required me to change.

I became more cautious and more suspicious. I learned to think about people's motives instead of simply taking them at face value. I started wondering what people really wanted when they complimented me. I became careful about being too friendly, too flirtatious, too sexual, or too trusting. I worried about giving the wrong impression because I had learned that there were people willing to turn an impression into permission.

Then there was 2020.

By that point, I had experienced eight years of sexual violence in one form or another, and that doesn't even account for all the other ways men had used sex as a means of manipulation. There were men who lied to me to get me into bed. There were men who would sleep with me and then ask me for money while they were still sleeping with me. There were situations where sex and exploitation became so tangled together that I stopped knowing where one ended and the other began.

In 2020, I went on one date with a man and decided I did not want to be his girlfriend or be monogamous with him. His response was to punch me in the head repeatedly.

He then put me on his Instagram Live and laughed at me with his friends. He called another woman on video chat and mocked me with her while I was there.

Two days later, I developed vertigo so severe that I was vomiting. I went to the emergency room, where they gave me Valium and told me there was nothing they could do. I went home, and for the next two years I lived with vertigo almost every day.

Even now, when I become dizzy, my mind can take me straight back to him.

That is another thing I did not understand before all of this happened. Trauma does not always stay in the part of your brain where memories are stored. Sometimes it gets into your body. A physical sensation can become a doorway. A feeling that has nothing to do with the present can suddenly make the past feel immediate again.

And that is when I started thinking about what rape and sexual violence had actually done to me.

It hadn't simply made me afraid of being raped again. It had changed my understanding of people.

I had begun to see the world through the eyes of the people who had hurt me.

That is perhaps the most disturbing part.

The men who assaulted me saw other people through a worldview of entitlement. They saw another person's body as something they could access if they wanted it badly enough. They could turn friendship into opportunity, kindness into permission, intoxication into an excuse, and rejection into justification for violence. They could look at another human being and somehow make that person's autonomy disappear.

I never believed that way. Yet after enough experiences with people who did, I started carrying pieces of that worldview around with me.

I began assuming there was always a threat underneath an interaction. I became suspicious of men's intentions. I started wondering what they really wanted when they complimented me. I became careful about being too friendly, too flirtatious, too sexual, or too trusting. I worried about giving the wrong impression because I had learned that there were people willing to turn an impression into permission.

Every interaction became a transaction, trading my safety for a crumb of affection.

I couldn't just smile at a man anymore without some part of me wondering what he might assume that smile meant. I couldn't simply be sexy or go on a date without considering whether I was creating an expectation that I would later have to defend myself against.

I had learned to see myself through the eyes of people who believed that my sexuality was something they could use against me. That changed the way I dressed, the way I interacted with people, and the way I thought about my own body.

There were times when I wanted to make myself undesirable on purpose. I wanted to remove the possibility of being wanted because there was a strange kind of safety in believing nobody wanted you. If nobody was attracted to you, then maybe nobody would try to take anything from you. If you didn't look sexual, perhaps nobody would treat you sexually. If you made yourself smaller and quieter, perhaps you would become harder to hurt.

Of course, that isn't actually how sexual violence works. But trauma isn't concerned with whether a behavior makes sense to everyone else. It is concerned with whether the behavior feels like it might prevent the next terrible thing.

So I collected protections. I became watchful and learned to read rooms and people's expressions. I became conscious of exits and paid attention to whether someone was drinking and how much. I noticed changes in tone and became sensitive to anger, even when the anger wasn't directed at me. I learned to think several steps ahead about what could happen if a situation went wrong.

I built walls because walls had a purpose.

The problem is that eventually you forget which side of the wall you are supposed to be living on.

The same suspicion that protects you from a dangerous person can make it difficult to trust a safe one. The same instinct that tells you to keep your distance from someone who might hurt you can tell you to keep your distance from someone who loves you. The same fear that keeps you from being exploited can make intimacy feel like surrender.

That is the part of trauma that is difficult to explain to people who have never experienced it. You aren't simply afraid. You have been given an entirely different set of rules for living.

I began to understand why anxiety and depression can become so pervasive after sexual violence. Of course the world feels more dangerous when you have repeatedly experienced it as dangerous. Of course relationships become complicated when the people you are supposed to be able to trust have taught you that trust can be exploited. Of course intimacy becomes difficult when someone has taught your nervous system that closeness can be followed by pain.

My mother knows this too.

She was raped in the Air Force and became permanently and totally disabled because of military sexual trauma. I have watched her have to adjust her entire life around something another person did to her.

Eventually, I realized that I had been doing the same thing.

I had been adjusting my entire life around rape.

That is the part that makes me angry.

The person who raped you gets to leave with their life still belonging to them. You are the one who has to rearrange yours. You have to figure out how to sleep again, how to date again, how to trust again, how to have sex again if you want to, how to feel attractive again, how to walk into a room without immediately looking for danger, and how to convince your body that the danger is over.

There have been many days since 2012 when I have wished I could simply die rather than remember what was done to me.

I don't mean that I wanted my life to end. I wanted the remembering to end. There is a difference between wanting to die and wanting to be free from a pain that has followed you for years, but when that pain is pervasive enough, the distinction can become difficult to feel.

That is what I mean when I say rape damages the soul.

It gets into places that were never supposed to belong to it. It changes the way you interpret a stranger's smile, the way you hear a man's voice, the way you understand attraction, and the way you think about your own body. It changes what you believe friendship means and how much trust you are willing to give another person.

It can make you afraid of things that never frightened you before. It can make you suspicious of people you have no reason to distrust. It can make you think thoughts that are completely out of character for you.

It is almost like a cold virus of feeling, something foreign that gets inside you and spreads into places it was never invited.

And perhaps that is why I have such complicated feelings about the people who hurt me. I don't only hate what they did. I hate what they left behind.

I hate that they put their worldview into me. I hate that I have spent years learning how to see the world as though everyone is potentially capable of becoming them. I hate that they made me question whether being beautiful was safe, whether being friendly was safe, whether wanting someone was safe, and whether being wanted was safe.

They were able to walk away from the way they saw the world.

I was left carrying it.

But I don't want to carry it forever.

I don't want the person who hurt me in 2012 to decide how I feel about my appearance. I don't want the person who hurt me in 2013 to decide who I am allowed to trust. I don't want the person who hurt me in 2016 to decide whether my no is powerful enough. I don't want the man who beat me in 2020 to own my relationship with my own body every time I become dizzy.

I don't want them to be the authors of my worldview.

I know I cannot go backward and become the person I was before any of this happened. Too much has happened, and there are things I know now that I wish I had never had to learn. But maybe healing is not about becoming who I was before. Maybe it is about deciding that the people who hurt me don't get to decide who I become next.

I can learn to distinguish danger from discomfort. I can learn that caution does not have to become isolation. I can learn that attraction is not consent, and that being attractive does not make me responsible for someone else's behavior. I can learn that being friendly does not mean I have invited someone into my body, and that being sexual does not mean I owe anyone sex. I can learn that trusting someone is not foolish simply because someone else once betrayed my trust.

Maybe, someday, I can look at myself in the mirror and see my appearance as mine again. Not an invitation, not a liability, and not a reason for someone else's behavior. Just me.

Because I am tired of making myself smaller to accommodate the possibility of someone else's violence. I am tired of living inside the worldview of people who hurt me.

They taught me to see the world through fear, entitlement, suspicion, and violence.

I want my own eyes back.

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I have been raped.

I have been sexually assaulted.

I have been sexually harassed more times than I care to count.

There are things that happened to my body that I still lack the language for. Memories I packed away so carefully that I sometimes forget they are there until something cracks the seal: a news story, a sentence, a woman describing something familiar, a conversation about whether someone should have known better.

Suddenly, I am not reading about somebody else.

I am remembering.

That is what has happened while I have watched the story surrounding the Cornell Seven unfold. I have tried to understand why it makes me so sad, why I keep returning to it, why its stories and arguments settle somewhere deeper than ordinary outrage.

Part of it is simple.

I know what it is like to be violated.

But there is something underneath that grief that I have been trying to name.

I think I am grieving the betrayal of manhood.

And I want to be careful about what I mean by that.

I do not mean that men are inherently violent. I do not believe men are secretly waiting for an opportunity to hurt women. I do not believe masculinity itself is synonymous with cruelty.

I have known good men.

I have loved good men.

I have depended on good men.

I have seen men be gentle and nurturing and patient. I have watched men care for children, sit beside sick loved ones, carry someone through the worst day of their life, and quietly show up when nobody was watching. I have experienced tenderness from men that I will always be grateful for.

So this is not an essay about why men are terrible.

It is an essay about a promise.

When we teach boys what it means to become men, we give them certain ideals: strength, courage, loyalty, protection, integrity. At their best, those are beautiful things. They describe the kind of person we hope someone will become when others are depending on them.

But somewhere along the way, those ideals can become distorted.

Strength becomes the refusal to admit weakness.

Loyalty becomes defending your friends no matter what they have done.

Protection becomes protecting your own from consequences.

And brotherhood becomes closing ranks.

That is where I think the betrayal happens.

Because what happens when the man who needs to be held accountable is your friend?

What happens when you love him?

What happens when believing a woman means admitting that someone you trust may have done something you cannot reconcile with the person you thought you knew?

What happens when protecting someone you love requires you to stop protecting him from the consequences of his own actions?

That is where manhood is tested.

Not in how loudly a man can promise to protect the people he loves, but in what he does when the truth becomes inconvenient.

I have spent enough of my life learning what happens when another man's comfort is treated as more important than a woman's safety.

I know what it feels like when people do not want to hear what happened.

I know what it feels like when your experience becomes a problem everyone would rather solve than listen to.

I Know what it feels like when people become more interested in the consequences of believing you than in the consequences of what happened to you.

And I know what it is like to realize that sometimes the silence surrounding violence is not empty.

Sometimes silence is a choice.

Sometimes it is loyalty.

Sometimes it is fear.

Sometimes it is denial.

Sometimes it is simply the desperate desire to believe that someone you know could not possibly have done what you are being asked to believe.

Whatever the reason, survivors can still feel the weight of it.

That is why stories like this do not stay on television.

They enter the body.

They find old wounds.

They reach into places I thought I had already made peace with and remind me of every time my pain was inconvenient, every time someone wanted the story to be simpler than it was, every time I wondered whether telling the truth would cost me more than keeping it to myself.

And perhaps that is why I am sad.

Because I want something better from men.

Not perfection. Not the impossible expectation that every man will immediately know the truth of every accusation or perfectly understand every complicated situation.

I want men to take the promise of their own character seriously.

If your friend has done something wrong, friendship should not require you to pretend otherwise.

If someone has been hurt, listening to her should not feel like an act of betrayal against him.

If accountability costs you a friendship, perhaps the question is not whether accountability was too expensive.

Perhaps it is whether the friendship was built on something sturdy enough to survive the truth.

I think about that because I do not want to spend the rest of my life believing that men are dangerous.

I have already spent enough of my life being afraid.

I want to believe that men can be safe.

Not because they are incapable of causing harm, but because they are capable of choosing not to—and because they are capable of challenging one another when someone crosses a line.

That matters.

The man who interrupts the joke matters.

The man who notices when someone is uncomfortable matters.

The man who takes consent seriously matters.

The man who can look at his friend and say, You were wrong, matters.

And so does the man who understands that difficult situations can contain uncertainty without making compassion impossible. We can ask careful questions, seek the truth, and still remember that the person telling us they have been hurt is a human being deserving of dignity.

These things can coexist.

What cannot coexist is the idea that loyalty requires silence.

I believe accountability is one of the deepest forms love can take.

It says: I believe you are capable of being better, and I will not help you become worse by pretending you did nothing wrong.

That is a much harder kind of love than simply defending someone.

And perhaps that is the kind of manhood I want to believe in.

Not a manhood built around domination or fear.

Not one that asks men to protect each other from consequences.

But one that understands strength as responsibility and loyalty as something more complicated than taking your friend's side.

A man should be able to love another man without excusing him.

He should be able to stand beside him without standing between him and accountability.

He should be able to say, I care about you, and what you did was wrong.

That is not a betrayal of brotherhood.

Maybe it is the truest form of it.

Because I am not grieving because men are inherently bad.

I am grieving because I believe men are capable of something better.

I believe the promises we make to boys about the kind of men they can become are worth keeping.

I believe manhood can mean having enough courage to tell the truth when the truth threatens your own comfort.

And I believe we can build a version of masculinity in which protecting someone does not mean protecting them from accountability.

I have spent enough of my life paying the price for other people's silence.

I would like to believe the next generation does not have to inherit that silence.

I would like to believe they can inherit something better.

Not perfect men.

Just men brave enough to choose the promise over the performance.

Men who understand that sometimes the most courageous thing they can do for another man is refuse to look away.

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Lately I've been seeing people online ask the same question. "Where are all the tradwives twenty years later?" I'm sure it's mostly rhetorical.

But I decided to answer anyway!

They scroll through videos of young women in linen dresses kneading sourdough, homeschooling toddlers, and talking about biblical femininity. Then they wonder why they rarely hear from the women who actually lived that life and then reached middle age.

I think I might be one of the women they're looking for. I got married when I was 19 and he was 21. We wanted to do things right and in a “godly” way. I wanted a husband who loved me. He wanted a wife who did everything for him.

I'm thirty eight now. My daughters are teenagers. Long before anyone called it being a "tradwife," I was living what would now fit that label. Except we never used that word. In our home church, we called it being a “helpmeet”.

That word shaped nearly every part of my identity. A wife's purpose, we were taught, was to help her husband fulfill God's calling. We were to submit. We were to be quiet. We were to trust his leadership. Our highest calling wasn't to become ourselves; it was to become indispensable to someone else.

Women were expected to have babies, make a house into a home, and have everything in order before their husbands walked through the front door. A clean house reflected a faithful wife. A warm meal reflected a loving wife. A cheerful attitude reflected a godly wife.

Looking back, I realize there was very little discussion about what husbands owed their wives. Only what wives owed their husbands. At the time, I didn't question any of it.

I believed it with my whole heart. I really believed that God didn't give people more than they could handle. So I knew he wouldn't command women to uphold a standard they weren't capable of, right?

Right?

Every morning, I was the one who got up with the girls. We had two daughters, two years apart. I learned to function on broken sleep because that's simply what mothers did. My husband got up with them only a handful of times in our seven year marriage, and every one of those mornings felt like punishment.

Cabinet doors slammed.

Heavy sighs echoed through the house.

The girls were yelled at for acting like... well... little girls.

It wasn't simply that he disliked getting up early. It was that the entire house was made to feel the cost of asking him to help. Before long, I stopped asking. It was easier to lose sleep myself than to wake up to the tension he created.

I don't know if that was intentional.

I only know that it worked.

The same thing happened throughout our marriage. It's referred to as “weaponized incompetence” now. I didn’t have a name for it then.

I was expected to keep the house, care for the children, cook dinner, manage the invisible work of family life, and somehow do it all with joy because that's what a helpmeet was supposed to do.

If I cooked dinner while he watched the girls, I would walk back into a house that looked as though no one had done anything at all. Toys everywhere. Dishes untouched. Chaos waiting for me after I'd already made the meal.

The expectation wasn't that we shared the work.

The expectation was that I would eventually clean up whatever was left behind.

One memory still sits heavy with me all these years later.

I was in the kitchen making dinner while my husband was supposed to be watching the girls. Instead, he was in another room playing his guitar.

Somewhere in those few minutes, our toddler left a colored pencil on the floor. Our baby found it. She fell with it in her mouth and the pencil stabbed the back of her throat.

The panic of that moment is something I still remember in my body.

Thankfully, she survived.

But I remember standing there afterward thinking that I had been trying to do exactly what I had been taught a good wife should do—prepare dinner while my husband watched the children—and somehow the responsibility still landed on me.

That was the thing no one ever talked about.

Being a helpmeet didn't simply mean doing the housework. It meant carrying the mental load. Remembering appointments. Watching the children. Planning meals. Cleaning messes.

Anticipating everyone's needs before they were spoken.

And if something went wrong, somehow feeling responsible anyway.

There were beautiful moments too. I loved rocking my babies to sleep. I loved reading bedtime stories. I loved baking, decorating for holidays, making our home feel warm and safe.

I still love those things.

Domestic work was never the enemy. I just couldn't understand why I was the only one doing it.

And the problem was that I slowly stopped existing outside of it.

By the end of my marriage, our home church had become something I can only describe as cult-like. Obedience mattered more than honesty. Questioning leadership became rebellion. My own instincts were treated as something to suppress rather than something to trust.

I wasn't trying to become a tradwife. I was trying to become a faithful helpmeet. There is a difference.

One is an internet aesthetic. The other was my entire identity and a faithful spiritual calling.

When my marriage ended, I didn't just lose my husband. I lost the role I had spent years believing God had created me to fulfill.

Rebuilding meant asking questions I had never allowed myself to ask before.

Who am I if I'm not someone's helpmeet? What do I believe because I chose it, and what did I believe because I was told to? Can I still love homemaking without believing it is the measure of my worth?

Today, almost forty, I think the answer is yes.

I still believe there is dignity in caring for a home. Caring for children and lovers.

I still believe meals made with love matter. I still believe children deserve parents who are present. But I no longer believe women were created to disappear into those roles.

Partnership is not the same thing as servitude.

Love is not measured by how much of yourself you can erase. So when people ask where all the middle-aged tradwives are, I have an answer.

Some of us are still cooking homemade meals. Some of us are recovering from marriages that asked us to become less and less of ourselves in the name of becoming more faithful. Some of us are learning, for the first time, that God never asked us to disappear. We only thought He did.

People ask where all the middle-aged tradwives are. Some of us didn't simply grow older. Some of us paid for that life with our bodies.

With chronic illnesses and autoimmune disorders. With substance use disorders and failing mental health. With fatigue and burnout and chronic pain. With undiagnosed disorders and undisclosed sexualities andgender identities we don't come to terms with until later.

I'm tired now in a way that sleep doesn't fix.

Bone tired.

The kind of exhaustion that settles into your nervous system after years of carrying the emotional weight of a family, walking on eggshells, surviving abuse, and believing your value was measured by how much you could endure. It is the kind of fatigue that lingers long after the marriage ends.

People often imagine that divorce is the finish line.

For me, it was another beginning.

Family court consumed years of my life. Every hearing felt like another piece of me being carved away. The marriage had already left me depleted, but the custody battle hollowed me out completely.

The abuse didn't end when the marriage ended.

It changed shape.

There came a point when I was barely functioning. Years of chronic sleep deprivation had finally caught up with me. Then I survived another rape. My already-fragile nervous system collapsed into what I now understand was profound autistic burnout and psychological crisis.

I needed help.

Instead, my vulnerability became evidence against me.

Earlier in our divorce, I had insisted on joint custody. He had repeatedly pushed for me to take the girls full time, but I believed parenting should be a shared responsibility. Looking back, it felt as though that insistence came with consequences I never anticipated.

When I sought treatment during one of the darkest periods of my life, he filed for emergency custody. In court, my mental health was presented as proof that I was unstable. The context—the years that had led me there, the trauma, the exhaustion, the abuse—seemed to disappear.

What remained was a woman in crisis.

And that was enough.

I have spent years wondering how differently my life might have unfolded if someone had asked not only, "What is wrong with her?" but also, "What happened to her?" That is a very different question.

Today, when people ask where all the middle-aged tradwives are, I think about women like me. Women who devoted themselves to marriages they believed would last forever. Women who built homes with their own hands. Women who disappeared so completely into the role of wife and mother that when everything fell apart, there was almost nothing left to catch them.

We are here.

Some of us are rebuilding careers we never expected to need. Some of us are grieving children we are not allowed to love. Some of us are learning that surviving is its own kind of courage.

And some of us are still trying to remember the woman we were before someone convinced us that becoming smaller was the same thing as becoming godly.

Eventually, in the middle of all that exhaustion and grief, I signed over custody of my daughters.

People often ask why a mother would ever do something like that. The answer is both simple and impossible to explain.

I wasn't giving up on my children.

I was giving up a fight I no longer had the strength to survive.

He had already filed for full custody. I don't know what outcome he expected, but I don't think he expected me to sign over sole custody without continuing the battle. At that point, years of litigation, trauma, sleep deprivation, abuse, and psychological collapse had left me with almost nothing. I believed I was choosing the option that would create the least conflict for my daughters, even if it broke my own heart.

What followed was a different kind of loss.

Over time, I saw my relationship with my girls grow smaller. Visits became more difficult. I was told they could only happen under supervision, and those supervisors charged fees I simply could not afford except every few months. Poverty became another barrier between a mother and her children.

Months turned into years and distance became normal.

Eventually, after years of tension and divided loyalties, my daughters asked me to stop trying to be part of their lives. People hear that sentence and immediately look for someone to blame.

The truth is more complicated. I don't blame my daughters, although I'm sure they blame me.

Children should never have to carry the burden of adult conflict. If every interaction with one parent means more stress, more arguments, more court orders, more emotional upheaval, eventually peace starts to feel safer than connection. I understand why they chose peace, even if it came at the cost of losing me.

So I quietly exited stage left.

Not because I stopped loving them. Because loving them sometimes meant refusing to ask them to carry one more impossible burden.

People ask where all the middle-aged tradwives are.

Some of us are mothers whose children are still alive, yet absent from our daily lives. Some of us built homes that no longer belong to us. Some of us spent years believing that if we were faithful enough, sacrificial enough, submissive enough, our marriages would be safe.

Mine wasn't.

Being a traditional wife couldn't save my marriage because my husband simply did not value me.

And perhaps that should not surprise me.

When an entire culture teaches men that a wife's purpose is to serve, to submit, to endure, and to disappear into his calling, it becomes frighteningly easy to stop seeing her as someone whose inner life matters just as much as your own.

I don't believe God asked me to become smaller.

I think people did.

It has taken me nearly forty years to learn the difference.

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To the Nineteen-Year-Old Tradwife

Little sister,

before you stitch your name

into someone else's life,

leave one thread

in your own hands.

You'll be told

that love is measured

by how much you can carry,

how little you complain,

how quietly you disappear.

They'll call it virtue.

They'll call it wisdom.

They'll call it God.

Be careful

what people baptize

in His name.

Bake the bread.

Plant the herbs.

Rock the baby

through the night.

Sweep the floors.

Light the candles.

Fold the towels

clean and white.

Homes are holy.

Work is worthy.

Love can live

in simple things.

But never let them

chain your soul

to what your labor brings.

Keep your laughter.

Keep your paycheck.

Keep the dreams

you've always known.

Keep your friendships.

Keep your calling.

Keep one thing

that's yours alone.

For a cage

lined up with roses

is a cage

all the same.

Even sacrifice

can become

another name

for being tamed.

Watch the man

when life is heavy,

not when life

is sweet and new.

Watch how anger

fills a doorway.

Watch what hardship

draws from him.

Love is proven

less by flowers

than by ordinary hours,

when the dishes

fill the sink

and neither one

has slept a wink.

If his comfort

costs your freedom,

count the price.

If his leadership

requires your silence,

think twice.

If your world

grows ever smaller

while his stretches

toward the sun,

ask yourself

whose kingdom

is being built—

and for whom.

God does not

grow mighty forests

by commanding

every tree

to bend itself

into another's shadow,

never reaching

to be free.

He gives each one

its roots,

its branches,

room to drink

and room to rise.

Love should never

ask you

to become

half your size.

So marry,

if you choose.

Bake the bread.

Raise the babies.

Build a home

with weathered hands.

But marry someone

who washes dishes

without applause,

who wakes with crying children

without resentment,

who sees your heart

before your service,

and your personhood

before your usefulness.

Little sister,

if one day

you must choose

between losing yourself

and losing your marriage;

Save yourself.

Because the woman

who survives

will need someone

to come home to.

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Dearest One,

June 22 arrives and I find myself thinking less about the drugs and more about the years. Nine years is a long time to be alive. Long enough for entire worlds to disappear and new ones to emerge in their place. Long enough to become several different versions of yourself without fully realizing it is happening. Long enough to look back at a person you once were and feel both tenderness and astonishment that you survived them.

If someone had shown you a glimpse of the next nine years on the day you decided to put down the needle, I doubt you would have believed any of it. Not because the future would have looked especially glamorous, but because it would have looked impossibly full. You would have seen grief arriving in waves you could not yet imagine, with the loss of your grandfather to suicide and later your grandmother, whose death would come exactly three years and one day after his. You would have seen yourself navigating family court, spending twenty thousand dollars fighting for your children only to discover that effort and love do not always alter outcomes. You would have seen yourself surviving sexual violence, living through a global pandemic, enduring two serious car accidents, moving four different times, and carrying loneliness for years longer than you believed you could.

And yet that is only part of the story, because life has always been strangely unwilling to contain itself within tragedy. While grief was unfolding, other things were quietly unfolding beside it. A cat named Lucy would arrive in October of 2017 and become woven so thoroughly into your daily existence that it would become difficult to remember life before her. You would spend years without a license and years without a car, learning how much pride can be swallowed when survival requires it and how much resilience can be discovered when there are no other options. You would slowly rebuild your credit from a number that reflected every mistake and hardship of your past into something that reflected persistence instead. You would create homes in places that were unfamiliar and learn how to live alone, which is a different skill altogether than merely being by yourself.

There were six years in which you remained single, and I think those years deserve more credit than they are usually given. It is easy to celebrate the day someone falls in love, but much harder to appreciate the long seasons spent learning how to sit with yourself. Those years taught you how to make decisions without consultation, how to endure silence, how to survive holidays and illnesses and disappointments without a partner standing beside you. They taught you that loneliness can be survived, which is perhaps why, when love finally arrived in 2022, you were able to recognize it for what it was. Not a rescue. Not a miracle cure. Simply another human being choosing to walk beside you, and you choosing the same in return.

What moves me most, however, is not the story of your relationships or your losses but the story of your honesty. Somewhere within these years you stopped negotiating with yourself about who you were. You found language for your identity. You came out as nonbinary. Some people left because of it, and that loss was real. There is no virtue in pretending otherwise. But what emerged from that season was something far more valuable than approval. You gained a deeper relationship with yourself, and unexpectedly, a deeper relationship with God. Many people are taught to believe that authenticity and faith exist in tension with one another, but your experience has been the opposite. The closer you moved toward truth, the closer you found yourself moving toward the sacred.

Perhaps that is why I struggle to describe these nine years as a recovery story. Recovery is certainly part of it, but it is too small a word for everything that has happened. This is a story about grief and endurance, about identity and faith, about loneliness and companionship, about all the ordinary and extraordinary ways a human being can continue after believing they might not. The remarkable thing is not that you stopped using methamphetamine and heroin. The remarkable thing is that after everything that followed, after every disappointment, every funeral, every setback, every heartbreak, and every reason you were given to give up, you continued participating in your own life.

When people speak about recovery, they often speak as though it is a destination, a place someone arrives and remains. Your life tells a different story. Recovery, at least in your case, was never a finish line. It was the decision to keep returning. Returning to yourself. Returning to love. Returning to faith. Returning to hope. Returning to life even when life had become complicated, painful, and uncertain. For nine years, through every season, that has been the thread connecting everything else.

And when I look back across those 3,287 days, I find that I am less impressed by your strength than by your willingness. Strength suggests certainty. Willingness suggests courage. Again and again, life asked more of you than seemed fair, and again and again you answered by remaining present for it. You stayed for the grief, stayed for the healing, stayed for the questions, stayed for the love, stayed for the ordinary mornings and the difficult nights. You stayed long enough to become someone your younger self could scarcely imagine, and long enough to discover that a meaningful life is not built from grand victories but from thousands of small decisions to keep going.

With love and admiration,

Someone who has watched you return to life, over and over again,

Lindsay

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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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Get more from Lindsay Douglas (they / them) in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

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