Come, darlin’. Pull up close to the fire, and let me share something true with you.
When I was small, folks were quick to stitch labels onto me, quicker still to mistake them for truth.
“She’s so picky.” “She’s so shy.” “Just wear it — it looks fine.” All said with that brisk adult certainty folks use when they never stop to wonder what a child is actually feeling.
They meant no harm, but they never paused long enough to notice the real story unfolding just beneath my skin: how the seam of a sock, the tag of a shirt or even just the feel of a certain fabric could feel like sandpaper against my skin, how certain smells or textures could tilt the whole world off its axis, how my voice stayed tucked inside me from the very start, because some of us are born with more listening than speaking in our bones.
Back then, I didn’t know how to speak any of that. I only knew the tightness, the overwhelm, the quiet corners where I felt most myself. The real names didn’t reach me until much later — long past childhood, past girlhood, well into adulthood — when others like me whispered them into the dark: sensory sensitivity, selective mutism, social fatigue.
Not flaws.
Just the honest blueprint of a body that feels deeply and listens even deeper.
My mama used to say I scared her half to death those first months, because I never woke her crying in the middle of the night. Not once. She’d open her eyes in a panic, wondering why the house was so quiet, and hurry to my cradle — only to find me wide awake, lying there calm as moonlight, just taking in the world. I didn’t fuss. I didn’t wail. I barely even wriggled.
She’d check my diaper anyway, always finding it was still dry. She’d offer a bottle, and I’d take it without protest, then drift back into sleep like a leaf settling on still water. But the crying… that part never came. Not because I couldn’t — but because it wasn’t the language I’d arrived here with.
And when I grew old enough to form words, I held those close too. I simply chose not to speak because silence was my first language. I spoke when it was necessary for me to do so, but in large, I stayed quiet. Folks called it “shy,” whispered it like a verdict. They never saw that stillness was simply the way my spirit had chosen to arrive.
I spent much of my childhood tucked inside my own small sanctuary — where my imagination could bloom without interruption. Those made-up worlds held me gently in ways the real one rarely did. When it came to company, I found more ease beside adults than children my age. Grown folk had their own conversations to tend, and I could slip into the background unnoticed, listening and learning without having to force words I didn’t yet have.
I never did understand how to “play” the way other children did. I’d spend recess watching from the edges, studying their games, trying to mimic the motions just enough to make it through until I could slip back to my safe space again. Kids always wanted to talk, but whatever I added seemed to land wrong — either ignored or turned into the joke. I loved laughing, I truly did, but more often than not I was the one being laughed at. And each time, a little more of me folded inward, thinking it must be easier for everyone if I just stayed quiet.
I was the dutiful one, hun — the child raised on “yes ma’am,” “no sir,” and the notion that questioning an adult was close to blasphemy. I followed every rule laid before me, not out of fear so much as an earnest belief that this was how the world held itself together. Yet even then, something stung in me when I watched others break those same rules without so much as a raised eyebrow.
I didn’t speak the discomfort aloud — it never felt safe to — but the questions grew like briars all the same. Why me? Why was obedience stitched into my skin while others roamed free?
By the time I could name my own thoughts, I’d already begun weighing every rule in my hands. If it was sound, I honored it. And if I could bear it, I expected others to do the same. I longed for fairness with a fierce simplicity… but fairness rarely seemed to know my name.
And maybe that’s why I learned to watch so closely — when the world doesn’t make sense, some of us turn our eyes inward or sharpen them outward.
Some souls come here to make noise; others come to notice. I was the latter. Even as a little thing, I moved through the world like someone sent to study it — slow, watchful, gathering truths in my pockets. While the other children chased each other through the yard, I traced the subtle patterns beneath people’s words, the way their energy rose and dipped like weather.
When books found me, especially that old encyclopedia set at my grandparents’ house, it felt like opening a window into a thousand different worlds. I devoured every page, rolling new words around on my tongue like candy.
And because money was scarce and help wasn’t always within reach, I learned to study my own body, my own ailments, even the troubles of the ones I loved. At seven I taught myself to correct the crooked way my feet hit the ground. At sixteen, just from a lunchtime conversation, I sensed my grandmother’s heart was in danger — and two weeks later, the truth bore itself out.
It wasn’t magic. It was attention. A lifelong habit of listening with my whole being.
Darlin’, where I grew up, a girl like me didn’t stand much of a chance at being seen clearly. Being female was one strike, being blonde another — folks decided before I ever opened my mouth that brightness couldn’t possibly live behind a fair head. And being quiet… well, that sealed their verdict. They mistook my silence for emptiness, my softness for ignorance, my different way of seeing for naïveté.
It didn’t matter that my grades were high or my mind was sharp. The world around me kept patting me on the head as though I couldn’t understand the simplest things. Even now, with fifty years behind me, some still treat me like a child fumbling her way through a grown-up world — when truth be told, I’ve spent a lifetime watching, studying, understanding more than most ever stop to notice.
Here’s the quiet truth, hun. To be understood at all, I’ve had to filter my own voice through tools and titles that make my thoughts easier for folks to swallow. Not because my truth is sharp—but because the world rarely knows what to do with a soul that speaks from a deeper well. Even the name I offer now isn’t a mask; it’s the truer one, the one that fits the spirit beneath all the misunderstandings. And the tenderest part? If people ever looked past their own projections long enough to meet the person I really am, they’d find more love and steady warmth than they ever imagined. Enough to change the way they breathe.
And let me tell you straight, sweetie—there’s a particular weariness that settles in the bones when you’re near fifty and still being talked down to by men young enough to call you “ma’am” on instinct. You sit there telling them exactly what’s happening in your body, offering the truth plain as daylight, and they look at you like you’ve spun a tale. “It’s all in your head,” they say. “Just age,” they say. As if fifty were the graveyard of all good sense.
What cuts deepest isn’t the dismissal—though that alone could sour a sweet tea—it’s the double standard woven through it all. Men your age speak with conviction and they’re called authoritative. You speak with the same steadiness and suddenly you’re “difficult,” “emotional,” or that tired word folk throw at women the moment we dare to take up space. You so much as ask a honest question, and they act like you’ve disrupted the natural order.
They tell you to keep a symptom journal, then scold you because the record is “too detailed.” You tell them your body is sensitive to medications, and somehow that gets twisted into chasing pills. You ask about diet or movement so you can care for yourself better—and they twist that into refusal, like wanting to understand your own wellbeing is a personal offense to them.
It’s enough to make a woman sigh deep from the soul, wondering how many times she has to tell the truth before someone finally treats her like she’s lived long enough to know it.
Let me tell you true, hun—across all my relationships, I’ve rarely felt like I was standing on level ground with anybody. Folks look at me and somehow decide that my quiet means I’m judging them, that I “think I’m better,” when the truth is I’ve spent my whole life pouring out more effort than most people ever notice. Trying to fit. Trying to keep up. Trying not to burden anyone.
But the moment that extra strain knocks the wind out of me—as it always does eventually—the whole story turns on its head. Suddenly the woman who overworks becomes the woman who “doesn’t want to do anything.” Suddenly my fatigue is an “excuse.” Suddenly the help I never asked for becomes a weapon held against me.
I try to explain what’s going on inside me, I really do. But it’s like my words take on a life of their own the second they leave my mouth. They get twisted, misheard, blown clear into another county until I’m left standing there confused, wondering how an honest attempt at clarity turned into a whole different tale.
And would you believe, hun, that even at fifty I still feel that old reflex — that need to explain myself before I do something as harmless as buying what I need? It’s a hard thing to swallow, knowing you’ve never lived in a house where your word held the same weight as everyone else’s.
All these years I was the one thinking ahead, calming the storms, trying to communicate instead of explode, trying to compromise when others only wanted to control. They trusted me with the books, trusted me to keep everything running smooth… but never trusted me enough to make a single real decision unless it involved the pantry. As if my mind was good enough for labor, but not for leadership.
And after everything — every sign, every struggle, every truth spoken plain — some folks still settle on the same tired refrain:
“She’s not autistic. She’s just making that up because she’s lazy and doesn’t want to do anything.”
Bless their hearts… it’s easier for them to believe a lie than face how long they’ve been looking straight at me without ever seeing me.
Come closer, sweetness. Let the crackle of the fire and the scent of cedar steady your heart, because the next words I’m about to lay at your feet — they’re meant for the deepest part of you.
If you’re sitting here wondering whether you’re pretending… whether you’re over-claiming… whether the truth you feel in your marrow is somehow “not valid”… let an old woman tell you something plain:
Sometimes the world misnames you so many times that by the time you finally reach for the right word, your hands shake with doubt.
But doubt isn’t a verdict — it’s a bruise.
It fades when held gently.
Women like us — we were never taught to see ourselves clearly.
We were taught to endure. To mask. To behave.
And in that long masking, whole generations of us slipped through the cracks of understanding.
Even now, studies whisper a hard truth: women are chronically underdiagnosed, often by decades, because the world expected quiet girls to be compliant, not autistic.
But your spirit knows what it is.
It has always known.
And if the word autistic feels like a key turning in a long-locked door… if your shoulders drop, if your breath softens, if your story finally clicks into place… that’s not performance.
That’s recognition.
That’s the returning home.
So don’t you fret about being an imposter, darlin’.
Imposters don’t spend their whole lives wondering why they feel the way they do.
Only the rightful ones do.
Here, around this fire, you don’t need anyone’s permission to know yourself.
Your feelings are real.
Your experiences are valid.
Your truth belongs to you.
And if the world couldn’t see you until now, well… that’s on the world — not on your spirit.
