There’s a version of you that lives six months from now. Maybe a year. They have a clean inbox. They meal prep on Sundays without it turning into a two-hour sensory ordeal. They don’t cry in the car before work. They can go to the birthday party, and the dentist appointment, and still have something left over for themself in the evening.
You’ve been waiting for that version of you for a long time.
You haven’t given up or announced it to anyone or anything like that. It’s the extra credit card you’re not paying off “for now.” It’s the friendship you’ve let go dormant because you’re “in survival mode” and you’ll reconnect “once things calm down.” It’s the diagnosis you got at 34, or 41, or 52, that was supposed to be the beginning of the fix. You thought: now that I know, I can finally learn how to do this right.
And you have learned things. You know what masking has cost (ok,* is* costing) you now. You know the word for why fluorescent lights make you feel like your skin is on inside out, why transitions between tasks feel like wading through wet concrete, why a to-do list with four items can somehow be four too many. You’ve read the books, found the right subreddit, maybe started meds, maybe started stimming without hiding it for the first time in your life.
But somewhere underneath all that learning, there’s still this belief you haven’t said out loud: **once I understand myself well enough, I’ll become someone who can handle this. **Handle a full-time job and a clean house and a social life and my own hygiene without a body double. Handle a “normal” life.
I need to tell you something, and it’s going to sting before it helps.
That person isn’t coming.
Not because you’re broken, and not because you haven’t tried hard enough. You have tried, harder than almost anyone around you knows, for years longer than they know.
