You were always reading. You had a book in every room, at every meal, at every family gathering that was too loud and too much and somehow also not enough. Adults praised you for it and your parents told the story with pride the way other parents talked about athletic trophies. She was always so advanced. He just loved to learn.
You accepted this framing because it was the only one being offered, and because it felt better than the truth, which you didn’t have words for yet anyway.
Here is one possible truth: you weren’t just advanced. You were gone. Books were the most socially acceptable method of leaving that anyone had ever handed you. A child who is loud gets redirected. A child who is reading gets called gifted. No one stops a child who appears to be learning, which meant that for a neurocomplex child, reading offered something rare: socially approved disappearance.
And yet the curiosity and complexity was also real, the love of ideas and worlds that moved at the speed your mind actually wanted to move. For many people the honest answer is both, and the ratio shifted depending on the day and the particular flavor of overwhelm on offer. Those two things don’t cancel each other out.
And then at some point, for many of the same people, the books stopped. Not dramatically, not all at once, but quietly. The nightstand book that hasn’t moved in months. The saved articles that produce guilt rather than anticipation. The reading life that was once the most reliable thing about you, now mostly absent or just out of reach. For others the pattern never stopped, it just changed shape, migrating into research spirals and podcast queues and the browser tab that opens before you have consciously decided to open it. The exit door is still there. It just looks different now.
If any part of that lands with more recognition than comfort, you’re in the right place.
Socially Approved Disappearance
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