My childhood was shaped by difficulties – emotional instability, and the quiet weight of growing up autistic without knowing it. Without the language or diagnosis to understand my experiences, I carried that confusion alone.
I was existing. Survival became my education. I learned how to stay functional in environments that required constant emotional regulation. Like many autistic children growing up without knowing, without understanding and without the emotional support, I relied on myself. Independence was not a choice: it was a necessity when you're navigating life with an invisible disability.
Over time, that survival shifted into something else. I learned how to stay small. I learned that taking up less space felt safer. My needs were background noise. This is a common trauma response, especially when the nervous system remains in constant survival mode.
Existing quietly became my protection.
That way of surviving didn't end with my childhood. It followed me into adulthood. With autism, I move through life with emotional distance – not because I don't care, but because autism dictates how I live.
For many late-diagnosed autistic adults, emotional distance is a form of self-preservation. There is a grief in realising that survival kept me alive, but it has also kept me from living my life.
Of the child who later learned she was autistic, for the child who built her life without a map, without a net, without the language for what she was carrying – the quiet weight of trauma, emotional neglect, disability, and constant survival – and who is now, at last, learning something different:
That she is allowed to rest.
She is allowed to take up space.
Allowed to exist not only in survival, but in something steadier, finally for herself.
Is this something you resonate with?
