I tell stories for a living.
I help people sift through the rubble of memory—pull out what still glimmers, what still throbs—and shape it into something true. Something that breathes. I teach others how to turn chaos into clarity. Pain into narrative. Grief into art.
Which is why this feels… ironic.
Because there are stories I haven’t told.
Not because they weren’t important. They were. But some stories don’t surface until they’re safe. Some need time. Some get buried so we can keep breathing. Others get dressed up in wit, masked by degrees, dusted with enough sparkle to pass for “fine.”
Some stories live in vaults.
Sealed.
Only therapists and emotional sadists dare to try the lock.
Even then, I still hold the key.
But as Brené Brown says, “Shame needs three things to grow: secrecy, silence, and judgment. It can’t survive being spoken.”
So, here’s what I haven’t said. Until now.
In my twenties, I was depressed. I was overweight, lonely, and taking blood pressure medication and Zoloft like it was some tragic wellness routine.
I wasn’t hanging by a thread. I was hanging by a damp paper towel—the kind that gives way exactly when you need it not to.
Romantically, I wasn’t rejected. I was invisible. Women didn’t say “no.” They just didn’t see me.
Like glass—not the shimmering kind, but the kind that quietly breaks and no one hears it.
One afternoon, lost in the fog, I started peeling labels off old prescription bottles. Not for any dramatic reason. I just… couldn’t sit still. I began sorting loose change into the empty bottles—pennies and dimes in the small ones, nickels and quarters in the large. No mixing. Order in chaos.
It felt… productive. Like I was doing something.
Like I mattered.
Then my sister walked in.
She didn’t speak. But her face collapsed—grief without a funeral. A silent scream that said:
I didn’t see it. But I do now.
But the signs were there long before.
When I was ten or eleven, Hardee’s gave out those little California Raisins figurines.
If you’re Gen X, you remember—claymation musicians with sunglasses and soul. I collected the whole band: the lead singer, guitarist, sax player. Everyone but the drummer.
That bugged me. Deeply.
I’d set them up on my toy chest like a tiny Motown revue. Made cardboard amps and scribbled “Marshall” on the sides. Took photos with my old disc camera like I was their tour manager.
At the time, I thought I was just quirky. Imaginative. Maybe a little lonely.
But looking back now?
I think I was trying to build a world where no one gets left out.
Where even the missing drummer has a place.
That impulse—the need for coherence, for completion—it still lives in me.
Years later, I saw it in Zack Greinke.
Greinke—quirky, brilliant, introverted, likely hall of famer—retired from Major League Baseball in 2023. He was a pitcher who didn’t just play the game—he interpreted it. When MLB introduced PitchCom—a device that allowed catchers send pitch signals directly to a pitcher’s earpiece—Greinke used it to call his own pitches.
That isn’t unusual. What is unusual was that sometimes, he’d shake himself off.
He’d reject his own pitch call.
People laughed. “Classic Greinke.”
But I didn’t laugh. I recognized it.
That internal jazz brain. The one that second-guesses mid-sentence. The mind that plays the same melody everyone else hears—but in a different key.
One Saturday the summer after I turned twelve, my mom took me to a psychologist in an old brick building with peeling paint and humming fluorescents. She suspected I might be on the spectrum. Back then, that was a whisper-word. A maybe. A shadow.
The official diagnosis? “Inconclusive.”
But I never believed it was nothing.
Even now, I shine when I feel safe. When I’m seen. I can light up a room. But when safety disappears, I don’t flicker. I vanish.
First grade. Mrs. A. had the kind of voice that felt like a lullaby. She had the voice and the presence of someone who was born to teach first grade.
One day, mid-lesson, she slammed a desk and screamed. Migraine, they said. But I was six. All I knew was that someone safe had turned terrifying.
That moment coded something in me.
Even now, when someone I love raises their voice, I go ghost. I melt into the walls.
I become glass again.
So why tell you this now?
Because a few months ago, someone in the President’s cabinet made some cheap, ill-informed comments about autism. As if people like me are punchlines. As if our lives don’t count. As if we’re just faulty wiring in the machine.
And something cracked.
I’ve spent my life trying to thread the needle between “high-functioning” and barely holding it together. I’ve never gotten the official diagnosis. But I don’t need a form and someone in a labcoat to tell me what I already know.
I know what I am.
More importantly, I know what I’m not.
I am not broken.
I’m not defective.
I’m also not the result of bad parenting, video games, vaccines, fluoride, or whatever today’s tinfoil nonsense happens to be.
I am not a mistake.
I am wired differently by the God I believe in who doesn’t make mistakes.
I’m telling these stories not for clout or comments.
I’m telling it for someone else.
Maybe for you or someone you love.
The person sorting coins in secret.
The man in the meeting who’s masking so hard it feels like he’s suffocating.
The woman whose brilliance is mistaken for coldness.
You’re not too much.
You’re not invisible.
You are not alone.
We write your novels.
We compose your symphonies.
We teach your children.
We solve your problems.
We throw your curveballs.
And often, we love you from behind a wall we can’t quite climb.
But the love and the stories are real.
We are real.
And we’re still here.
And we’re not going anywhere.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
