[Anthology] Someone Like me

Read the winning entry for our June 27, 2025 prompt, "Someone Like me"

Neurodivergent Narratives Presents: ‘Someone Like Me’

A contest where we write about the deep emotional resonance of autistic-coded characters in fiction.

Goldilocks - Girl Misunderstood
By Bragitta Ozhga

I remember the story of Goldilocks and how every grownup who read it to me made sure to tell me how spoiled, intrusive, and rude she was. But as a child, what struck me was how she was villainised for curiosity, for fatigue, for hunger. The questions that burned within me weren’t about why she went into the house, but why she was alone. She must have been hungry and tired, seeking food and a comfortable bed, but no one ever thought that way.

As an AUDHD adult with a neurodivergent child, I still hold those same questions — but now they’re joined by others, backed by knowledge and insight. Seeing Goldilocks through this lens changed how I see myself: I’m not fussy or difficult, just like she isn’t. We’re sensory seeking, needing comfort in a world that often feels too loud, too bright, too confusing. When my son eloped at two and a half, I imagined him lost in the woods: tired, hungry, looking for somewhere safe. Would he have walked into a stranger's house? Probably. If he was hungry would he have eaten the food laid out on the table? Yes. And would he have chosen the bowl that was the right consistency? With his ARFID, definitely. Goldilocks became a

mirror — showing me how children like me, like him, aren’t misbehaving, but deeply misunderstood.

Goldilocks doesn’t have an innate grasp of social rules; she walks into a home that isn’t hers, eats the food laid out on the table, sleeps in the beds, and flees when the Bears return, like many Autistic children who panic when they’re discovered. Goldilocks matters to me because she taught me it’s okay to look for “just right.” That I’m not wrong for needing comfort or spaces that fit me. She helped me understand my son’s needs and honour my own, giving me permission to see the child I was — and still am — with compassion instead of blame. She showed me how easy it is to cast someone as a villain when we don’t understand them, and helped me forgive those who didn’t understand me as a child. You see, she was never the arrogant, selfish brat she was made out to be. She was just an autistic girl, misunderstood.

Konstantin Levin
By Louise Lomas

When I was 10 years old and on a typical British seaside holiday, loved by children and loathed by parents, where the weather makes the sea an exhilarating ride and puts the sand into sandwiches, and where parents pull their hair out trying to save their sanity, I had read every book that I’d brought with me and all of the books in the campsite shop. I lived for my books, and through my books and me running out of books was a devastation that neither I, nor my mother, could bear. In desperation, Mum gave me one of her books to read: Anna Karenina, a novel by the Russian author, Leo Tolstoy; a book not generally considered suitable for pre-teen children. But I loved it. I devoured it. I fell in love with it. I met my soul mate in it. I saw myself written on the page in the guise of a rather large, seemingly rather hairy, Russian man. And I never read another children’s book again.

Levin, as he is known, enters the story in chapter 5, making a singularly hurried appearance. Tolstoy’s description of him as a person who attracts disapproving looks, looks that he is oblivious to; who is shy, angry and uneasy, all at once and who is loved by his friend none the less, by a friend who will take his arm and “guid[e] him through dangers” in that most ordinary of situations, entering a room where there are strangers, spoke to me. This was me. Without the friend, of course, but with the awkwardness. And how I wanted a friend like that!

In this first description of Levin, Tolstoy has us notice Levin’s attention to detail and how he his “absorbed” by the “huge shining studs” on one of the stranger’s cuffs. He tells us about his abrupt manner, the way that he launches immediately into a topic that he feels strongly about, dispensing with niceties. In one brief scene, Tolstoy introduces us to a core concept of Levin’s personality: his strong justice sensitivity and his ability to speak up; a quality that goes beyond a willingness to hold others accountable because, to his mind, there is no alternative option; it simply doesn’t exist.

Levin’s mind is not just independent; he does not conceive of another way of being. He researches alternative means of farming deep into the night and puts them into practice, oblivious of the head scratching and wry (or “mocking”) smiles of those around him. He loves deeply and is hurt quickly, confused by the subtle signals that others read instinctively.

When I was 10, I didn’t know that Levin was autistic. And I didn’t know that he was autistic, or that I was, for the next 4 times that I read it. It was on the 6th reading, 46 years later, that I realised that my old friend Levin and I were both probably autistic, and I went and sought an assessment.

On Pippi Longstockings
By Fiona Baker