[Micro Memoir] Autism Appreciation

Read the winning entry for our July 25, 2025 prompt, "What Do You Love About Being Autistic"

Neurodivergent Narratives Presents: What We Love About Being Autistic

A contest with pride in who we are!

Feeling Too Much
By Isabella Gallagher Rattan

Lightness cannot exist without darkness,
neurodiversity cannot exist without neuromajority.

So I would like to thank those who are neurotypical;
and I would like to thank the intense sadness that can fill me up from top to bottom, from the split ends of my hair to the dirt under my toenails.

Without those whose brain is structured in the same way as everyone else’s, who feel emotions strongly, I wouldn’t get to feel emotions stronger.
I wouldn’t get to be consumed by a feeling that I can’t name.
I wouldn’t be me.

I am drowning in sorrow and my skin is on fire with rage and my flesh is turning inside out with embarrassment and I’m suffocating with worry and I’m lifting off with love and my smile is growing past my ears with joy and my lungs are expanding with pride and my arms are flailing with excitement because I am nothing without my emotions that are so, so, strong.

I’d like to thank depression for teaching me what euphoria is, and showing me how to lounge around in joy.

They told me to enjoy the space between feeling everything and nothing but the map they gave me doesn’t work, I can’t find it. So I cut my split ends off and paint my toenails and revel in the feeling of feeling too much.

---

I love music more than my mother (and I don’t think it’s normal)

Music in the grooves of my brain,
Notes in my corpus callosum
A voice smoothing over the grey wrinkles
Blood thumping in time with the drum

I can’t explain it, how it feels to listen to music
But it’s the neurological equivalent to a key slotting in a lock,
The bitting fitting into place, it was made for this

The feeling when I finally find,
A song that makes me feel alive
What do you mean its abnormal
To listen twenty times?

The waves they reach into my ear
And worm into my brain
They find the bit that makes me feel
And turn off all my pain

I couldn’t tell you how
And I couldn’t tell you why
The clusters of notes and sound
Make me unafraid to die

Us
By Kaleigh E

I took a chance to
reach across the
long distance between
Us who live apart in
time and space and
genealogy

to seek an under-
standing of what
makes You and what
breaks You and what
am I that I feel
that We are more similar than
different

and discovered how
We need a knob to
turn it all down so We
can express the
colour of emotion as
it blasts across
Our skin

how We know the
aura the essence the
story after a brief
encounter because
the mirror neurons took
over and surmised a
future from Our
sensory input

that there is no rabbit
hole deep enough
that We won’t jump down
hand to heart to
lips together when
We explore and
dump Our knowledge all
over the page

(only We will take
the risk to dive into
the collection the data the
accumulation made during
the throes of monofocus while
neurotypicals can’t
be bothered)

that there is no limit to
the creation of worlds through
words or colours or sounds or
whatever sense stimulates in
the moment as We
know it has never been
explored like this before

that nothing else matters when
something triggers
the innate sense of
incorrect wrongness when
We can’t stand by and
“just let it be”
when We see someone
hurt

and somehow and
in some digital place that
echos with Our voice
We have created
a cultural space for
Our unique brand of
weird

“To the Ones Who Never Asked Who I Really Am”
By someone who’s done masking for you.
By Jodi Britcha-Coyne

You say I’m too much,
only after I’ve been too silent for too long.
You ask why I’m distant,
Yet never ask what it cost me to stay close.

I learned to shape shift before I could spell it,
to smile when confused,
nod when crushed,
laugh when the joke cut deep.

Your world demands whispers when my brain shouts,
demands eye contact when it burns,
demands peacekeeping while your storm rolls in,
then blames me for the thunder.

You tell stories where I’m the villain,
how convenient that my silence
made it easy to write the script without me.

But I remember.
I remember the raised eyebrows,
the conversations I wasn’t meant to hear, the casual cruelty brushed off as jokes,
the gaslight flickering over every doubt I dared to voice.

I grieve the relationship I pretended we had.
I mourn the acceptance that was actually performance.
I bleed
not just from what you did,
but from how long I believed I had to earn your basic respect.

No, I won’t twist myself anymore
to fit your comfort.
No, I won’t wear a mask
so you can look in the mirror and call yourself kind.

This is what it means to be me:
a mind like wildfire,
a heart that bruises quietly and scars deeply,
a soul stitched together with truth and justice you keep refusing to hear.

If you want to understand,
stop talking and start listening.
Not to reply.
Not to fix.
Just to witness.

And if that’s too much for you-
know now that I finally, soulfully and ably, let it be too little for me.