NEURODIVERGENT NARRATIVES - CHAPTER 12: AUTISTIC JOY

The Light We Carry.

There is a particular quiet that arrives when you begin to tell the truth about what you love in yourself. It is not the noisy triumph that the world imagines. It is closer to the hush inside a seashell, a small internal chamber where joy echoes without having to explain itself. Many late discovered autistic people begin their lives inside that chamber and never knew it had a name. The depth of focus, the sensory rapture, the way patterns unfold like constellations in the mind, the feeling of slipping into an inner world that is vast and unbothered, all of it was once framed as excess or eccentricity. Now it becomes a form of clarity.

When Autistic people describe what we love about our minds, we rupture the story that has been told about us for generations. We dismantle the presumption that our lives are defined by deficit and lack. We create a record of joy where only pathology was expected. To name what we love is to carve out a new archive.