NEURODIVERGENT NARRATIVES - CHAPTER 6: HAIKU YOU

Seventeen Syllables of Belonging.

There is a strange tenderness in trying to slip your whole life into three short lines, counting on your fingers, cutting away everything that is not the pulse of truth. For many of us, late discovery arrived like that too, a small phrase that rearranged the sky. Autistic birthright is not a certificate or a diagnosis, it is the right to name what your senses know, to honour your stims, your patterns, your way of moving through the world, and to do it in your own language, even when it only takes seventeen syllables to say you were always here.

A haiku is a brief visit to one moment of knowing, the click of a stim, the ache of masking, the soft rebellion of choosing yourself anyway. As you read these poems you are invited to recognise your own signatures in them, the way your brain notices edges and seasons and shadows that other people stride past, and to feel that noticing as inheritance rather than mistake.