NEURODIVERGENT NARRATIVES - CHAPTER 4: LOCAL COLOUR

Within Walking Distance

There is a whole world pressed up against your front door, and for years you have moved through it on autopilot, head full, body braced, eyes locked on the pavement. Late discovery works like that too. One day the street is just the route between home and elsewhere, the next it is a map of every time you masked, every time you dissociated, every time you noticed too much and were told it was nothing.

This chapter asks what happens when you turn back and really look. A few hundred metres, the weather, the neighbours bins, the single tree that changes faster than people do, the way sound gathers in one corner of your road and vanishes in another. Local colour is what they once called it, as if it were decoration. Here it becomes something different. A record of autistic attention. Evidence that your way of seeing has always been vivid, precise, and entirely real.