Where Are My Flowers?
On intellectual intimacy, Autistic relational style, and the specific loneliness of being fluent in a language nobody around you speaks.
I once spent three hours helping someone understand why their business model was structurally unsound. I drew it out, traced the logic, showed them where the load-bearing wall was and why removing it would eventually bring the whole thing down, and shared precisely what I would do in their position. I was thoughtful, thorough, careful, meticulous, and honest. I was, I genuinely believed, giving them a gift.
I thought they might send flowers. Instead, they never spoke to me again.
I have a version of that story for dozens of close relationships in my life — not just professionally, but personally as well. I do my thing and go intellectually deep, and later learn that I am seen as defensive, argumentative, or difficult, whereas I had imagined myself as communicative, flexible, and thoughtful. It’s so weird to be so unseen and unknown and turned by so many into a villain unfamiliar to me. It’s so destabilizing to be told you are someone you know you are not. Or do you know it for sure? Does everyone else know who you are better than you do?
For most of my life, I understood this as evidence that something was wrong with me. I was too much. Too intense. Too unrelenting. I had been told this so many times, by so many people, in so many different registers, that I had essentially absorbed it as fact, the way you absorb the fact that the sky is blue. In my head, I just saw myself as someone who drew the short straw in the personality lottery.
It took getting an Autistic diagnosis and then a decade of actual work to understand that I wasn’t broken, but rather I was operating in a completely different relational language, an Autistic one.
What I thought I was doing
When I go deep with someone, when I follow a thread to its end, when I push on an assumption and then push on the assumption underneath that assumption, I am not attacking them. I am not competing. I am not performing superiority or trying to win.
I am telling them they matter.
For me, intellectual intensity is intimacy. It is the highest form of care I know how to offer. When I engage rigorously with your idea, I am saying: I take you seriously. I trust you with complexity. I think you can handle the truth, and I respect you enough to offer it. When I bring my full attention to a problem you have, I bring my whole self.
As I’m typing this, I am thinking about the first time I heard the term sapiosexual and instantly knew that was who I was. A sapiosexual is someone who experiences sexual or romantic attraction primarily based on a person’s intelligence rather than their physical appearance. I had a philosophy professor at the time who was not conventionally attractive and 30+ years older than me, but I could not stop thinking about him. Around the same time, I read a magazine interview of Pam Anderson, then a recent Bay Watch alum, talking eruditely about her love of Shakespeare, and it gave me the same feeling as the philosophy professor.
Once, when my husband and I were first dating, I asked him to read a book I loved, and he said, “I will read it, but I have to tell you this isn’t the type of book I normally like and if I read it and I don’t like it, I will tell you. Do you still want me to read it?”
I said no, but that logic was the beginning of my falling in love with him. Recursive thinking (meaning thinking that repeatedly turns back on itself and examines its own structure, assumptions, or outputs) is my kink.
I appreciate it when people interrupt me to inspect the assumptions underneath my ideas. It tells me they are interested and that they care. In grad school, I was taught to reason by definitions and edge cases. Didn’t everyone else learn that, too? How else do you do it? I feel understood and seen when my ideas are probed and when they listen to pressure test me. I feel gaslit or blown off if people hedge their statements or don’t deeply question what I share. It makes me feel distant and not close. What’s the point of talking to someone who is indirect and doesn’t push against my assumptions?
What they thought was happening
While recursive thinking and this meta-analysis might be my thing, it is very much not a standard communication style. Especially for neuronomative conversation my approach can be seen as aggressive, not loving.
Most human conversation is not optimized for philosophical precision. It is optimized for status negotiation. The goal isn’t to get to the bottom of things; instead, it’s to keep interaction stable, predictable, and emotionally manageable. The exact approach that feels so hollow for me.
I insist on precision. My goal is to make hidden contradictions visible. When I interrogate foundational assumptions directly, especially in real time, several things can happen. I am not merely discussing a topic; I am examining the framework through which the conversation itself is functioning. My style reduces ambiguity faster than many people are comfortable with. Many people find this quite destabilizing. Some people experience that as intellectually exciting. Others experience it as socially threatening.
This is where they start to see me as manipulative or arrogant, rather than loving and generous. I have been told that talking to me is exhausting, overwhelming, exposing, and impossible to navigate safely.
Bottom-up processing, a central feature of Autistic cognition, means we build understanding from data. Details first, synthesis later. I am not asking questions or pressing points to win. I am asking the question behind they question to get the foundation before we can build the structure. I am not being aggressive when I challenge your premise, but because to my mind it’s the most useful, loving, and kind thing I give you.
But to someone who processes top-down, who starts with the social context and then fills in the content, this can feel like being taken apart. The rigor that feels like love from the inside lands as interrogation from the outside. The data hunger that is, for us, a form of care, can read as relentlessness. The follow-through that means “I’m still here, I’m still with you, I haven’t given up on this” can feel like pressure.
And so they say: fine, you win.
Which is the most heartbreaking sentence, because there was never supposed to be a winner. It was supposed to be jazz. It was supposed to be two people riffing, building, following the implications, seeing how far the idea could go. The conversation was not a courtroom. It was an invitation.
What is actually happening
The problem is not that either of us is wrong about what conversation is for. The problem is that we never compared notes on the question, because most people do not know they have an answer to it.
When I enter a conversation, I am processing structurally. I am tracking the architecture of the argument, testing whether the premises hold, mapping where the logic leads. I am doing this in real time, automatically, the same way other people are automatically tracking tone and facial expression and whether the emotional temperature in the room is rising or falling. I am not ignoring those things to be difficult. My processing runs on a different substrate, and it runs fast, and it is doing its work whether I intend it to or not.
The person across from me is usually doing something else entirely. They are processing emotionally and socially while they talk. They are bonding, co-regulating, maintaining the coherence of their own identity within the interaction, monitoring the social equilibrium of the room. Conversation for them is not primarily a truth-seeking exercise. It is a relational one, and the health of the relationship is the thing being built or damaged in real time, not the argument.
Neither of us is wrong. We are just using the same word, conversation, to describe two different activities that happen to require the same furniture.
What I experience as inquiry, they experience as interrogation. What I experience as conceptual excavation, they experience as someone digging up the foundations of a house they are currently living in. What I experience as truth-testing, they experience as an implicit challenge to the competence and coherence of their thinking. The intensity that feels to me like full presence and engagement feels to them like a sustained pressure that has no obvious off switch and no clear social purpose, because social purposes are exactly what my style is not optimizing for.
The Autistic cultural term for what I am doing is Bottom-Up Processing meeting Justice-Seeking in real-time conversation. The neurotypical term for what I am doing, when they are being generous, is exhausting. When they are being less generous, the terms are manipulative, aggressive, and impossible. What is actually happening is a collision between two entirely coherent but mutually unintelligible conversational operating systems, neither of which came with a manual, and only one of which gets treated as the default.
Somehow, I’m Still Waiting for Those Flowers
Somehow, after understanding all of that, after the diagnosis and the years of learning and the vocabulary and the frameworks and the relief of finally having words for what had always felt both intimate and impossible, I am still standing in the same old emotional terrain, surprised every time this cycle repeats itself, and saddened every time I realize that understanding the mechanism has not spared me from the grief.
This cycle never seems to exhaust itself.
There is always a moment, sometimes brief and sometimes lasting months or years, when I feel the unmistakable spark of recognition and think, this time is different, this person sees me clearly, this person can keep pace with me, this person understands that my intensity is not conflict but closeness, and for a while I let myself believe that I have finally found what I have been looking for.
I feel connected. I feel seen. I feel intellectually alive in the company of another person. And then something shifts.
They begin to pull back.
The warmth cools.
The responses shorten.
They tell me, gently or bluntly or sometimes not at all, that being with me is too intense, too much, too exhausting, too difficult to navigate, and often they cannot or will not explain further because they know from experience that if they try to explain, I will ask questions, and then ask questions about the questions, and then try to understand it more deeply, and to them that itself becomes the proof.
And then they disappear.
Poof.
Out of my life.
Somehow, after all of it, after the diagnosis and the years of learning and the vocabulary and the frameworks and the relief of finally having words for what had always felt both intimate and impossible, I am still standing in the same emotional terrain, still surprised when the cycle repeats, still saddened by the discovery that understanding the mechanism has not spared me from the grief of living inside it.
After enough repetitions, I would be arrogant not to ask whether the common denominator is me, and of course it is, and I know that, and I am not trying to escape it. What remains genuinely difficult is that I still cannot fully see what they see.
I can explain bottom-up processing, justice sensitivity, and competing conversational frameworks with enough precision to make the entire system legible, and still, this is the only way I can think of to show I care. I can’t CARE and not do it. It’s just the way I process information. The fact that it feels like manipulation rather than generosity fills me with so much self-hate it can be hard to keep going.
I’m sure you can imagine that if enough people over enough years describe you as exhausting and difficult and too much, you eventually have to sit with the possibility that your private understanding of your own intentions and the impact you are actually having do not line up.
I know I am the one expected to adapt, to slow down and soften, to offer less, to leave more unsaid, and to become easier to be around. I understand the social math behind the conclusion that I am in the wrong. What I do not know, even after all these years, is how to become someone fundamentally different from the person I actually am. How I process information isn’t a habit I can swap. It’s the way I orient, the way I love, the way I know I am fully present with another person.
And so I am still here, still trying to hold compassion for the people who experienced my powerful verbal processing as overwhelming and compassion for myself in the same breath. I am still hoping that somewhere out there are people who hear about my particular language of intensity and recognize it immediately for the gift I know it is. Maybe someday someone will stay in the conversation long enough to answer in the same key.
