(If you read this script out loud, please use the following voices: You: as a child, high-pitched, trembling, desperate to be seen; as an adult, carefully modulated, whatever you find most pleasing. The children: sharp and careless, laughter that cuts.)
(the victim)
So you are just a child, and you don't know much, only that something is very wrong with you, and you won't find out why for the next 20 years. A laundry list of your flaws: you stare too little, or too long. You have a habit of mouthing every sentence after you say it. You have a stutter that doesn't quite go away, even after you are taken to a speech therapist. You ramble about everything that catches your interest. You have periodic meltdowns under the fluorescent lights of a classroom until the teachers tire of your histrionics. There are upsides to your haywire sensory processing: a sensitivity to colour, hearing pitch as solfege (unfortunately, you have no interest in making music, but it's a fun party trick), but no one takes note of that. To the kids you are leaking contagion. For the first six years of your schooling you are a body to be kicked and a mind to be tormented, and you are drawn into the dark underbelly of child psychology. It is something like a social experiment. You have no lone tormentor to hate, no anomaly to point to, just the enormity of an entire grade against you. The memories come in fragments: the sadistic variants of manhunt, a daily search for your lunchbox, a system of popularity points. The time you are chased, forced to call yourself stupid, ugly, the words lodged in your throat. That particularly awful day your head is slammed into the side of a portable. You remember the tears, the class splitting in two, half remorse and half delight, and the clever ones turn it into a trial of sorts, complete with a judge and jury, and you are forced to defend your innocence. You marvel at the creativity of young minds. You are too proud to tell anyone about it, too angry to lie down and take it, so you idle lunch periods in washroom stalls, nestle away in library shelves, hurl insults back when you can, pretending it makes a dent in their power.
(the analyst)
It's fascinating. You don't feel unhappy as a child, because it is all you have ever known. You learn two truths from your experiences: that people are incomprehensible to you, and that you are very adept at survival. The moment you have unsupervised internet access you begin assembling your toolkit. You create a burner account from under the covers of your bed and follow every socially well adjusted girl you can find, and you mimic their behaviours until you have them memorized. You discover you can fly under the radar if you just playact some sort of shy deprecation, and in this state you manage a few friendships. You pour over Wikipedia pages on human behaviour and social code like you are unveiling some careful secret, learning the scripts of body language and tone and reciprocal conversation. By the time you are twelve you have memorized everything you can about abnormal psychology. You shelve them in your head neatly, learn the delineation of every class of mental illness, the web of differential diagnoses, and it festers into a pathological need for predicability. You take that 4degreez quiz on personality disorders in eighth grade and send it to your crush because both of you are convinced you are uniquely broken, and for a while you delude yourselves with self diagnoses. By some cruel misfortune you skip over neurodevelopmental disorders, as if for the narrative suspense, and you won't return to it for the next decade.
(the achiever)
And if you have a brain to use your escape may as well be academics, because the world is kind to good workers. You are bright as a child, an early reader, or clever with your observations on probability, and your parents take note, wanting to satisfy their own egos. You are another nameless face in asian immigrant suburbia (it makes the bullying worse, you can't even deem it racially motivated), but you lack the inherent discipline of your peers. You remember sitting with your mom in the clutter of your living room, prepping for gifted screening, parroting back strings of numbers, rehearsing your version of a stuffy prodigy. Privately you think that if you can fool a room full of neurotypical peers surely a psychiatrist would be a no brainer. And things get a bit better in a class of kids with IEPs and learning disorders, the strangeness of curious minds, and the back and forth of petty competition, even if you always feel a little behind. It's not until high school that things begin to click, and the validation forms a tenuous feedback loop, and you feel the momentum building. Before you know it you are on that stage at graduation, swept by the awards and chalky praise and the high of revisiting an elementary school that believed you stupid. But eventually the guise wears thin, and you are humbled by the vastness of the real world, and the overwhelm of moving to the states, and you switch to other pursuits. There are occasional moments of relapse, like that poorly motivated YC interview, and the panic of watching college friends move to Anthropic, or OpenAI, or whatever the latest dream company is, and the discomfort of meeting people sharper than you, but you grow to accept your tradeoffs. You are surrounded by people with big dreams and god complexes wrapped around a precarious sense of self, all posturing and masks, a hundred iterations of the same story. You find comfort in the familiarity, the petulance of it, because for once everyone is acting with you. You are all still children waiting to be told you are good.
(the butterfly)
And like most gifted kids, your life doesn't really start until you are free from the institution of school. You move to the big city and drift into parties and go through the motions of socialization until it's natural. You have become quite good at pantomiming interest. You are tired of acting shy, with everything you are holding inside, so gradually you let yourself speak. You go to clubs and raves and try whatever drugs you are handed, and you fall into sensory overload so bad you are crippled without earplugs and sunglasses, but you pretend to enjoy it for the ethos. You develop a habit of playful roleplay, of disappearing into spaces where you know no one, inhabiting the stories of past lives. You are a struggling artist, or a visiting spy, or a curious interloper, or a hired assassin, and your wit draws people to you. You learn that your quirks can be considered endearing instead of grotesque so long as you are pretty enough, so you reskin yourself until people are pleased, and the boys that would've once picked on you now give you another type of fight or flight. The happiness is paper thin, the kind that collapses at a bad photo, but overall people are kinder, they let you infodump and blurt out the wrong things, and it feels better than masking yourself. You pursue your interests, your hyperfixations yielding to generativity, and you find a sense of self in the output. You become better at gauging compatibility. You meet people with too much polish, an unsettling charisma, and your body is instantly repelled. You meet people you are fascinated by and realize they like you too. It's taken you maybe 22 years, but you finally know what it's like to have friends, the kinds with open hearts and inventive minds and a tender acceptance to the way you bleed out. You go through rough times and you tell them about it, and they are awed by how effortlessly you wield your pain, but you don't view it that way. You just like a good story. You know how to sterilize your pain until you barely register it as your own. You whisper it like you are uncovering something fragile, and listen to their stories in kind, and it feels as close to real connection as you have ever known.
(the romantic)
And maybe you get the job, shed your skin, make the friends, but romance remains the struggle you cannot tame. In the beginning you are just happy to be desired, and primed to certain dynamics from your childhood, and unsure of how to assert yourself. You playact this caricature of a girl, playful and absent minded and harmless, placid smiles stretched over silent screams and the ability to swallow yourself whole, and it leaves you feeling all twisted up inside. You feel helpless in the callousness of modern dating, because you approach love with the same devotion as the girl you were at age 10, an iPod with 400 Eminem songs memorized, just waiting to blabber about it. And it all feels absurd to you, the idea of tying something as profound as connection to the flimsiness of attraction, and you wish for a mass exodus from physicality. (Once, a friend asks if you could fall in love with a disembodied voice. You think you could.) It takes a few iterations of this strange ritual for you to shed the masks, and you get better at discerning your wants and needs, your discomfort with gender roles and dating apps. You return to your habit of treating intimacy like a puzzle to be solved, calibrating to the needs of others, and through trial and error you learn the framework of attachment theory and sexuality and the nightmare of cluster b abuse. In the aftermath you work really, really hard on attachment security, on dismantling your misandry, and you scare off scores of your friends' boyfriends with pointed interrogation, asking, what do you like about her, bristling at something flattening like i like how she makes me feel. You don't know why you judge when you are hardly better, with idealization and obsession tangling up your definition of love. You are wary of your desire, suffocated by the rarity and the heat, ashamed of your projection and ego, because admittedly you like looking at yourself reflected in someone whose gravity you are caught in. Romance is one of those things that deconstructs when you think about it too hard, but you always come back to it, with all its messiness. You are tethered to the quiet practice of building something real, the defiance of having endured it all and still giving freely, and there are moments of true intimacy and meaningful care beneath your attempts at intellectualization. It's a risky game to be playing, no matter how many times you learn the rules, because with the ghost of your child self you always feel a little in their power.
(the loner)
And when the friends go home, and the games are over, the question lingers: who are you when no one is watching? Your room is something like a safe space. You crawl into bed with snacks from the pantry, and the crumbs make their way into the bedsheets, and you open your laptop to oncall alerts you have ignored, and texts you can't be bothered to respond to. You are tangled hair and a stained shirt curled over your laptop as you stalk the same comfort people. You curate your internet presence, all smoke and mirrors, and fight the urge to delete it all whenever you're on psychedelics. You sit in this unravelling and wonder if anyone would love you in this state. You think about how you've never met anyone bullied to the extent you were, found no one so innately defective, and when you detach yourself from it all it reads like a horror segment on the news or a piece of poorly written chain mail. You have never forgiven them. You fantasize about revenge even now, ripping them apart with words, blasting them online, or parading a mirage of success. You think about the boy that threw your shoes on the school roof, taunted you with the intel, but you were too ashamed to ask the custodian for help, so you walked home with muddied feet and the disbelief of your parents at having lost them. He slides into your dms in college, and as you thumb over the block button you have a brief fantasy of gripping him by the hair and slamming his head into a portable instead. You didnt think you had the capacity for this sadism until you have written these words, and it frightens and intrigues you in equal measure. You picture the web of paths you could've taken and think of how you were a few gene pairs away from becoming a school shooter or a tragic suicide headline, and yet you chose healing at every turn. You are standing at the hollow vantage point of a moral high ground, and the view brings pride and bitterness. Because in the end there is no justice, it is you who are forced to write the pain out of you, you who are imprinted with the belief that you house something very ugly. You imagine your insides and think of The Grand High Witch from The Witches peeling back her mask to sinewy skin and rotted sockets, or picture stretched skin over fused lips and eyes sewn shut. It cuts through the walls of your room, that fear of exposure, and you sit up a little straighter in bed, because you are never free from this sense of voyeurism. You have masked for so long that you are unsure what lies beneath.
(truth)
So after everything, when the truth descends on you, it is like lightning. The mechanism doesn't matter, the ig algorithm has been nudging you for months, but you are dismissive, rolling your eyes at the pop psychology. It is not until you stumble on the AuDHD tug of war and autistic masking and the phenomenon of late diagnosis in women that the alarm bells begin to go off in your head. You schedule an emergency appointment with your psychiatrist for the formality, send her 25 years of struggle condensed into four pages, and she validates you with a bluntness you have come to appreciate. You are shocked at the simplicity, embarrassed the truth has eluded you for so long, from the hundreds of journal entries and essay drafts and a lifetime of puzzling over your mind. You message one of your autistic friends (there are many, you hadn't realized, how you've all found each other) and the two of you curl in fetal position on the couch, fingers tapping in strange patterns, quilted blankets wrapped around you, and you feel her acceptance soothe you like a balm. You call your parents and tell them a tale you have long withheld, and they are quiet at the right parts of your story, even if they close their ears around your diagnosis. That night you dream of your child self, mud slung on her clothes and bruises lining her legs from where she'd been kicked, blinking owlishly up at you, and you reach for her tentatively, say it'll all be okay in the end. You tell her she'll grow up with this prickling urge to understand people, make them feel okay, and she stares at you with reproach, because you haven't done the same for her. You sit and plead for her forgiveness, for every moment of self-loathing or cruelty or ineptitude. She holds a mirror to your face as you peel back the layers you've grafted on yourself, and it's a bloody endeavor, but in the end you see neither grotesque distortion nor fused flesh, just the clean skin of a world that is kinder, softer, more forgiving to neurodivergent femmes. You tell her it'll be a long journey, stare at the twin faces peering back at you, the crooked teeth and acne and choppy bangs, and find you cannot tell them apart. She softens at the resemblance, reaches for your hand, and you let her hold it, knowing she'll need it for the path ahead. And in the morning you make your way into internet forums and discord servers and find so many arms waiting to greet you. You share her story, bit by bit, and you see yourself reflected back in their words. You stitch together this patchwork of lived experiences, drape it around yourself, and you feel yourself beginning to heal.
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