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19 Mar, 2026

18+; themes about neurodivergence, projection, black-and-white thinking, internalized shame, suicide

This is a preamble to something I haven’t written yet wrote, but which I keep thinking about, which is the importance of my learning when and how to “close ranks” in order to protect myself and my loved ones. That isn’t this.

“I’ve been thinking about the current moral panic toward neurodivergent people,” I told my best friend. We were in the kitchen. She was eating popcorn.

“And I think it comes down to not sticking to the script,” I continued. “When someone is unmasked, they break the fourth wall. And people get really upset, because it emphasizes that none of this is real.”

My best friend arched a brow at me.

“I don’t mean—”

“The Matrix?” she asked me, amused.

“—existentially,” I continued, “I mean society, these social scripts. The social scripts are not working.”

“Everyone in the White House right now is neurodivergent,” she sniffed.

“That’s so right,” I said, nodding. “It’s projection. ‘I’m not sick, you’re the one who’s sick.’” I launched into a whole thing about RFK Jr’s diaries. Anyway.

“I think about Mark,” I said. She nodded.

“I loved him,” she said, “for someone I didn’t know very well.”

“Me, too,” I said. We’d gone to high school with Mark. He’d been an effortless polyglot, had been courted hard by the U.S. military. Before long, though, he’d been discharged for insubordination, had returned home, had suffered in isolation before ending his life. By then he’d had a wife and child.

“He must’ve been thinking what must be wrong with me,” I said.

“He shouldn’t’ve gone.”

“No he should not have.” I sighed. “I didn’t get the script. I missed kindergarten. My therapist kept trying to get me to say that I felt fundamentally broken, unlovable, and that my parents had done it. She kept trying to go back to earliest childhood. But my parents didn’t do all that stuff. I always knew they were both messed up. It happened later.”

“The teachers in Texas,” my friend said.

“And church,” I said, nodding. It had been a highly, highly authoritarian environment. What must be wrong with me?

“I was in one of Mrs. F’s church plays—” I started.

“A tree,” my best friend said.

“I never actually played a tree,” I told her, “I played a background sheep. It was only like being cast as a tree,” and we laughed. “No, this was a different play, a little family drama.

“I was playing a teen at a sleepover. I had one line: ‘I just want to eat pizza every night!’ I kept saying the line the way I would say it, and she kept having us run the scene over again. And I kept saying it this way,” and I repeated the line in my own voice, in exactly the way I, as a pre-teen, would’ve said those words if I’d genuinely meant them.

“And finally it clicked for me, what she actually wanted from us. So I went full Disney Channel. Or, I’ve never seen Disney Channel.” I hesitated. I’d given it the ol’ Mary-Kate and Ashley, maybe. “I suddenly decided to try something, and I did a TV teen,” I explained, and then I said the line again out loud, in the absolute dumbest Sleepover Teen Number Three I could deliver—in, not just a different cadence, but an entirely different voice. It’s specific.

My best friend went wide-eyed, a handful of popcorn in her mouth.

“And yeah, that was exactly what Mrs. F wanted from us, and now she was mad at the other three girls, ‘why can’t you do it like Jenny is doing it?’”

My best friend cackled. I did the line two more times, in an increasingly exaggerated voice, just to tickle her. My character’s one quality was that she was very into pizza.

“And that’s what I mean about scripts and masking,” I said. “I did a little test. And it turned out, yeah, Mrs. F didn’t want me to say the thing the way I would say it. She didn’t want to hear me at all. She just wanted dumb teen number three.” I sighed. “Is there more popcorn?” I asked my friend.

She reached into the microwave for the next bag, dumping it out into a shallow tupperware bowl. I grabbed a handful.

“Perfectly popped,” I said admiringly.

“There are three popcorn settings on the microwave,” she said. “You should always pick the third one, setting three.” She blushed. “I had to learn this,” she said, not elaborating.

“Thank you,” I said.

I said something about offices, families, assigned roles, controlling family members panicking if Christmas Day doesn't sound exactly like a Hallmark movie and, off-topic, but why would you ever expect life to sound exactly like a cheesy, poorly-written Hallmark movie? (“To be honest, these people are fully masked, on-script, but I don’t really even understand who is supposed to be neurodivergent and who isn’t anymore. I mean, if you need scripts that bad…”) We carried the popcorn to the couch.

“Like when I went into the gas station for nicotine. I’ve gone in three times now,” I explained, then muttered something under my breath about being still very extremely addicted to nicotine.

“The first time I went in, this guy was working. I said, can I get Juul pods. Actually, three packs of… those, the ones you’re standing next to. All the way on the end. I’d intended this to be helpful. And he just stood there and stared at them, and I said, um, right in front of you.

“Well, I’d offended him. He was angry. He said just tell me what you want, and I haltingly said, uhh, Juul… tobacco-flavored—oops, Virginia, I mean. 5%… they come in four packs. Three four-packs, uh, three of those, thank you.”

The young man had been insulted; unable to achieve a verbal flow state, my uncertainty and anxiety had made me sound increasingly condescending. He’d rung me up in silence and then had turned his back on me, waiting, refusing to acknowledge me further, until I’d completely left the building. A swift punishment.

“He wanted me to use a specific script,” I explained. Really, he was displacing the cognitive load onto me, while also having me communicate in his specific way, rather than the simple shorthand of, I want the ones all the way on the end, which we are both staring at.

“The next time I went in,” I continued, “someone else was working there. And I very nervously told him, um, may I have… Juul pods, Virginia, 5%, three packs of four. And he stood in front of them and stared, kind of processing. And I apologized and said what I’d wanted to say to the first guy, which was, I’m sorry, I don’t know what order to… give the information. You know, the most logical taxonomy of information.

“And finally he said to me, no, I’m trying to figure out if… let me see… I’m trying to figure out if two packs of six would be less expensive.” I shook my head. “He saved me ten dollars,” I said in disbelief.

My friend was just as overwhelmed at this retelling as I was.

“The third time I went in¹, the original employee was back. I said, Juul pods, Virginia 5% and, oh, if you still have the six-packs, I’d like two of those. He was very sunny and warm. Have a great day! Yeah. I was more unnerved by that than I’d been by his outrage.” I sighed. His anger had felt disproportionate. “I don’t know if he’s neurotypical or not,” I said slowly, “or if he even remembered me from before or not. But his distress tolerance, it was narrow. He had no patience unless I stuck to his preferred script.”

“Maybe he was just having a bad day,” she said, “or at the end of a very long shift.”

“For sure he was,” I said, nodding. It was a good point, because working around other people, just working at all, erodes your distress tolerance, stresses you out. “I’m just saying it’s a projection, to claim that neurodivergent people have no distress tolerance at all, or that they behave like robots, when neurotypical people are the ones retaliating or punishing or otherwise getting all dysregulated when you drift off-script.”

“The performance,” she said, realizing.

“It’s a performance,” I said, nodding. The Actor’s Nightmare! Everyone got the script, their assigned roles, but you’re saddled with the constant cognitive load of improvisation, with no assigned character (and when people do eventually force a script and an ill-fitting role, especially one that exclusively plays to your weaknesses, it feels crazy). And none of it is real.

Now I was chatting with a friend, stretched out on my stomach in bed with my iPad open, about the immensity of the dread I was feeling.

I’d scrolled past a social media post, a reply, which I wasn’t supposed to see, and which might have not about me, but which had been a scathing, perhaps-accidental indictment of my behavior, about this tendency to roll into someone else’s DMs in an attempt to make yourself feel better about something, and how infuriating it is to the person who had not asked for it.

I messed up, I told my friend. Not only that, I keep messing up, making mistakes here and there. I keep forgetting.

She attempted to allay my concerns, to soothe my anxiety.

No, I said, I just think underneath the anxiety is a lesson. The anxiety is saying “hey, look at this.” It’s a lesson that wants to be noticed and learned. I just keep forgetting the lesson.

It’s just my Human Design Model again. I know not everyone believes in this stuff, but I do, as does an unusual proportion of Los Angeles. My “blueprint” says my role is “to respond.”

The instant I’d first read this—that I am not to initiate, only to respond—my heart had sagged in my chest, because I knew it was true. For whatever reason, anytime I initiate correspondence, any sort of contact with anyone, no matter how tender or gentle, it comes off like a violent incursion to the other person, an act of aggression. I can follow-up on open-ended conversations, to a point. I can text back (but not double-text). I can even function as a messenger, carrying in someone else’s request or news, or make introductions. If someone asks me directly what I think, I can offer an observation, but only then. I just cannot come in starting shit.

I read this, and I’d immediately recognized it as true. Intent isn’t magic; what’s magic is the way I startle everyone. I’m like a specter that has to be summoned. If I just materialize of my own volition, they’ll run for a priest. I’m trying to make peace with this, that it’s just how things go, but I keep forgetting.

“It’s like when I went on that date with—oh, I already told you about this,” I said. I’d never followed up with a date. During brunch, I could tell she was unhappy with me, and I even understood why. It had less to do with me and more to do with, she’d just hoped I would be exactly like her? I wasn’t, which had deeply disappointed her. I really liked her. I’d decided to buzz off unless she ever happened to reach out; I’m not going to give someone I like a sales pitch.

My friend messaged me farewell, at least for the next few hours of errands. I was still in bed, propped up on my elbows in front of my iPad, which was in its keyboard case, open on a lap desk, the screen facing my face, when another wave of exhaustion overcame me.

I closed my eyes, but I was still awake. Oh, why am I so tired all the time.

I knew the answer. I remembered a video I’d seen on social media recently, a man telling other fellas “it is the flex you think it is” to have a girl fall asleep on you. The comments were ecstatic. I’d burst into tears.

If I could just lie down next to you and close my eyes, I thought, just for three hours, I think it would be like sleeping three years…

But dreaming of coregulation is exactly like starving for external validation; it’s just that the validation is now nervous system-based. No one can solve PTSD for another person.

I’m trying to learn to do this for myself. I’d spent the day before lying in bed listening to music, singing along softly, had gone to sleep that night hugging myself, on my side bound up in my own arms, trying to downregulate my own nervous system, to become my own self-perpetuating safe space. I’d woken up in the pre-dawn dark and done laundry, the dishes. When I woke up a second time, the house had people inside, and it was unseasonably warm outside. Everything was back in full swing.

If I could just rest, not have to be on constant guard, take off the night watch for once, if I could just— I thought, right before my thoughts unexpectedly veered toward Hell. I might’ve gasped.

Trust me, it’s no one you know. It’s no one I know. It isn’t a real person at all, just an idea of one. What matters is that my thoughts went straight to Hell.

Sorry! I didn’t mean to think that!

I cringed, trying to pump the brakes on a physiological reaction. What the fuck? A somatic therapist might say I’d tapped into a feeling of safety, but a pastor would say otherwise.

This never used to happen; I was a highly compartmentalized individual. I was proud of this: I liked it that way, I wanted it that way, I had no conscious intention, or motivation, to change this about myself.

Last year, at dinner, I’d confessed to a longtime friend that I’d never been able to make myself experience any romantic or physical attraction toward anyone I actually cared about. (If it weren’t always that way, well, it’d quickly turned that way soon enough in my 20s.) A look of astonishment, possibly tinged with pity, had passed over his face. “I’ve come to appreciate that this has protected me personally and professionally,” I continued quickly, my voice firm, overexplaining, hoping to stop my friend from saying whatever he was thinking. “Then, when I met my spouse, I truly believed the curse had been lifted.”

Maybe the real curse was on my spouse, because now he had two wives, Day Wife and Night Wife. A product of church on Sundays and daytime conferences and nighttime mixers (and now married to someone with many of the same potential colleagues), Night Wife was ravenous, insatiable, a sleep paralysis demon, while Day Wife thought P.D.A. is weird and unprofessional. Day Wife was diagnosed with tachycardia, Night Wife had bradycardia, both wives were put on metoprolol.

More to the point, both wives were exhausted. Day Wife was burned out keeping it together; Night Wife often needed a babysitter. “There are two Jenns,” my spouse had attempted to tell me. He was also unimpressed with my imperious moral uprightness. “You’re gonna wreck yourself,” he’d warned.

At first I’d ignored him. Then I’d decided he was correct, and that Night Wife needed to be chained up in the basement and starved. But I’d eventually looked at my Human Design’s “split definition,” and it had helped me visualize the idea that there were perhaps two circuits inside of me, with two distinct engines, two batteries, two separate cups. If bridged in the middle, maybe you could fill them simultaneously? I was floored by this. Learning they could be bridged was uniquely devastating. I grieved. I don’t know. Maybe this doesn’t make a lick of sense to anyone but myself.

Right. Defeating limerence—that is, the fantasy of a rescue, of “being seen exactly for who you are”—was going to require actual discipline now. I’d already vowed to divest wants or needs from notions of other people: no more hopes or fears or any other illusions secretly running the show.

I revised my thought. If I could just be my own safe place to sleep— I began again.

I was already asleep and already dreaming.

In my dream, I was on my computer playing some shitty time-wasting casual game. A pop-up notification appeared over the action, and I tried to click it closed. Oops! I’d just ‘liked’ the game on Facebook, apparently, in exchange for a handful of gold coins.

Fuck! I don’t use Facebook anymore; it is very important that I remain not-there. I scrambled for my phone, trying to delete the post endorsing the casual game from my Facebook Wall. Instead, I accidentally tapped on a link to the game. Ugh. Its mobile-app version opened, filling my phone’s screen.

Oh, wow, this was exactly where I’d left off, pretty slick. And this was inexplicably easier to control, more intuitive, than the computer version. Was it using the smartphone’s internal accelerometer?

I was in a cartoony fighter plane, and a handful of NPCs was swarming another player. Entering the encircled boundary meant you were joining the fight, like a timed MMO event. I went through the threshold and joined the battle circle, wanting to help this one player. I chased an enemy plane out of the circle. I accidentally left the circle myself. Whoops. Finally I shot down the enemy I’d been chasing, reentered the circle, just as the player finished the last of the four or so other enemies. The dogfight was over.

Here you go! The game gave us our earnings: 5 silver coins each. Ten in total, split halfsies between us.

Uh. These coins weren’t mine; I had done shit to earn them. I’d essentially robbed the player by joining the dogfight at all—kind of like how the U.S. joined WW2 right at the very end, assuming credit for finishing everyone off.

I started to putter my cartoon airplane toward the other player, was trying to memorize his displayname so I could apologetically DM him my 5 silver coins.

Nope! This casual game apparently had a plot. The screen faded to black. Now a cutscene had started, a conversation between two talking cartoon animals in military hats. I was being called to duty in a submarine at the bottom of the ocean, where I’d…

No! I thought. Do not want! I tapped at the screen frantically, trying to close this unskippable cutscene. I had to give the other player my 5 silver coins! Or else he’d curse my name, rue the day I ever—

I looked up from my phone. I was in the driver’s seat of a car, rolling forward down a narrow dirt trail through a dark forest, with neither of my hands on the steering wheel, nor my foot on the accelerator. Huh?

I flung my phone into the empty passenger seat, put my hands on the wheel. I flashed my headlights’ beams. Yep, it sure was a dark forest, which I hadn’t realized I was driving through until now.

I opened my eyes.

I was still lying on my stomach in bed, faced toward my open iPad, my chin still propped in my hands.

I slapped my iPad shut. I inverted myself and laid in bed properly, on my back, with my head on a pillow like you’re supposed to. I closed my eyes. I was already dreaming again. Now my mom was entering the room.

I opened my eyes as the bedroom door actually creaked open. It was the husky, who—damn her—knows how to fumble with a doorknob until it twists open.

“Heyyy,” I said to her drowsily, “I was just thinking about you.”

I sat up as she shyly moved toward my side of the bed, and I took her great big bear head in my hands.

“You’re hungry?” I asked her. “I’m hungry,” I realized. I got out of bed to figure out dinner.