Did you know that when I was small, I was the shadow girl?
In the early years, the teachers quietly gave up on anchoring my attention. They spoke in a language I understood perfectly, yet my mind had already slipped through the floorboards, wandering off to ride bareback horses through dense, unfiltered woods.
There was a sensory overload in their structured world that I couldn't quite map, so I learned the art of disappearing. I was picked on sometimes, but mostly I just dissolved into the wallpaper. I became a master of the chameleon’s trade, masking the static in my head by mimicking the stillness of the room.
Safety was a solitary geometry. I spent hours—sometimes days—contained within the silent perimeter of my bedroom. Armed with a fierce devotion to pencils, pens, and the tactile perfection of crisp, untouched notebooks, I built a kingdom out of raw imagination. I cataloged prose and spun complex, meticulous worlds just to whisper them back to myself at night. Huddled under the blankets, the heavy weight of a red plastic flashlight anchored in my small hands, I let the warm beam—powered by the steady hum of its two C batteries—illuminate my hidden pages, tucked into the heavy, echoing quiet of the house.
Outdoors, the hyper-focus shifted but never faded. I lived in the architecture of the woods, building secret forts and scaling the highest, thinnest branches of the tallest trees, needing to see the world from a vantage point where it couldn’t touch me. The social code of humans felt like a foreign tongue, so I negotiated elsewhere. I whistled perfect, repetitive echoes to the birds, confided my secrets to the stray cats I constantly brought home, and organized intricate, silent conspiracies with our toy poodle.
Over time, I fell in love with melancholy because it was predictable; it never abandoned me, and the deep isolation eventually etched itself right into my skin. It took decades to find the clinical name for the way my wiring functions, to understand that inside I am a chamber of hot, pressurized lava leaking from a perpetually volcanic heart. Sometimes, the only way to quiet the deafening hum of the world and soothe my racing thoughts is an absolute absence of execution—to drop all demands and exist entirely inside the soft, unchanging sensory boundaries of my pajamas.
Yet, even when the outside world stops asking things of me, my own internal machinery takes over. I immediately begin spinning a new web of rigid rules, intense passions, and high expectations to impose upon myself. It is a constant, exhausting internal loop—but I realize now, it is precisely the rhythm that keeps me sane.
