A quiet unraveling led me to parts of myself I’m only just beginning to meet. This piece is for the parts we’ve silenced, the children we’re raising, and the versions of ourselves we’re still becoming.
I used to think I was managing.
Not thriving, maybe, but coping.
Functioning.
I kept routines in place like scaffolding, each task, each to-do list, each smile a plank holding everything steady. If I could just stay in motion, no one would notice the static buzzing under my skin, the overwhelm, the emotional floods, the not-so-quiet hum that said something wasn’t quite right.
But underneath it all was a live wire I’d been walking across for years.
I’ve always felt like I was standing just outside the door.
In preschool and kindergarten, I probably had friends, but even then, something felt off. Like I was in the room, but not of it. I couldn’t name it then. I just knew that eye contact felt like too much, too bright, too close, too exposing. I wanted connection, but it felt like trying to hold sunlight in my hands. I was already quietly watching, trying to understand the rules everyone else seemed to know.
School was never simple for me, not the way people assumed.
Heck, life wasn’t simple in any capacity.
There was trauma, deep, unspoken, formative. I didn’t know how to ask for help because my nervous system had already learned that needing could be dangerous. And even once I left the environment that harmed me, I still couldn’t reach for support. My body didn’t register safety. My voice didn’t trust it would be heard.
As the years went on, that feeling of not belonging only deepened.
New schools, new classrooms, new faces, but the same ache. At recess, I’d stand off to the side with my sleeves pulled over my hands, watching the others run and laugh and melt into each other with ease. I wanted to join in, but I didn’t know how. My words caught somewhere in my throat, and my body felt like it didn’t move right, too hesitant, too careful, too much and never enough at the same time.
I was picked on. Bullied. Whispered about.
And still… adults saw me as “well-behaved.”
I didn’t disrupt. I followed the rules, at least until high school.
But I wasn’t okay. I was surviving.
And I kept asking myself the same silent question over and over again:
What is wrong with me?
Why do I never fit?
Why does every space feel like it wasn’t made for me?
Why does the outside world see one thing, while the inside of me is breaking?
That question followed me everywhere.
Even in spaces that were supposed to be safe.
Even when nothing was technically wrong.
I didn’t feel like I belonged anywhere.
I worked hard. I always have. But then came an abusive marriage, emotional, psychological, and in ways I didn’t even realize until much later, and suddenly, all that trying didn’t matter. It didn’t matter how much of myself I gave, how tightly I held everything together, how deeply I felt or how badly I wanted peace. It was never enough. Not for him. And not for the system I had unknowingly built my life around.
Over time, I became so dysregulated that I barely recognized myself. I was reactive, intense, constantly on edge…and I hated it. That wasn’t the version of me I knew inside. It wasn’t who I was, not deep down. But it was who the world saw. Who my children saw. They were forced to live inside the fallout of a storm I didn’t know I was carrying. They got the most raw, dysregulated, desperate parts of me, not because I didn’t love them, but because I hadn’t yet learned how to love myself in the places that needed it most.
Back then, I still believed something was wrong with me, that I was just emotionally weak, too sensitive, too “broken.” I didn’t know that I was carrying trauma layered on top of something even older. I didn’t know that neurodivergence had been living quietly underneath everything all along, not as something that happened to me, but something that was always part of me.
No one taught me that, not because they didn’t care, but because they didn’t know either. My parents didn’t have this language. The world around me didn’t recognize the signs. It wasn’t intentional. It was just invisible. But it shaped everything. It shaped how I moved, how I loved, how I collapsed. It shaped the way I blamed myself for not being able to “just do better.” And because I didn’t know it was there, I fought it. I shamed myself for it. I tried harder, got smaller, felt more and more broken for not being able to fix what I didn’t understand.
Looking back now, I can see it so clearly. This living, breathing part of me, this different wiring, was with me from the beginning. It took root quietly and grew its own system within me. And because I didn’t know it existed, I never learned to care for it. I never learned to work with it. I never even considered that I wasn’t failing, I was trying to survive in a world that never even knew I needed something different.
And that… breaks my heart.
But it also explains so much.
It explained why everything started to come undone this year, why I suddenly couldn’t hold myself together the way I used to. Why routines that once anchored me now slipped through my fingers like silt. Why emotions surged like thunderstorms in my chest and spilled out without warning, leaving me soaked in overwhelm with no dry place to rest.
I didn’t know at first what was happening. All I knew was that something inside me had cracked wide open, and the waters I had kept dammed up for years, maybe decades, were flooding every corner of me. The stillness I once clung to was gone. In its place, a churning, aching, desperate rush. I wasn’t coping. I wasn’t managing. I was regressing. Cognitively, emotionally, spiritually. I was unraveling in slow, painful waves.
I forgot how to do basic things. Couldn’t plan. Couldn’t remember. Couldn’t stay present in conversations. My brain felt like a fog-covered field with no path forward, just wandering thoughts and sudden dead ends. I became reactive in ways that startled even me. I couldn’t regulate. I cried without reason. Couldn’t make decisions. Couldn’t think in a straight line. Couldn’t stop the ritual loops in my head. OCD came crashing in like an uninvited storm, and I was powerless to close the windows against it.
There have been moments were I would stop whatever I was doing and begin with sobs, breath shallow, vision blurred, begging for stillness inside myself. Meltdowns that left my skin buzzing, my body heavy with shame. Shutdowns where I couldn’t speak. Couldn’t move. Could only stare at the wall while the world blurred and I disappeared inside it. And all the while, that voice returned, What is wrong with me?
But this time… I listened differently.
Instead of turning away, I turned toward it. I knew, finally knew, that I couldn’t keep guessing, couldn’t keep patching together theories and trauma fragments and calling it healing. I needed answers. Real ones. I needed to understand what was happening in my brain, not so I could be “fixed,” but so I could be met, by myself, by others, by a map that finally made sense.
So I started testing.
The first appointment was over Zoom, gentle, distant, a beginning. But the in-person sessions brought the truth to the surface like heat rising off stone. My evaluator was warm and attuned, the kind of presence that feels like soft moss under bare feet. She noticed everything, the overwhelm in my body, the quiet way I swayed when I couldn’t focus, the way my eyes filled with tears without warning. She didn’t rush me. She didn’t flatten me. She gave me space to exist.
Even still, the testing was intense. The tasks pushed against the raw edges of my cognition, the places I’d tried to pretend were still working. One test involved shapes, rotation, patterns I couldn’t hold. My vision blurred. My mind spiraled. I couldn’t finish. I started to shut down or maybe it was having a meltdown. She offered a break, and I accepted it. When I walked into the breakroom by myself, I broke down, weeping, shoulders curling in, arms around myself like a child. It was to much. I was doing good until I wasn’t. Will I ever know the answers I got right vs the ones that were wrong? She paused the testing and rescheduled the rest because she saw what the world so often misses: not defiance, not failure, but flooding.
I’ve had three appointments so far. And still, I’m terrified they won’t see the whole of me. That they’ll see only the fragments I managed to share in the window of those few hours. That something will be missed because I didn’t type fast enough or remember enough or explain myself with the precision I needed. So I prepared. God, did I prepare. I typed pages—ten, maybe more, trying to capture my mind like sunlight in cupped hands. I explained. I gave examples. I wrote until my fingers ached, because I needed them to see me.
Because this isn’t just about a diagnosis. This is about a lifetime of being misread. About having been called dramatic or lazy or intense when I was simply different. When I was simply navigating a world not designed for my wiring. I don’t care what the results say, well I do but I care that they reflect the truth of me. The depth. The nuance. The why.
Because I am not building a new mask.
I am building a foundation.
One that can hold all the things I never knew how to name.
Now I wait.
I wait with my chest pressed against time, my nerves humming like power lines in the heat. I wait for words on paper that might give shape to the fog I’ve been walking through for decades. For something I can hold in my palms, solid, rooted, something that says, yes, this is real. You are not imagining your difference.
But I’m not waiting for a diagnosis. I’m waiting for recognition. For something that echoes my inner world the way trees echo wind, faithfully, without distortion. I’m waiting for the kind of truth that doesn’t just explain me… but meets me. That looks me in the eye and says, You were never broken. You were just written in a different language.
And I’m not doing this alone.
I’m doing it for my children.
For the ones who feel sound with their skin and emotion with their whole bodies.
The ones who melt down when they’re overwhelmed, not because they’re disobedient, but because their systems are trying to survive.
I want them to have the words I never had. The soft place to land I never knew. I want them to see their intensity as power, not pathology. I want them to walk barefoot in a world that no longer punishes them for their softness, their strength, their spirals, their sparkle.
And for the grandchildren I might one day hold in my arms as well as the one that is already here, I want to leave the soil softer for them. I want them to grow roots in ground that understands their depth, their rhythm, their different way of blooming. I want them to be seen before they disappear into silence.
And yes, I’m doing it for me too.
For the girl who stood at the edge of the playground, wind licking at her cheeks, sleeves pulled over her hands, wondering why her body never felt quite right in the world.
For the teenager who thought she was just lazy and dramatic when she was actually in pain.
For the mother who sat under the shower until the water turned cold, trying to quiet the screaming in her head without ever making a sound.
For the woman now, who is slowly learning to hold herself with the tenderness she always deserved.
I’m not healed. I’m still unraveling.
But I am no longer disappearing.
I am becoming.
And for the first time, the sun is warming parts of me that have never seen the light.
I am not broken.
I never was.
I was just written in wild script, like vines on stone, like rivers through canyons.
And now, I’m learning to read myself.
To speak myself.
To build myself, rooted and reaching, all at once.
Perfectly Imperfect 
Express Yourself!