We Weren’t Too Much. The World Was Too Little.

No one talks about the grief.

Not just the grief of diagnosis.
But the grief of realising who you had to be to survive.

The masking. The mimicking. The pushing through.
The cost of being acceptable. Of being “not too much.”
Of staying quiet when your whole body wanted to scream.

I wasn’t diagnosed autistic until adulthood.
Before that, I just thought I was broken in oddly specific ways.

Too intense. Too sensitive. Too tired.
Too honest. Too much.

But the truth is, I wasn’t too much.
The world was too little.
Too little curiosity.
Too little accommodation.
Too little care for people who don’t fit a standard mold.

Being autistic doesn’t mean lacking empathy.
It means feeling everything.
And often carrying more than one nervous system should.

Today is World Autism Day

And I don’t want awareness.
I want reckoning.
With the systems that made so many of us feel like failures just for being different.

Because I don’t need to be fixed.
I need space.
To stim. To rest. To speak in my own language.
To work in ways that make sense to my brain.

If you're late-diagnosed, or wondering if you might be—
You’re not imagining it.
You’re remembering who you were before the world told you not to be.

What would change if autistic people didn’t have to perform for acceptance?

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