To The Little Girl Who Thinks She Is Broken

To you,

The little girl with the wide green eyes, messy dark curls, and a crooked toothed smile. There was a time when you were totally and completely innocent to all the ways that the world and the people in it could hurt you. But that is a time that as an adult, you will not be able to remember. You will try, you will try so awfully hard. But unfortunately, you learned at a young age how the world chews up and spits out anyone even the slightest bit different. You learned that people, even the incredibly young ones, maybe even especially them, can be incredibly cruel for what will feel like no reason at all. And the pain of that cruelty is what will shape you over the years, until you don’t know how to let anything else guide you.

I wish that there were a way for me to really talk to you now. I wish that I could beg you to fight for yourself. I wish that I could beg you not to let all of the people around you change you. To not let them push you so hard that you had no choice but to learn how to do something you should never have had to do. Mask. You won’t know that word of course. Not yet.

You’ll just know that you cannot take the way people tease and torment you at school and in public. You’re so sick of feeling wrong and broken because of the way that people treat you, and you just want it to stop. You’re sick of crying yourself to sleep wishing that you could fix whatever was missing inside of you and be more like everyone else. I know. I know how bad your eyes sting every night as you finally go to sleep.

You will hope that if you try to act more like other people, if you try to be the way they think that you should be, then it will all feel better. Maybe if you talk a little quieter, and a little less, you won’t be too much for people. Maybe if you dress more like your classmates, and talk less about your strange interests, that cute boy won’t dump milk on you or throw food at you again. If you hide your real personality. If you hide all your quirks, inside and out, maybe everything will change, and the world won’t feel so hard.

But the truth is, the only thing you are going to get right is that something is going to change. But its not a good thing. At the end of the day, all those cruel people are still going to be cruel. But you aren’t going to be you anymore. You’re going to get so good at masking, that you’re not going to start learning how to truly tear that mask off until you are thirty years old. And that, that is the real tragedy in this story. Because there was and is nothing wrong with the you behind the mask. Autism and ADHD and Neurodivergence are not bad words.

The tragedy is in the words your mother waited until your late twenties to utter. “I always thought that you might be on the spectrum.” Said years after your son’s autism diagnosis. Almost a decade into your own adulthood. Words that feel like a gut punch. Not because there’s anything wrong with being autistic. But because after thirty years of masking so much and so deeply, how do you even begin to do the work to undo that?

I wish that I could tell you, sweet little girl, to embrace yourself as is. To tell all those other people around you, family and schoolmates alike, to bugger off. I wish that I could tell you that you were let down by the people who were meant to have your back. That you are perfect just the way you are. Nothing is wrong. Nothing is broken. And all those kids with their mean words, and their lack of acceptance, will be nothing to you in another twenty years.

But most of all, what I really wish I could tell you… and I am crying now as I type these words… is that I love you. I love you for all that you are, and all that you should have been allowed to be. And I wish to god that I could grip your shoulders and tell you that loving you, loving yourself, is the most important thing. The only important thing. And that no matter what they all say, there is so much good in you to love. Things that you should never have had to hide behind that mask. Things I truly hope that you will find again.

Be the little girl who talks too much and too loud again. Laugh and smile and revel in all the things you are learning now to hate about yourself. Shine the way you were meant to.