Untangling autism, ADHD, and trauma when all the language feels wrong — and learning how perception actually works from the inside out.

What looks like apathy or intensity-from-nowhere is actually my nervous system trying to survive epistemic collapse. I’m not “bad at focusing” or “too deep”; I’m relearning how to exist in a world that once demanded I perform belief instead of having my own perception.

I’m learning how to stay awake inside a life I was never prepared to inhabit, trying to steady myself between dissociation, awe, and the disorientation of finally understanding what being human actually is.

I’m trying to understand why my reality slips, why I loop, why I panic—and why belonging feels impossible even as I hunger for it. This is me trying to stay with myself instead of abandoning myself again.

I’m trying to reclaim my own perception after decades of evangelical conditioning, but every time I surface for air, the world itself feels like it’s collapsing. It’s hard to know what’s “me” and what’s inherited programming.

I’m tracing twenty years of coercion, collapse, desire, silence, and survival—and finally seeing the shape of what all those years made of me.

I’m learning what it means to survive after my inherited self has shattered—body horror, derealization, and all—and what it takes to rebuild a mind that was never allowed to be mine.

A grounded look at why my “flat” memory style isn’t broken, why vivid trauma-recall isn’t a universal human trait, and why I’m not missing out by avoiding EMDR and brainspotting.

I walked back into my authoritarian Christian high school expecting the old hierarchies and shame codes to clamp down again. Instead I found awkward midlifers, open talk about harm, and my nervous system quietly realizing the danger was gone.

Growing up in evangelicalism, I was never taught what emotions were—only how to interpret them as God’s approval or judgment. This conversation unpacks how that emotional colonization, a shrooms trip, years of therapy, weed, and even Tetris all intersected as I finally began to meet my own feelings as real and non-spiritual.