I Want to Go Home.

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I was already home. In my own house. Surrounded by familiar things. In a place where I was safe, where I belonged, where there was nowhere else I was supposed to be.

And still, somewhere between the tears and the overwhelm, a voice rose up from a place inside me that felt impossibly young.

I want to go home.

Not once. Not as a passing thought. Over and over.

I want to go home. I want to go home. I want to go home.

There was no address I could put into Google Maps. No destination that would make the feeling stop. It was a yearning so deep that I could feel it in my body. An ache that seemed older than the moment I was living in.

And I couldn’t make it go away.

What precipitated this meltdown is personal, and it will remain that way. I’m choosing to share what happened inside me, not the circumstances that brought me there. I can be honest about my experience without making every part of my life available for public consumption. Privacy isn’t the opposite of authenticity, and vulnerability doesn’t require full disclosure.

I’m a psychotherapist. I spend much of my life helping people understand their nervous systems, recognize their parts, and navigate overwhelm. I teach about autism, ADHD, PDA, trauma, and what happens when our nervous systems experience the world as too much.

I know the language. I know the frameworks. I know the tools.

And there I was, crying in my own home, wanting desperately to go home.

Because your therapists have meltdowns, too.

Knowing isn’t the same as being able to access.

There’s something particularly humbling about being able to explain what’s happening in a nervous system while simultaneously being unable to change what’s happening in your own.

I could probably have given a pretty compelling presentation about my experience. Cumulative demands, autistic overwhelm, the relationship between threat and autonomy, younger parts carrying experiences that don’t disappear just because we’ve grown older and built lives we love. I could have explained why a person might cry out for home while sitting in the middle of it.

But none of that made the crying stop. None of it made those younger parts feel like they had finally arrived somewhere they could rest.

It doesn’t matter if you have a million tools. You still only have two hands. And sometimes those hands are busy holding yourself together.

I’ve been sitting with those words.

I want to go home.

What does home mean when you’re already there?

I don’t think the answer is always a place.

Sometimes home is a feeling we remember, or perhaps a feeling we’ve spent our whole lives trying to find. Somewhere nothing is required of us. Where we don’t have to explain our needs, translate our internal experiences into language other people can tolerate, or perform being okay.

For those of us who grew up neurodivergent without knowing it, the concept of home can be complicated.

You can be loved and still spend years feeling fundamentally misunderstood. You can be cared for and still learn that your needs are inconvenient. You can have a childhood filled with beautiful things and still carry a younger self who never quite felt safe enough to stop working so hard.

And sometimes those younger parts don’t want insight or a reframe. They aren’t looking for another coping skill. They just cry.

I want to go home.

Perhaps what they’re asking is whether there is anywhere in the world, or inside ourselves, where they can finally put everything down.

Learning to fall apart.

There is a strange mythology around therapists. That because we understand emotional processes, we must somehow exist outside them. That our ability to help others regulate means we’re always regulated ourselves.

But understanding a meltdown doesn’t prevent one. Being a skilled clinician doesn’t exempt me from being autistic. Knowing my parts doesn’t mean they never overwhelm me.

And frankly, it took me a long time to learn to let myself have meltdowns at all.

For much of my life, overwhelm didn’t disappear. It went inward. My system had learned to contain, conceal, and internalize distress so efficiently that I could appear perfectly composed while everything inside me was coming apart.

I was taught to perform before I even had language.

By my early twenties, I had a reputation for always being okay. I could be dying inside, screaming with everything I had, and remain completely silent on the outside.

At one point, I started trying to do what I’d seen other people do when they weren’t okay. In hindsight, it was a very autistic approach to figuring out how to express distress.

Someone I knew had once driven up the Pacific Coast Highway to Santa Barbara when they weren’t okay. So one day, when I was supposed to be somewhere else, I did the same thing.

I drove up PCH to Santa Barbara.

And then I gave up.

It felt stupid. It wasn’t my brand of not being okay.

I had tried to borrow someone else’s way of falling apart because I didn’t know what mine looked like.

Except on stage, of course. There, I knew exactly how to express emotion. I could cry, rage, grieve, and fall apart in front of an audience.

But as myself? That would take decades.

And I think there’s something profoundly sad about having to learn how to be visibly distressed. About being so well trained to appear okay that even your attempts to express pain become another performance.

Which brings me to something else.

I don’t post my meltdowns on Instagram. Not because I’m unwilling to be vulnerable, or because I’m particularly ashamed of them.

But because if I, or anyone else, were to turn on a camera in the middle of one, it would almost certainly stop immediately.

Not because the distress had resolved or because I had suddenly regulated. Some deeply conditioned part of me would recognize that I was being watched and immediately shift.

The tears might stop. My face might change. My voice might steady. I might even smile. And I’m sure there’d be a joke right there waiting.

Someone watching might mistake that for being okay.

But the absence of visible distress is not the presence of safety.

That’s the thing about masking when it begins before language. It doesn’t always feel like a choice. Sometimes the nervous system responds to being observed before the conscious mind even has a chance to decide what it needs.

I wonder how many times people have mistaken my ability to stop showing distress for my ability to stop experiencing it. How often I’ve been praised for pulling myself together when what I was actually doing was disappearing.

Learning to let that distress move outward, to stop swallowing it whole, has been part of learning to inhabit my own humanity.

And that hasn’t been easy. And people do not like it.

There is something particularly painful about realizing that the very thing I worked so hard to allow myself can still be interrupted by the mere possibility of being observed.

Sometimes the most vulnerable thing I can do isn’t to show someone my meltdown.

It’s to allow myself to have one at all.

I didn’t need another tool. I needed somewhere to land.

There is a difference between being helped and being managed. For people whose nervous systems experience demands, expectations, and even well-intentioned support as additional pressure, that distinction matters enormously.

When I’m in that place, the last thing I need is someone handing me a list of things I could be doing differently. Reminders to breathe, suggestions to take a walk, questions about which coping skills I’ve tried. Judgments.

Even the invitation to regulate can feel like another demand. Another task I’m somehow failing.

We are so desperate to alleviate distress that we can forget to witness it. We want to make the feeling smaller before we’ve made enough room for the person experiencing it.

How often are we told we’re too much, too scary, too… autistic?

Sometimes there is nothing to solve in that moment. Sometimes there is a grown woman crying in her own home because some younger part of her is desperately searching for a feeling she cannot find.

And maybe the most compassionate response isn’t to ask her to stop crying.

Maybe it’s to hold her hand and say, “Let’s go home. Let’s find it.”

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what we ask of people who are considered healed, healthy, successful, or professionally competent. We expect their struggles to become stories told in the past tense. Something that happened before the insight, the diagnosis, the therapy, the growth.

We love a narrative with a clean ending.

I used to struggle, and then I learned.

But my life doesn’t work that way.

I can have built a life I love and still be overwhelmed by it. I can be a good therapist, a loving partner, a parent, an advocate, and a teacher, and still have moments when I am reduced to tears by something I cannot fully name.

These truths do not cancel each other out.

And I am proud of my humanity. Deeply, fiercely proud of it.

As someone who was taught to perform before I even had language, learning to simply be human has been hard-fought.

Learning to sit in my humanity, and with it, without immediately trying to make it more palatable or acceptable to someone else has taken years. Allowing myself to be messy and overwhelmed without turning those experiences into another performance of being okay is still something I’m learning.

For someone who learned to perform before she learned to speak, allowing herself to simply exist might be one of the most radical things she’s ever done.

Maybe home is not a place we arrive.

I wish I could tell you that I found the perfect way to comfort those younger parts. That I sat down, listened carefully, offered exactly the right words, and felt something settle.

That would make for a satisfying ending. But it wouldn’t be the whole truth.

Sometimes the ache doesn’t resolve neatly. Knowing where something comes from doesn’t necessarily make it hurt less. Sometimes you just have to survive the moment without turning your survival into a performance of growth.

I’m still thinking about that yearning. About how a person can be home and want to go home. About where I have found home.

About how many of us have spent our lives trying to build the safety we needed, only to discover that some parts of us haven’t yet learned to trust that it exists.

We cannot go backward and give our younger selves every experience they needed. We can love them now, listen to them, and try to build lives in which they don’t have to work quite so hard to be allowed to exist.

But we cannot rewrite every moment that taught them to long for somewhere else.

There is grief in that. Real grief. And I think it deserves more than a coping strategy.

I don’t share this because I think therapists need to disclose everything about themselves. We don’t. We each make decisions about what to share based on the context, the relationship, and the needs of the people we work with. Our clients deserve care and a therapeutic relationship that centers their needs.

But I think the mythology of the perpetually regulated therapist does harm. It asks clinicians to conceal their humanity and suggests to clients that healing means becoming someone who never falls apart.

I don’t want that for my clients. I don’t want them to become so skilled at managing themselves that their pain becomes invisible, or to mistake the ability to suppress distress for the experience of safety.

I want them to have more room to be themselves. I want that for me, too.

So here I am.

A therapist. An autistic adult. A person who teaches other people about nervous systems and autonomy and trauma and healing.

A person who sometimes has meltdowns.

A person who was sitting in her own home, crying, while something very young inside her begged to go home.

I don’t have a tidy conclusion. That’s not really my jam.

But I do know that I don’t want to turn that moment into another thing I was supposed to handle better.

Maybe I can just let it be what it was.

A moment of profound overwhelm and longing and pain, when my nervous system had nothing left to give.

A reminder that even the people who spend their lives holding space for others sometimes need a place to fall apart.

Your therapists have meltdowns, too.

And we are no less worthy of tenderness when we do.

Maybe home begins somewhere in that tenderness.