It's Neurodiversity Pride Day

Enough Like You

There are people who say,

You don’t seem queer.

As if queerness is a costume instead of a life.
As if they can measure decades of love with a glance.
As if surviving requires no camouflage.

As if they have never met the generations of us who learned to fold ourselves into shapes the world would permit.

And there are people who say,

You don’t seem autistic.

As if autism is a stereotype instead of a nervous system. Alert. On fire.
As if they are meeting me and not the thousands of hours I spent studying how to be met.

As if adaptation is evidence against struggle.
As if the bridge I built to cross the river proves there was never water.

The two sentences share a spine.

You don’t seem queer. You don’t seem autistic.

What they mean is:

You seem enough like me that I don’t have to question the story I have been told.

What they mean is:

I cannot see the labor. I cannot see the translation.
I cannot see the years spent learning to survive inside a world that rewarded performance and called it authenticity.

But visibility was never the same thing as recognizability.

The truth of a life does not become less true because someone else cannot identify it on sight.

I did not become queer when you noticed.
I did not become autistic once I had language.

The ocean exists whether or not you can see beneath the surface.
The stars emerge long before they are named.
And I have spent enough years mistaking recognition for reality.

I no longer need someone else’s certainty to confirm my existence.

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