Story time.

For years I thought I got dumber.

And before anyone rushes into the comments with “You’re not dumb!”—I know.

I’m talking phenomenologically.

Keep up.

When I was little, I was one of those deeply annoying children who taught herself to read early and then proceeded to develop strong opinions about things no second grader should have opinions about.

I was bright.

Curious.

Obsessive.

The kind of kid who would accidentally read an encyclopedia for fun.

Then I changed environments.

And suddenly my brain seemed to file a formal resignation.

The intellectual energy that used to go toward books, ideas, and pattern recognition got redirected into a much more urgent research project:

How the hell do humans work?

Why are they saying one thing and meaning another?

Why is everyone following rules nobody explained?

Why does every social interaction feel like I’ve arrived halfway through a meeting that started three years ago?

For decades I thought my intelligence had somehow vanished.

Turns out it hadn’t vanished.

It had been conscripted.

My cognitive resources were no longer studying ideas.

They were busy conducting a full-time ethnographic study of neurotypical behavior.

With no funding.

No supervision.

And frankly, very poor working conditions.

Then I hit my 40s.

And something weird happened.

My brain got bored of surviving.

The capacities I’d been missing started showing up again.

Systems thinking.

Writing.

Theory building.

Pattern recognition.

The whole crew wandered back into the office like they’d just been out for lunch.

And that’s when I realized something.

Sorry, Erik Erikson.

You forgot about us.

Not because your model is bad.

Because your model assumes development is linear.

Step one.

Step two.

Step three.

Identity.

Intimacy.

Generativity.

Everybody move neatly through the stages in an orderly fashion.

Meanwhile autistic people are over here like:

“Interesting theory. I appear to be having an existential crisis, an identity breakthrough, a sensory collapse, and a cognitive awakening simultaneously.”

I don’t think autistic development is linear.

I know it isn’t.

I think it’s ecological.

I think development emerges from the interaction between:

safety,

belonging,

trauma,

sensory load,

support,

meaning,

community,

and whether or not we’re spending 87% of our processing power trying to determine whether “Thanks.” is gratitude, disappointment, passive aggression, or a declaration of war.

The question isn’t:

“What stage are you in?”

The question is:

“What is your system adapting to?”

Because what looked like regression in my life was often adaptation.

What looked like delay was resource allocation.

What looked like stagnation was survival.

And what looked like a developmental growth spurt at 40 wasn’t a miracle.

It was an ecosystem finally allowing something to grow.

Maybe autistic people don’t develop late.

Maybe we’re growing the whole time.

The ecology just determines what gets sunlight.