The Japanese concept of not comparing yourself to others, drawn from the observation that cherry, plum, peach, and apricot blossoms each open in their own time, in their own way, without reference to each other.
There is a particular kind of ache that doesn't have an obvious name.
It isn't jealousy, not exactly. It's quieter than that. It arrives when you watch someone else reach something you haven't reached yet, finish something you haven't finished, bloom in a season you're still waiting...
The Dutch word for going out into the wind to clear your head. Not a walk exactly. A deliberate exposure to open air and weather as a way of emptying a mind that has become too full.
I have approximately seventy tabs open right now.
Not on my browser. In my head. (ok, in my browser too)
Some of them are things I need to do today. Some are things I said I would do last week. Some are conversations I'm still processing from three days ago. Some are ideas I don't want to lose, half-formed things...
The Japanese word for the awareness of the universe that triggers a feeling too large for language. Not sadness. Not joy. Something older than either.
I was watching a flock of geese when they disappeared into the clouds.
Not dramatically. They didn't vanish all at once. They just kept going, one by one, into the grey, until the last one was gone and the sky was empty and I was still standing there looking at the place where they had been.
I didn't move for a long time. Not because I expected...
The Hawaiian word for the shimmer of light on moving water. There is no English equivalent.
I stopped walking without deciding to.
It was the water that did it. Not the water itself but what the light was doing to it, the way the surface had come alive with a thousand small fires, each one appearing and vanishing before I could hold it. I stood there longer than made sense. I couldn't have told you why. Something was happening in that shimmer that required my full attention, even though nothing...
There is no English word for the moment when everything is too much and one small thread appears.
You are standing in the middle of a room full of things that need doing.
Nothing is on fire. You know exactly what the tasks are. You are capable of all of them. And you cannot begin.
Then something small catches your attention. A familiar object. A routine motion. One step so obvious it requires no decision at all. And somehow, without choosing to, you start.
The myth gave us the word. We just never...
"The mask isn't something you put on. It's something you discover you've been wearing your whole life."
I was thirty-eight years old before I understood that the way I moved through the world was a performance.
Not a conscious one. Not a deliberate choice to present a false version of myself. Something that had begun so early, in response to such consistent feedback, that it had become completely invisible — to everyone around me and, most thoroughly, to myself.
The unmasking didn't happen in a...
"Patience in astronomy isn't passive. It's an active, alert waiting — the kind ND minds do better than anyone."
The first time I tried to observe Saturn seriously, I waited three hours.
Not three hours of doing other things while occasionally glancing up. Three hours at the eyepiece, watching a planet wobble and blur in unstable air, waiting for the atmosphere to settle. Waiting for what astronomers call good seeing — the brief windows when the air above you goes still and the view sharpens...
You poured the cream and then you stopped.
Not because anything interrupted you. Because something happened in the glass that was worth watching. The cream hit the cold coffee and didn't mix immediately. It fell in slow columns, bloomed at the bottom, rose in curling plumes along the edges. Patterns emerged and shifted and changed, each one complete for a moment before becoming the next one.
You watched it longer than was strictly necessary.
If you are neurodivergent, you probably know this...
A memory arrives.
Not because you were looking for it. Not because something pulled it forward. No scent, no song, no object encountered by accident. It simply appeared, fully formed, in the middle of an ordinary moment that had no apparent connection to it.
You were making coffee. You were stopped at a light. You were in the middle of a sentence about something else entirely. And then, without warning, something from years ago was simply present. A person. A room. The particular quality of...
There is a word for the idea you were certain was yours.
Cryptomnesia. The experience of believing something is original — a thought, an image, a melody, a phrase — when in fact it is a memory. Not a memory you recognize as a memory. A memory that lost its label somewhere in the archive and resurfaced as something new.
The content survived. The source did not.
You didn't plagiarize. You didn't steal. You genuinely believed the thing was yours because, by the time it arrived, it felt like yours....
There is a particular feeling that arrives when you find the word for something you have always felt.
Not surprise exactly. More like recognition. The quiet settling of something that had been slightly out of place for years, finally finding where it belongs. You didn't learn something new. You were handed the map for territory you had been living in your entire life.
This happens with certain words more than others. Not the words for objects or actions, which name things that exist...
"Summer doesn't arrive gently. For a neurodivergent nervous system, it arrives at full volume."
There is a particular quality to summer heat that I can feel before I step outside.
Not the temperature — the pressure. The specific weight of humid Houston air that arrives in late spring and doesn't leave until October. The way sound travels differently in thick air. The smell of concrete that has been absorbing sun since 6am. The brightness that makes everything look slightly overexposed, like...
You open a drawer looking for something else entirely.
And there it is.
A photograph. A piece of jewelry. Something small and worn that has no business being as significant as it is. You weren't looking for it. You weren't ready for it. And yet here you are, standing at an open drawer, holding something that weighs almost nothing and contains everything.
There is a German word for objects like this.
Habseligkeiten.
It translates roughly as "meager possessions", but the translation misses the...
A young vine, given the choice, will grow toward the darkest corner of the room.
Not away from it. Toward it.
This seems wrong. Everything we understand about plants tells us they move toward light. Phototropism, the bending of a stem toward a light source, is one of the first things we learn about how plants work. Sunlight is energy. Sunlight is life. Of course they move toward it.
But certain vines, in their early stages, do the opposite. They detect the darkest point in their environment and...
There is a term that comes from an unexpected place.
Sub-drop. It originated in communities where people engage in intense physical and emotional experiences together. When the experience ends, the body, which had been flooded with adrenaline, endorphins, and cortisol, suddenly has none of it. The floor drops out. What follows can look like anxiety, sadness, irritability, exhaustion, or a kind of emotional rawness that seems to have no logical cause.
The experience was real. The chemistry was...
There's a teaching that goes like this.
You're carrying a cup of coffee and someone bumps into you. Coffee spills. The question the teaching asks is not about the person who bumped you. It's this: why did you spill?
The answer: because there was coffee in the cup.
You can only spill what you're already carrying.
The Story
A friend told me something recently that brought this teaching back to me.
Someone said something offensive to her. Not catastrophic, just the kind of thoughtless comment that...
"Writing isn't how I communicate. It's how I find out what I actually think."
I didn't start writing because I had something to say.
I started writing because I had something I couldn't stop thinking about and no other way to find out what it was.
This is, I've come to understand, a specifically neurodivergent relationship with writing. Not the only one — but a common one. The brain that processes experience associatively, that makes connections across unrelated domains, that holds multiple...
Everyone talks about the speed of light.
Nobody talks about the speed of shadows.
What Shadows Are
A shadow is not a thing.
We treat shadows as objects, as presences, as something that falls and stretches and moves. But a shadow is an absence. A region where light is blocked. It has no mass, no energy, no physical substance of its own. It is defined entirely by what it is not.
And because it is not a thing, it does not have to obey the rules that govern things.
It can stretch from a point to an...
"Kepler refused to round off. That refusal changed everything we knew about our solar system."
There is a particular kind of person history keeps producing.
Difficult to work with. Obsessive. Inflexible on details everyone else considers minor. Incapable of letting go of an anomaly that doesn't fit the accepted model. Unable to look at the world the way it's supposed to be looked at.
History calls them geniuses — usually after the fact, usually after the people who found them unbearable are...
You can, however, become someone they cannot ignore.
There's a difference worth sitting with. The first assumes respect is something granted by others, something you petition for, something that requires their cooperation. The second has nothing to do with them at all.
Carried, Not Earned
Some people never worried much about respect.
Not out of arrogance. Not out of indifference to how they're received. But because they were too busy being precisely and fully themselves to spend much energy on...