Slowed-Down Love: On Plushies, Loss, and the Consciousness of Matter

A moment in a rural charity shop becomes a meditation on memory, matter, and autistic resistance to forced “growing up.” On plushies, reverence, and what it means to keep what softens us—and what still remembers.

Introduction: The Moment of Witness

It was a quiet morning at the charity shop, the kind of day that hums with the familiar rhythm of folding clothes, sorting books, greeting guests with practiced warmth. My family volunteers here a few times a week—steady hands in a place that receives the afterlife of many homes. Frazier Park, like so much of rural California, may be part of a blue state on the map, but it’s red to the bone. MAGA flags hang proud in pickup windows. There’s a bluntness here that can seem like candour, until you realise what’s been cut away to make room for it.

Most donations pass through us without event—bags of fast fashion, outdated appliances, the odd jigsaw puzzle with the missing pieces. But that day, a family came in with cardboard boxes filled to the brim. I recognised the ritual immediately, though no one named it aloud. The boy stood beside them, quiet but taut, like a string pulled too tight. His parents called it “cleaning out the clutter.” Said he was getting older now. Said it was time. The phrase carried the same tired finality I’ve heard before—like a benediction for becoming. Only it wasn’t blessing. It was abandonment.

They left quickly, the boxes now ours to sort. I turned back to the shelves, distracted by some small task, and it was my daughter who found it first—our daughter, also an autistic GLP, and someone who sees the world in the same layered, relational way I do. She held up a plushie without a word. Round, blue, with a soft yellow beak and a headband of long, flopped bunny ears perched atop its head. A bird, yes—but cosplaying as a bunny. Not pretending, exactly. Becoming. “I think this one’s for you,” she said, like it was obvious. And it was. I felt it instantly: the weight, the resonance, the story stitched into silence. Not just a plush, but a presence. A remnant of something unfinished.

It reminded me of someone. The boy. His silence. His gaze. The way he hadn’t looked at me, but through me, like I might be the kind of adult who wouldn’t understand. My daughter had seen it too. Had recognised the shape of that grief and thought, they’ll get it. And I did. She paid the asking price, small but symbolic—a kind of ransom, really—to offer it a new, loving home.

We’re told, especially in rural places, to grow up fast. To harden. To leave behind our softness as if it were shameful. The MAGA dads with their tactical gear talk of resilience, of discipline, of grit—but they don’t tell you what it costs. We discard plushies like we discard gentleness, imagination, kinship with things that cannot speak back. In their absence, we train children to emulate the left hemisphere’s rule: classify, suppress, outgrow. But the right hemisphere remembers differently. It remembers that matter is not inert. It holds. It listens. It attends.

My daughter and I are made of that kind of attention. The plushie wasn’t a toy—it was a slowed-down companion, an echo of the child who needed it. And maybe still does.

The Things We Are Told to Outgrow

The dominant culture calls it growing up. A rite of passage. A cleansing, even. At a certain point, you’re meant to put the soft things away. Box up the plushies, the imaginary friends, the voices that once comforted you when the dark pressed too close. Give them away. Bury them in attic corners. Or throw them out. In many households—especially here, where resilience is confused with refusal—this is framed as necessary. A lesson in letting go. But I’ve never found it holy. Only hollow.

What they don’t say is that this ritual is less about the child’s readiness and more about the adult’s discomfort. It’s the parent who wants to see order instead of chaos, obedience instead of attachment, linear progression instead of cyclical return. The child’s need for repetition, for talismanic touch, for the quiet companionship of a toy that knows their scent and rhythm—these are misread as regression. As weakness. As something to be outgrown.

I never lost mine. Not the way so many others did. No one came to take them from me, no rite of passage forced their removal. I still have my original stuffed animals—thread-worn, beloved, and wholly unashamed. I travelled the world with them, tucked safely into suitcases or curled beside me in unfamiliar rooms. No one really noticed. Or if they did, they didn’t care. I was mostly ignored—another stranger with strange attachments and no obvious need for policing. And now that I’ve grown, strong enough on the outside to keep my softness visible, no one dares to say a word. My desk is ringed with Squishlettes. My reading nook is their home too. It isn’t hidden. It’s curated.

I didn’t hold on because I couldn’t move on. I held on because these companions were never obstacles to growth. They were—and are—witnesses to it. They stayed through heartbreak, through migration, through the long, slow claiming of a self the world tried not to see. And I’m not letting them go. Not now. Not ever. Because in a culture that still mocks visible tenderness, and still reads comfort as regression, this too is resistance. To love something small and soft and unthreatening, and to do so proudly, is not a failure to mature. It’s the quiet practice of a very different kind of strength.

And now, science—ironically, the same science so often used to justify compliance—begins to catch up with what many of us knew in our bodies all along. That memory isn’t just stored in the brain, but in the hands. That co-regulation is not indulgence, but necessity. That transitional objects aren’t just for toddlers, and that what we call “immature” might in fact be the very thing keeping us tethered to our humanity.

Iain McGilchrist helps name this fracture. He writes of the divided brain—not the cartoonish left-brain-logic versus right-brain-creativity we were sold in the ‘90s, but something deeper. A civil war of attention. The left hemisphere, he argues, seeks control, certainty, dissection. It handles abstractions, labels, maps. But it does not know what to do with living wholes. The right hemisphere, by contrast, attends to relationship. To presence. To gesture, rhythm, metaphor. It knows things that cannot be reduced—and does not try.

Within that frame, the plushie is not trivial. It is not regressive. It is sacred matter. It is, quite literally, consciousness slowed down—a form given to feeling, a softness that remains even when language fails. And if we let it, it can become a vessel for connection, for safety, for memory that does not disappear just because we’re no longer young.

So when we brought that blue “bunny” Squishmallow home, it wasn’t sentimentality. It wasn’t nostalgia. It was memory—held in form, in texture, in weight. Matter, as McGilchrist writes, is consciousness slowed down—and this one carried more than mine. It held a moment of grief that the boy hadn’t been allowed to keep. And now, nestled among my Squishlettes, it’s more than a plush. It’s a living echo. A small, steady presence preserving a memory that might otherwise have been erased. I treasure it more now, knowing that I’m not just holding onto softness for myself, but safeguarding something that was never meant to be discarded. For that poor youngling—for all of us who’ve ever spoken through the things we weren’t allowed to say—I’ll keep it safe.

Matter as Memory, Matter as Meaning

McGilchrist writes that matter is not the inert, lifeless stuff modernity takes it to be. He speaks of a world not built from things, but from relations. From reverberation, resonance, and the deep continuity between self and world. And in that light, the plushie changes shape. It is not a mute object. It is a vessel of presencing—a way in which memory, attachment, and affect come into form. A mode of knowing that cannot be accessed by analysis or dissection, only by participation.

This is where so much of neurotypical culture falters—where left-hemisphere habits of abstraction and categorisation fail to perceive the richness of what is actually there. Because what a Squishmallow holds is not reducible to its fabric or its mass. It holds continuity—across days, across moods, across ruptures of the self. It bridges moments we could not narrate. It anchors what might otherwise float untethered in the sensory and emotional flux of an autistic life.

For gestalt processors like me, who experience the world not in parts but in patterns, these objects are not decorative. They are nodes of felt meaning. They hold gestalts—clusters of memory, sound, tone, breath, gesture. They are often the first witnesses to sorrow, the first companions in joy. They remember what we forget when language breaks down.

The blue “bunny” we brought home is not just a plush rescued from a bin. It is a memorial to a child’s voiceless grief. But it is also something more: a testament to what McGilchrist calls “the sacredness of the world as it is revealed through attention.” It is not merely sentimental to care for it—it is ontological. It is a practice of reverent noticing. Of resisting the lie that meaning must be spoken aloud to be real.

In its small, rounded softness, it reminds me: what steadies us is never trivial. And what holds us in return—when we are unable to hold ourselves—deserves to be seen for what it is: not clutter, not childishness, but a companion in the co-creation of being.

What We Carry Forward

It lives with me now, the blue “bunny.” Not hidden away, not stored in some drawer as an oddity or artefact—but settled comfortably among the rest of my Squishlettes, nestled into the shelves that shape the landscape of my reading nook. It has found its place not as a charity case, but as kin. As one more presence in the slow constellation of things that help me live.

We didn’t bring it home to rescue it. That framing is too thin. We brought it home because something in us recognised something in it. Because we all knew what had just been lost. Because even now, so many of us are still learning to speak the language of things that carry memory—not just ours, but others’. This one carries the weight of a goodbye never given voice, and the shape of a grief no one acknowledged. It carries the trace of a child who wasn’t ready to let go, and of a culture that didn’t bother to ask if he should.

McGilchrist writes of presencing—of how things become real through the quality of attention we offer them. And in that sense, the “bunny” is more real now than it was in the box. It is attended to. It is named. It is felt. And in my keeping of it, the memory it holds is not lost, but transfigured.

If you ever wonder where your blue bunny went—
know that someone saw.
Someone felt the hush of that moment.
Someone paid its small ransom.
And someone kept it safe.

Closing – Refusing to Let Go of What Matters

They’ll say it’s Peter Pan syndrome. That to keep plushies, or play, or softness into adulthood is to refuse the world as it is. They’ll say it like an accusation. As if wonder were a failure. As if the refusal to abandon what steadies and delights us is evidence of immaturity, not integrity. It’s a story autistic people know well—the one where we are cast as the child who never grows up. But what if we’ve misunderstood the moral? What if growing up, in its dominant form, is the tragedy?

Because if becoming an adult means losing the thread of imagination, the whimsy that animates a room full of Squishlettes, the gentle attachments that tether us to feeling—then no, I will not call that maturity. I will not pretend it’s evolution to sever ourselves from the very capacities that make connection possible. Softness is not something we outgrow. It is something we’re trained to hide. And in that training, something vital is lost.

Autistic temporality runs differently. Not in the straight lines they draw for us—milestones, stages, deadlines—but in spirals and returns, in lingerings and loops. We know that not all goodbyes are necessary. That presence doesn’t always demand forward motion. That some of us live more fully in the keeping than in the moving on.

So I’ll keep what steadies me. I’ll keep the blue “bunny.” I’ll keep the echo of the boy’s gaze, and the hush of that moment, and the sacredness of small things made visible by care. I’ll keep the shelves full of Squishlettes and the soft defiance they embody.

And maybe, if you’re reading this, you will too.
We will keep what softens us.
We will rescue what remembers.
And we will grow—not away from these things, but with them.