The Joy That Lives in My Skin

A Life They’d Rather Prevent, Lived in Full Colour

A celebration of neurodivergent joy, embodiment, and survival in the face of erasure. Not a rebuttal, but a coronation. We were never lost—we were never broken—and we are not waiting to be loved.

Introduction

It’s a rare thing, isn’t it? To stand in the middle of so much ruin and still feel joy radiating from your chest like it’s got somewhere important to be. Not the easy kind of joy—clean and curated and made for soft lighting—but something raw and real, something with muscle memory. Lately, we’re told the end is near in so many ways it becomes ambient noise. Politicians promise to “solve” us, to trace our lives back to a single mutation or event, as if people like me are a calamity waiting to be undone. RFK Jr. says they’ll find the cause of autism by September, like we’re a mystery they’ve finally cracked. They say it with the tone of triumph, but I hear an elegy. I hear the dangerous hope that we’ll be wiped clean from the story—neatly, surgically, like we were never meant to be here in the first place.

And still, I grin.

Because I know something they don’t: I’ve already won.

I remember being young and fearless, eyes scanning the pitch or the mat, always looking for the biggest, strongest, fastest opponent. Not to prove anything to anyone else—but to test my own edge. I didn’t want the easy match. I wanted the one they warned me about. The one that made others step back. I wanted the struggle that required all of me. And this—this life—is the same. It’s the fight of my life, and I have never been more alive.

They cast me aside early, chalked me up as a lost cause before I even had a chance to start. Illiterate, they said. Unteachable. Too much. Too scattered. And yet, here I am—not just surviving, but writing my own name with joy. With authority. With love. This isn’t a comeback. This is a coronation.

I refuse to let joy be the first thing stolen in hard times. I will not drape myself in gloom just because the world is crumbling. My joy is not naïve. It has calluses. It limps sometimes. But it’s here. It showed up. And that makes it holy. This is revolutionary joy—the kind Audre Lorde wrote about, the kind that blooms in the cracks of empire. Neurodivergent joy that hums in echolalia and stims with delight. Trans joy that slips past their binaries and bursts into bloom. It is wild, unapologetic, and so very much alive.

There is something miraculous in saying: I’m glad I’m me. Especially now. Especially in a world that keeps wishing I wasn’t. That joy, that gladness, is not a distraction from the struggle. It is the struggle. It’s the banner I raise above the noise. It’s what they can’t regulate, erase, or legislate out of existence. So I celebrate. I celebrate not as a distraction from collapse—but as a refusal to collapse with it. Because I am here. Still here. And that is worth everything.

The Problem with the Search for a Cause

They say they’re close now. That soon, perhaps by September, they’ll have “found the cause”—as if autistic people are the result of a miscalculation, a genetic spill that must be traced, contained, prevented. The headlines speak with certainty, as though our lives were merely waiting for science to fold us back into acceptability. But I know this pattern. I’ve faced this kind of battle before. And long before I had a word for what made me different, I knew how to recognise a pattern, solve a problem others thought was unsolvable, and turn it into a victory.

My first year of college football, the coaches moved me from centre to right tackle—a position I’d never played. I was raw on the edge, still learning my steps, but they saw something in my frame, in my reach, in the way I moved. I had size, yes, but also mobility. Control. And a deep hunger to prove myself. The test? Win the now-disfavoured Oklahoma Drill against the starting right tackle, a man named for the Samoan creator god: Tagaloa. A giant. A legend. Everyone expected me to fail.

But I studied. Quietly, obsessively. I watched him on film—not just once or twice, but again and again, until I knew the rhythm of his feet, the tilt of his shoulder before he drove in, the way he planted too heavily on his right step. I didn’t try to outmuscle him. I didn’t try to be smarter. I found the glitch in his code, and when the whistle blew, I used his own power against him. I won.

At the time, I didn’t know this was a sign of my neurodivergence. That my brain mapped bodies like geometry. That I could see the unseen choreography in what others called chaos. That this wasn’t just instinct—it was pattern recognition, it was gestalt processing, it was survival.

And now, all these years later, I feel that same electricity humming in the air as they try to “solve” us. As if their research is noble. As if searching for the origin of people like me is anything but an erasure by another name. But just like then, I see the tells. I know how they move. I know what they’re trying to knock down.

And I won’t meet it with brute force. I’ll meet it with memory. With strategy. With joy. I’ll use the weight of their assumptions against them. Because what they don’t see—what they never see—is that we’ve already adapted. Already survived. Already made a life worth loving in the very world that forgot to make space for us.

They call it a disorder. I call it a miracle.

They call it preventable. I call it me.

The Reality of the Neurodivergent Journey

Some of us, GenX, grew up in a kind of neurodivergent hell week—only there was no coach yelling, no stopwatch ticking, no finish line to cross, and no bell to ring if you’d had enough. No washout option. No relief. Just the endless grind of trying to make sense of a world that didn’t know you existed in the way you truly did.

Imagine BUD/S training, but invisible. No sand in your boots, but the constant grit of misunderstanding lodged behind every interaction. No icy surf to numb your senses, just fluorescent lights and cafeteria noise and the thousand daily cuts of being too much or not enough. No team of brothers to carry the log, only you, carrying the weight of your difference alone.

I was late diagnosed. For years, I was the mystery no one bothered solving. Misunderstood. Dismissed. Left to sink or swim in classrooms that couldn’t hold me, conversations that moved too fast, expectations that never once considered my processing style, my needs, my pain. The world was loud—inside and out. The noise never stopped. My own thoughts sometimes turned on me, looping and spiralling while I smiled through it, trying to pass.

There were days I didn’t know I was hungry until the shaking started. Days when heat or cold or tags on clothing felt like warfare. Times I forgot how to speak in the ways people expected—because the words weren’t there, or they came too fast and all at once. And burnout? Oh, I’ve met her. Not once, not twice, but again and again—like an old rival who knows where I live.

And still, here we are.

Because every single one of those struggles was a victory. Not a failure. Not a flaw. A survival. I adapted. I endured. I found ways of being in the world that didn’t break me, even when the world tried. I wrote scripts when I had none. I flapped and paced and repeated and grounded myself in patterns and movement and ritual and meaning. I didn’t fail to cope—I created coping. I found breath where no one thought air existed.

And now, in this body, older and creakier and still somehow kicking, I can look back on it all with something approaching pride. The old bones groan when I stand too fast. I forget things. I need more rest than I used to. But oh, what a thing it is to have made it here.

Like the old song said—“I was minding my business, lifting some lead”—but it was never just gym metal in my hands. It was the weight of being unseen. Of dragging myself through locked doors and ticking clocks and classrooms that measured everything except the truth of me. I carried every sidelong glance, every lowered voice, every report card that missed the story entirely. They didn’t know what they were looking at. But I do now.

And what I see isn’t failure. Isn’t brokenness. It’s joy. A hard-won, bone-deep kind of joy. Not the kind they put on glossy brochures or motivational posters—but the kind that limps a little, laughs anyway, and keeps going. It’s joy forged in the fire of making it through. I didn’t get a trophy. There was no moment of recognition. Just me—older now, finally diagnosed, still unclaimed by any system, and somehow… gloriously, stubbornly here.

We Were Never Lost

(for the ones they keep trying to diagnose out of existence)

how silly of me
to forget
that I am the love of my life—
not a question mark
on someone else’s clipboard.

they say they’ll find the cause
as if I’m a disease
and not a daughter
not a whole damn cosmos
cracked open in joy
and stimming light.

what a marvel,
this body—
this beautiful, buzzing signal tower
they keep mistaking for static.
I spoke in scripts
because your world didn’t fit.
I flapped to hold the pieces together.
I shut down to stay alive.

and still—
I made it here.
burnt out, rewired,
re-born in my own rhythm.
you call it pathology.
I call it poetry.

you will not
write me out
with your timelines and funding goals.
you will not
solve me away.

I am not waiting to be cured.
I am remembering to be cherished.
And how lucky you are
to share a world with us—
the ones who love like thunder,
who notice everything,
who survive
and still sing.

The Love of My Life Wears My Face

There’s a particular kind of joy that doesn’t arrive all at once. It unfolds. Layer by layer. Like a favourite song whose meaning keeps changing as you do. I remember the moment—maybe fourteen, maybe younger—when I first heard The Smiths properly. Not just in passing, not as background, but really heard them. It was like being struck. Punk and ska had been good for starting fights and moving bodies—god, the energy, the way it all made sense on a cellular level—but Morrissey’s lyrics? They saw me. Pierced right through the noise. It was me, spelled out in minor keys and sideways glances, wrapped in longing and wit and pain. And Marr’s guitar? Like emotional scaffolding—delicate and exact, yet always on the verge of spiralling out.

Those songs didn’t offer answers. They didn’t ask for neatness. They gave me permission to ache beautifully, to strut in sorrow, to find art in contradiction. For a teenager already unravelling in the margins, already misfiled and misread, that mattered more than I knew how to name.

And now, years later, I find myself returning to that kind of emotional terrain. Not as someone lost in adolescent melancholy, but as someone who has crawled through the wreckage and emerged with something soft and shimmering in hand. Self-love, yes—but not the glossy kind. Not the language of influencers or affirmation apps. This is self-love as revolt. As riot. As refusal.

It is the love that bloomed in the cracks of erasure. The kind that says: You thought I wouldn’t make it. But here I am, dazzling. It’s the love I had to build with the pieces they left me. And still—how silly of me to forget that I am the love of my life. That line arrived like a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding. Not narcissism. Not delusion. Just recognition. Like walking past a mirror and stopping not to criticise or disguise—but to smile. To say, Oh. You. Look at you.

Because I am not a mistake. I am a mosaic of truths that survived erasure. Every odd phrase, every echoing silence, every time I chose stillness over speaking, every meltdown, every mask, every glorious burst of too-muchness—I carry them all with tenderness now. I love the way I speak, even when it’s not linear. I love the way I feel, even when it’s overwhelming. I love this body, even as it shifts and surprises me. Especially because it does.

Embodiment, for me, has never been simple. But it has become holy. I no longer see myself as someone trying to become—only someone finally allowed to be. I am the love of my life, and she wears my face. Sometimes tired. Sometimes bright-eyed. Sometimes weathered by the day. But always mine.

And that, I think, is the secret they never tell you. That the world will work overtime to convince you that loving yourself is selfish, absurd, a detour from usefulness. But the truth is: it’s the centre. It’s the resistance. It’s the revolution. And it’s a dance—equal parts Marr shimmer and Morrissey sigh—that no one else gets to choreograph.

The Role of Joy in Leftist Imagination

There’s a line from Guevara that’s stayed with me for years: “It’s a sad thing not to have friends, but it is even sadder not to have enemies.” And I’ll admit, I hold that line with a particular kind of reverence—tender, tongue-in-cheek, and fully aware of the contradictions it carries. I know the uglier things he said. I know what doesn’t sit right. But I also understand contradiction, as Mao taught—not as failure, but as the engine of history. And perhaps most of all, I understand the power of being unwanted by the systems that feed on obedience.

Because if the world has declared you an enemy for daring to exist joyfully, you might just be doing something right.

Grief and struggle have long been the currency of the left. The catalogue of pain is well-worn: hunger, displacement, incarceration, extinction, exile. And yes, those stories matter. We carry them in our bones. But joy? Joy is what keeps us human in the face of it. Joy is not the absence of struggle—it is the stubborn presence of aliveness despite it. It’s what Audre Lorde called “a source of our power.” What adrienne maree brown reminds us is “our birthright.” What José Esteban Muñoz named as “the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality.”

Joy is the blueprint for the world we want, not just the balm for the one we’re trying to survive.

And for people like me—for neurodivergent, trans, disabled people—joy is not ornamental. It is ancestral. It is feral. It is divine. It comes in flashes: a perfectly timed script that makes a friend laugh. A sensory moment that sends shivers down the spine. A fragment of a song from youth that still fits. Joy is the flapping hands, the humming under breath, the rhythm that emerges from chaos. It is not performative, not performable. It just is. A pulse older than shame.

When the world tells us to be quiet, joy is the echo we leave behind.

I think about Guevara’s other line—“A country that does not know how to read and write is easy to deceive.” And I think: what about a child who wasn’t taught to read her own mind? What about the people who were never given the tools to name their own truths, who had to write their language from scratch? They tried to keep us from knowing ourselves. They thought that would be enough. But we learned. Slowly. Messily. We pieced together a map from the inside out.

And now? Now, they want a cause.

But I am not a cause. I am a constellation. A cluster of histories and futures and impossible light. There is no single origin point. There is no one explanation. I am made of starstuff and sweat and second chances. I am the dream of an ancestor who could not yet speak my name.

So yes—grief shaped me. But joy sustains me. Not the kind sold in slogans, but the kind that hums when I speak in fragments and still feel whole. The kind that dances barefoot in the middle of collapse and says: I’m still here. I’m still brilliant. I’m still free.

Final thoughts …

I sometimes get comments on my work—well-meaning, sometimes clumsy, sometimes pointed—wondering why I’m so serious all the time. Why everything I write seems so heavy, so intense. And I get it, I do. Joy doesn’t always look the way people expect it to. Especially not when it comes from someone like me.

But when I dig a little deeper, when I look at who’s asking that question, I rarely find comrades. I don’t find leftists who understand the long tradition of mourning and celebration braided together. I find “progressives.” I find people who think politics is a brand, not a battleground. People who want good vibes and slogans, but not systemic change. People who confuse discomfort for harm, and silence for peace. Reactionaries in recycled wrapping.

What they don’t understand—what they can’t understand—is that every article I write, every book I’ve put into the world, every carefully chosen phrase and rhythm and image—is a celebration. A joyful act of creation. A dance in the margins. A gift. Serious, yes. Because the world is serious. But joyful? Always. Every word is a shimmer pulled from survival. Every story is a song. Every page is proof that I am still here, and that I still believe in a world worth writing into.

They can’t fathom revolutionary joy. Not really. They think joy is the reward at the end, not the resistance itself. But we—those of us who have clawed our way through misunderstanding, through bureaucracy, through misdiagnosis and systemic neglect—we know better. We know that joy is not a finish line. It is the heartbeat that got us through. It is the flare we send up from the rubble, saying I’m still here. I’m still worthy. I still love this life.

And so I close this piece not with despair, but with gratitude. Not the easy kind. Not the kind that demands nothing and risks less. But the hard-earned kind. The kind that says: Thank you to the child I was, who kept showing up even when the world didn’t see her. Thank you to the ancestors who held the line in silence, who dreamed someone like me into being. Thank you to the person I am now—every ache, every crack, every radiant, radical truth.

I’m not waiting to be loved. I am already loved. By the child who scribbled glyphs and sigils on notebook margins. By the body that still learns its own language. By the stars that have watched me all along.

And if the world ends tomorrow—well. I got to be here. I got to be this.

And that, my lovelies, is a cause for celebration.