They Call Me Bitter: On the Mistranslation of Autistic Emotion

The Tasting Notes You Never Bothered to Read

An autistic, trans reflection on overwhelm, emotional nuance, and being misread. From wine tasting to HRT, this piece reclaims depth, metaphor, and the right to be fully felt—without needing to be palatable.

House Red

for those who never ask for the list

My body says: I’m overwhelmed.
They hear: I’m angry.
I freeze.
They see defiance.
I stim.
They call it disruption.
I retreat.
They write me off.

But inside—
it’s not just red.
Not the flat pour they imagine.

It is deep garnet shadowed with panic,
green bell pepper bursts of urgency,
damp forest floor sadness underfoot.
There’s plum-dark longing,
a flick of white pepper shame,
the lingering tannin of silence
pressed too long on the tongue.

Once, I couldn’t name it.
Once, everything was house red:
poured without pause,
served too warm,
labelled only wrong.

Then came HRT—
and with it, the list.
A decanter for the day’s feeling,
a glass matched to the weight of the moment.
I found language—not theirs,
but mine.

Grief?
A brooding Syrah—full-bodied, smoky,
with a finish like dusk over winter hills.
Joy?
Bright, citrus-laced,
opening into something floral and rare.

And overwhelm?
Not a storm in a bottle—
the storm itself.
Salt-lashed coast of Jura,
peat smoke rising through cold mist,
brine and ember tangled in the air.
It strikes like sea spray to the face—
then lingers,
bold, wild,
and utterly honest.

Still, they do not sip.
Do not pause.
Do not ask.

They read the label they printed themselves.

Angry.
Withdrawn.
Sharp.

They sip nothing—
and call me bitter.

Introduction

I am still overwhelmed. Writing that poem didn’t fix it. But it helped me sit with it differently. In this moment—and in every moment like it, layered across time in the way my gestalt mind stores things—I’m holding multiple overwhelmings at once. They don’t line up in a neat row. They pile, they echo, they come forward in a rush. Past and present blur. What happened then is also what is happening now. The difference is, I’m no longer drowning in the sameness of it all.

Since beginning HRT, I’ve started to sense the shape of things inside me. I can taste them. Not metaphorically, not entirely—my synaesthetic tendencies blur those lines too—but I mean it when I say: there are notes. Distinctions. Layers. Where once there was only one flat, bitter pour of “bad,” now I find smoke, salt, brine, fruit, tannin, and shadow. I can sit in the complexity without shame. I know why I felt what I felt, even if I didn’t have the language at the time. And I no longer blame myself for not knowing. How could I have known, when no one studied this? When research on people like me—autistic, trans, gestalt processors—barely exists, and what does exist is mostly wrong?

So here I am. Still overwhelmed. But no longer erased by it. I write poetry and verse because they hold what standard language flattens. I write because this is how I offer myself context, time, forgiveness—and maybe, just maybe, someone else will taste something familiar in the words.

Misunderstood Emotional Landscapes

I’ve learned to taste my overwhelm. But that doesn’t mean others have learned to see it.

The world I live in—especially the institutions meant to support people like me—still reduces what I feel to how I behave. Not in context, not in relationship, not in a spirit of curiosity or care. Just behaviour. Observable. Chartable. Punishable.

When I go quiet, they call me disengaged.
When I stim, they call it disruptive.
When I melt, they call it a tantrum.
When I shut down, they call it defiance.
When I retreat to survive, they accuse me of avoidance.
The house red they pour me is bitter, sharp, and cheap—but they say it's my fault for drinking.

The research backs this up—though it’s strange to read facts confirming something I’ve always known in my bones.

Phung et al. (2021) describe how autistic shutdowns and meltdowns are still widely mistaken for misbehaviour, because institutions fixate on what’s visible, not what’s real. Our inner states—complex, layered, often wordless—are flattened into disciplinary categories. Emotional depth becomes a behaviour report. A cry for help becomes a referral for “noncompliance.”

Veerasamy (2024) found that even when educators value self-regulation in theory, they rarely understand how it looks in practice for autistic students. The result? Poor support. Poor assumptions. Poor outcomes. Because when we self-regulate in ways that don’t look “normal”—through stillness, silence, motion, sound—we’re seen as broken instead of adaptive.

De Groot and Van Strien (2017) note how our emotional dysregulation is often read as aggression. Nason (2020) calls attention to how shutdown is mistaken for apathy. But these are not failures. These are survival strategies. And yet—time and again—they are punished. Corrected. Pathologised.

Garvey (2023) and Clifford et al. (2022) both highlight how our stimming, quietness, withdrawal—acts of care we give ourselves—are the very things we are told to stop doing. The cost of this is not just misunderstanding. It’s distress. Trauma. Mental health decline. A stone, tied to our ankles, whilst we’re still expected to swim.

Phung’s interviews with autistic youth cut the deepest. The children and teens didn’t say they were angry. They said they were overwhelmed. They weren’t refusing. They were drowning. But their pain was read as laziness, their struggle as a threat. The support they needed never came—only punishment did.

We are not emotionally illiterate. But we live in a world that is.

And so we learn to mask. To fold ourselves into quieter versions. To disappear, if that’s what it takes to be left alone.
We become sommeliers of our own pain—whilst others drink their wine and spit us out.

The Journey Toward Emotional Vocabulary

I didn’t grow up with flavour.
The diet I was raised on was born of poverty and necessity—food meant to keep us going, not to delight. Meals were simple, repetitive, and reliable because they had to be. There wasn’t room for curiosity, or complexity, or tasting for the sake of joy.

So when I found myself enrolled in two semesters of wine tasting at Santa Rosa Junior College—back when I needed full-credit classes to stay enrolled—it felt like a door cracked open to another world. I hadn’t expected much. But I discovered something I didn’t know I had: a palate. A real one.

And then came the wine that changed everything.
Châteauneuf-du-Pape.
Not just a wine, but a symphony. A blend that allows up to thirteen different grape varieties, most often led by Grenache, Syrah, and Mourvèdre. It was full-bodied, yes—but also layered, alive. I remember tasting it for the first time, expecting “red wine,” and instead getting dark fruit and spice, the whisper of earth, the flicker of smoke, the warmth of a sun-drenched field. It was as if the wine itself had a soul. It made room for contradiction—strength and softness, shadow and brightness—and still held itself together.

I fell in love. Not just with that glass, but with the possibility it held. That something could be so complex, so unapologetically itself, and still be called good.

Later, when I turned toward the Highland Games, my body found its strength, and distillers took notice. I earned sponsorships. I attended tastings. I learned to love whisky not just as a spirit, but as story. And like the Châteauneuf-du-Pape had done for my tongue, Jura did for my bones.
The whisky of the storm-lashed coast: peated, elemental, defiant. It didn’t care if you liked it. It wasn’t trying to please. It knew what it was. And I wanted to be that, too.

But Jura wasn’t like the more famous Islay drams that get all the attention.
It wasn’t the blunt force of Laphroaig—those buckets of iodine and seaweed, those medicinal slaps to the face.
Jura had restraint. Elegance. Peat, yes—but woven with intention. Smoke rising from a hearth, not a chemical fire.
It was the difference between being loud and being heard. Between spectacle and resonance.
Where Laphroaig demanded attention, Jura invited presence.
And I found myself in that distinction—longing not to overwhelm, but to be known in my depth.

At the time, I didn’t know that this sensory literacy—this ability to distinguish, to describe, to feel—was also the shape of something happening inside me. I just knew I could taste what others passed over. That I could feel more than I had words for.

Then came HRT.

It wasn’t a rewiring. It was a rendering. Suddenly, everything I’d always felt stood out in startling clarity—like upgrading from pixelated x86 graphics to a PlayStation 5 on an 8K screen. And then, as if gifted a remastering patch for my memory, the past became visible in the same sharp resolution. The old feelings were still there, but now I could name them. Taste them. Forgive them.

Where once every feeling had been just “bad”—just house red—I now had a tasting menu.
Anxiety, with a bitter green stem and mineral pull.
Grief, all black cherry and ash.
Joy, bright citrus, maybe bergamot.
Peace, a faint curl of smoke from a hearth fire, a soft wool blanket pulled close.

It turns out I’d never been too sensitive.
I’d been precise.
And the world had simply lacked the willingness—or the vocabulary—to notice.

But my palate was always there.
And now, I trust it.

The Cost of Misframing

There is a cost to being misread. A real one. A cost that accrues interest over time, that settles deep into the tissues of your being until even your own reflection starts to feel like someone else's misinterpretation.

No one in the Global North imagines someone like me when they think of “sophistication.” The media rarely offers us that grace. People like me—autistic, trans, large-bodied—aren’t cast as the thoughtful ones. The romantic leads. The introspective professors. We’re not given the soft lighting or the full sentences. We’re the “lunkheads,” the bruisers, the monsters, the punchlines. Even the rare trans visibility that makes it to screen only seems to survive if it fits neatly into cis-heteronormative aesthetics—slim, polished, palatable. A queerness that doesn’t unsettle too much. A visibility that doesn’t take up space.

I remember watching Sense and Sensibility—the Emma Thompson version—and loving how gently it held complexity. How the emotions were allowed to steep. But even then, I remember wondering:
Why can’t someone my size get to be that character?
Why can’t tenderness come in six-foot-seven?
Why do strength and softness have to be opposites in their eyes?

The answer, of course, is that in most institutions—schools, workplaces, healthcare, even family—people like me are read as problems to be solved, not stories to be heard.

I titled my book No Place for Autism? with a question mark, but the irony isn’t lost on me. Most days, the question feels more like a statement.

Every autistic student with an IEP seems to have a behaviour plan attached—coded language for compliance scripts. We are taught early on that we are the disruption. That our reactions are inappropriate. That our instincts are wrong. By the time we reach adulthood, we’ve been managed so thoroughly that we begin managing ourselves before anyone else even notices.

Support becomes surveillance.
Accommodation becomes containment.
Care becomes correction.

And somewhere in all of that, the self begins to blur. We lose trust—not just in others, but in our own sensations. Our own intentions.
We ask:
Was I really being rude?
Was that really too much?
Am I really just broken?

This is the psychological toll of constant mistrust. Of emotional erasure dressed up as “help.” Of being told that your inner world is invalid unless it can be measured, charted, or adjusted to fit a behaviour rubric.

And still, we taste.
Still, we know.
Still, we hold on to what we feel inside, even if the world refuses to see it as anything but noise.

A Call for Slowness, Curiosity, and Listening

There is another way.

But it requires a kind of slowness that modern life punishes. A kind of curiosity that doesn’t presume. A kind of listening that doesn’t rush to translate us into terms it already understands.

Because we are not blank.
We are not broken.
We are not waiting to be filled in with someone else’s expectations.

We are already rich with meaning.

What we need—what we have always needed—is space to be as we are, not endlessly reshaped into versions that make others more comfortable. We need those around us to stop assuming, stop diagnosing from across the room, stop forcing our feelings into pre-labelled boxes. We need them to stop misnaming what they see just because they don’t have the vocabulary to describe it.

This is why I write in metaphor. In taste and texture and weather and wine. Because autistic expression isn’t always verbal, and even when it is, it doesn’t always follow the tidy, linear paths others expect. Sensory language is one of the ways I bridge that space between what I feel and what others can hear—if they’re willing to listen.

You don’t have to “get” all of it to respect it.
You don’t have to map your own emotions onto mine to believe that mine are real.
You don’t need a translation—you need attention.

So slow down. Taste it. Don’t gulp and label—sip and notice. Let our expressions breathe, like a good wine in a wide glass. You might be surprised at what opens up.

When you make space for our complexity, something shifts. We are no longer problems to be solved. We are people, speaking in a different key.

And what we say—what we feel—is worth hearing.

Final thoughts …

They sip nothing—
and call me bitter.

That’s how the poem ends.
But not how the story does.

Because I’ve learned to taste the difference.
I’ve learned to sit with a feeling long enough to know its name—not the name others gave it, but the one it whispered to me when I finally stopped trying to be palatable.
I’ve learned that what they call “too much” is often just untasted.
That what they dismiss as “rude” or “sharp” or “withdrawn” is sometimes the most honest note in the glass.

I’ve learned to trust my own tongue.
To trust the body that carries these flavours.
To trust the life that brewed them.

And I will not let their palate define my depth.

Not anymore.