Unsolvable by Design: Living the Three-Body Problem

The Gravity of It All: Autism, Transness, Chronic Illness, and the Unstable Orbits We Inhabit

A three-body problem: autism, transness, chronic illness. Not a puzzle to solve, but a system to witness. This is an attempt at an Autism Awareness Month post—written from the inside, in all its gravity.

Introduction

It was a happy accident, really. My first year of university, nursing the end of a short-lived college football career and the injury that sealed it, I was functionally illiterate and scrambling to find classes I could survive—ones that wouldn’t depend too heavily on reading or writing. I saw the word astro and assumed I was signing up for astrology. Something easy, right? Stars and signs, maybe some personality types.

What I got was introductory astrophysics, complete with lab.

To my surprise, I loved it. Not just the content, but the bigness of it. The room it gave me to think in wholes. I struggled, of course—I needed tutoring just to make sense of the equations, and I couldn’t keep up with the reading. But something about the structure of the cosmos made intuitive sense to me. Even now, I still feel that class in my bones. I earned a B. One of the hardest and proudest grades I’ve ever received.

What stayed with me most, though, was the elegance of the two-body problem. A single object orbiting a larger mass. Stable. Predictable. Solvable. You could map it, graph it, teach it. Add a second body—say, a planet orbiting a star—and it still mostly held together. The maths got trickier, but you could still find solutions. It still behaved.

But introduce a third body—and everything collapses into chaos. The system becomes unsolvable, its path untrackable. No matter how exact your measurements, the equations fall apart. Minute changes in the starting conditions lead to wildly different results. You can simulate outcomes, even find stable configurations in rare cases—but there is no general solution. There is only instability, decay, and the near-certainty that something will eventually fly out of orbit.

That, I think, is what it’s like to live as me.

My life isn’t a neat ellipse. I do not orbit a single identity, nor even two. I live within a chaotic system of gravitational pulls—each exerting force on the others, each making the whole thing wobble. My autism pulls one way. My transness, another. My chronic illness, another still. And within each of those are moons and fragments and disruptions of their own: GLP, alexithymia, hyper-empathy. Queerness, neuroqueerness. Erythromelalgia, pain, and flare.

There is no map for this. No predictable path home. Only spirals. Approaches. Outswings.

And yet, each April, the world insists on portraying autistic people as if we are simple orbits—flat, knowable, repeatable. A single trait, a puzzle piece, a symbol without context. As though autism is one body, orbiting a sun called “awareness.” As though that tells you anything about the way we actually live.

This piece is not that. This is not a celebration of “awareness” that flattens us. This is a refusal. A reclamation. A reminder that many of us are living in systems far too complex for your equations—but no less worthy of being understood.

Orbit One: Autism

Autism is not a planet. It’s not even a single body. It’s a gravitational system unto itself—complex, layered, always in motion. People speak of autism as though it were a singular diagnosis, a neat circle around which behaviour, cognition, and affect quietly orbit. But my experience is more like an irregular system with too many moons and no obvious sun. Things pull, push, spin, collide.

Some of the bodies in this system have names, though most people wouldn’t recognise them unless they’ve lived inside this kind of gravity.

There’s gestalt language processing, for one. My language doesn’t come in isolated words like neat pebbles on a beach. It arrives whole—chunks of dialogue, remembered phrasing, melodic sequences of meaning, emotion, and memory fused into single units. It’s less like constructing sentences and more like catching a comet. Something flashes across my sky and, if it fits, gets pulled into orbit. If the gravitational relationship is just right—if the phrase suits the emotional terrain—it stays. Becomes usable. Familiar. It can take years for a phrase to stabilise in my lexicon, and even longer for it to attach meaning recognisable to others. The presence of each new phrase subtly alters the system—like a captured asteroid whose arrival shifts the balance, ever so slightly.

Then there’s alexithymia—the absence, or obscuring, of emotional language. Not the absence of emotion itself, but the language to name it. Emotions come, strong and real, but fogged. I feel the movement, the pull, the orbit—but not the coordinates. Not until later. Sometimes not at all. It’s like being inside a gravitational field you can’t see, only sense—the body moving without knowing why, carried by tides you can’t map.

And then, paradoxically, there’s hyper-empathy. Where alexithymia dulls the ability to source and name what’s within, hyper-empathy amplifies everything from without. The emotional states of others hit like gravitational waves—those deep-space ripples that pass through solid matter and still manage to move it. I can feel things I don’t have words for. I can absorb emotional weather from across the room. And I carry it. Sometimes for days.

These dynamics don’t sit neatly alongside each other. They pull against each other. They compound. Alexithymia makes it hard to parse my emotions. Hyper-empathy makes me drown in yours. GLP gives me whole phrases, but not always when I need them. It’s like trying to stabilise a satellite network when each satellite has its own unpredictable thrust pattern, and none of them were built from the same blueprints.

It is, in short, not a stable orbit.
But it is mine.

And I’ve learned to feel the rhythm of it. I’ve learned when a comet is coming—when a phrase will land, when a wave will crest, when something unnamed is trying to be known. But it takes effort. And it takes time. And it is rarely understood by those outside the system, who expect constellations to hold still long enough to label.

From the outside, this system may look chaotic. But from within, there’s a kind of fractal logic—one that can’t be solved, only lived.

Orbit Two: Transness

If autism is a gravitational system of internal satellites, then gender is a planet that didn’t stay where it was “meant” to. It was never a stable, central body. It was a world I suspected existed—felt tugging at the edge of my sky—but that didn’t show up clearly on the early charts. The instruments used to name it were built by people who didn’t believe in that kind of world. Or worse, who believed it should be destroyed.

At first, it was a faint signal. A shimmer in the upper atmosphere. A feeling that things weren’t where they should be. That I wasn’t. But queerness gave me a language, or at least a lens. It was the first force to knock me out of orbit. A flicker of possibility. Not just in who I loved, but in how I existed. In what could be. It felt like discovering that orbits didn’t have to be circular. That some planets tilt. That some moons have oceans under ice.

And then came HRT. And it was not a gentle alignment. It was a detonation. A planetary event. The shift from femme-leaning ambiguity to trans clarity was not incremental. It was seismic. The hormones entered my system and everything reconfigured. Suddenly what had been a loose field of gendered possibility snapped into a real, physical trajectory. Things moved. Collided. Stabilised. Shattered. Reformed.

What I had once called queerness—fluid, shimmering, nonbinary—wasn’t erased by this shift, but re-contextualised. Clarified. It’s as though I had spent years watching a planetary nebula, only to learn that inside it was a star, waiting. And the closer I moved toward that light, the more sharply everything else came into view.

But the journey wasn’t just about finding self. It was about shedding misreadings. About unlearning all the models that had named me wrong. Because gender, like autism, isn’t experienced in a vacuum. It’s warped by cultural gravity. By binary assumptions. By anatomical myths and gendered rituals. By the way others see us, even when they don’t look.

Being trans doesn’t just complicate your own orbit—it distorts all the systems around it. It changes how others read your body, your voice, your motives, your mind. And when you are also autistic, those distortions compound. What is read as nonconformity becomes “inappropriate.” What is sensory discomfort becomes “resistance.” What is dissociation becomes “emotional volatility.” The autistic orbit and the trans orbit interact, refract, collapse in on each other. They resonate—and they interfere.

And then there’s neuroqueerness. Not as a separate thing, but as a refusal. A refusal to separate the neurological from the political. To isolate gender from processing style. To pretend that one part of the self could be legible whilst the rest remains subtext. Neuroqueerness says: I am not a tidy equation. I am not here to be solved. I exist at the edge of your models for a reason.

This orbit is not clean. It doesn’t circle predictably. But it is mine. And the further I move along it, the more I see how much possibility there is. Gender, like space, is not a fixed destination—it’s an expanse. A cosmos. And I’m still mapping it.

Orbit Three: Chronic Illness

The third body didn’t show up on any of the early scans. It was there, of course—always there—but its mass was diffuse, its orbit erratic. No one could agree on what it was. It would appear, disrupt, pull me sideways, then fade. The symptoms were real, but the language for them was not. And without language, even the most devastating gravity can be ignored.

This is how chronic illness enters the system. Quietly at first. A flicker of pain. A drag on movement. The growing sense that something inside you is off-axis. For me, it began with heat and pain in my feet and lower legs. Not dramatic, but insistent. At first, I lacked the words to describe it. I just knew that things sucked, in a way I couldn’t quite measure. Not just pain, but a kind of internal static. A dissonance. And because I didn’t have the vocabulary, others didn’t take it seriously.

“Lose weight.”
“Try compression socks.”
“Maybe try going vegan.”
They assumed the problem was superficial—something cosmetic or lazy. Something fixable, if only I’d try harder. But no amount of weight loss or dietary restraint was going to fix what they refused to name.

Eventually, after years of misdirection, I was given a name: erythromelalgia. “Man on fire syndrome,” they call it, though that label is rarely used outside specialist circles. It’s an old ailment—described in medical texts as far back as the 1800s—but not one your average GP has on their diagnostic radar. Like so many rare conditions, it had to be found by process of elimination. Everything else had to be ruled out first.

For me, the flares are mostly in my feet and lower legs, but my skin, especially my light-complected face and arms, reacts poorly to the sun. Some days, heat from inside the house is enough to trigger it. Blood vessels dilate. Skin reddens and burns. It’s as if my body forgets how to regulate fire. When it hits, everything else has to stop. Thinking, walking, functioning—it all goes sideways. I’ve learned that I’m also histamine intolerant, and I’ve adjusted my diet accordingly. That helps. It reduces some of the flare triggers. But it doesn’t solve the underlying problem. It just narrows the conditions under which I might experience pain.

Pain is not just a sensation. It is a disruption of rhythm. It throws off timing, thought, focus. It introduces delay where fluency once lived. And the rhythms it imposes are incompatible with almost every temporal framework around me. Chronic illness doesn’t run on neurotypical time. Or capitalist time. Or even activist time, which sometimes demands a kind of endurance I simply cannot sustain. Pain comes when it wants. Fatigue shadows even the smallest efforts. And none of it fits neatly into a schedule.

In this way, the body becomes its own planet—a hostile one, at times. It pulls me out of alignment just when I feel like I’m nearing coherence. I’ll be on the edge of something—emotional clarity, creative flow, a sense of grounded identity—and then a flare hits. A storm brews in my calves. My skin blisters with heat. I lose signal. I lose orbit.

And because chronic illness is inconsistent—because it is visible only in moments, and often looks like nothing at all—it distorts how I’m read. It invites disbelief. It erodes credibility. And in doing so, it pulls at my other identities. I am not seen as trans in pain. Or autistic in pain. Just “moody.” Or “fragile.” Or “not trying hard enough.”

This third body—this wild, internal star—doesn’t follow rules. It doesn’t announce itself. But it has changed the gravity of my life. And the system must adjust.

What the Models Miss

It’s Autism Awareness Month, and already I’m tired.

Tired of puzzle pieces.
Tired of “awareness” campaigns that feel like weather reports from a planet I don’t live on.
Tired of hearing my existence described as if it were an affliction orbiting someone else’s life.

Because at the centre of so much of this rhetoric—whether it’s from healthcare systems, education policies, or even well-meaning advocates—is the assumption of a two-body universe. One body, orbiting another. One problem, one fix. One primary, one secondary. A sun, and a wayward moon.

It’s the same broken model everywhere I look. In schools, they try to “fix the behaviour.” In healthcare, they aim to “clarify the gender.” With chronic illness, the goal is to “manage the pain.” Each orbit treated as if it were a solitary malfunction in an otherwise smooth system. As if identity could be diagnosed like a fault in an engine.

But that’s not how gravity works.
And that’s not how I work.

This two-body logic doesn’t just fail—it collapses. Because it was never designed to hold people like me. People whose lives are not governed by a single force, but by multiple gravitational bodies—pulling, twisting, reshaping one another in ways no simple model can contain.

Now, with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appointed to head the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services—a man who has spent decades fuelling the lie that autism is a vaccine-induced epidemic—the metaphor has taken on chilling literalness. His logic is not just wrong. It is weaponised. It believes that if the right missile can be aimed, the “second body” (autism) can be destroyed. That what remains will be the “real” person: a cis, hetero, neurotypical subject restored to their proper orbit.

This is not just misinformation. It is annihilation, wrapped in policy.

The medical model, with its tidy schematics, has always insisted that there is a “normal” underneath all this. That the autistic child is simply wearing a costume of difference. That the trans adult is confused. That the chronically ill person is failing to self-optimise. The solution? Find the missing puzzle piece. Remove the offending data point. Eliminate the anomaly.

But I am not an anomaly. I am a pattern your model can’t process.

Autism is not new. Transness is not new. Chronic pain is not new. We are not emergent phenomena caused by modern additives or mysterious “toxins.” We are ancient. We are woven into the genetic memory of humanity. We have always existed, in every society, in every time. We are the keepers of fire, the memory-holders, the watchers of stars.

The idea that I need to be cured or solved or brought into alignment with a model built without me in mind is not just absurd. It’s dangerous.

The model is wrong.

Not because it lacks data, but because it was built to exclude people like me. It assumes stability is the goal. Predictability, the virtue. But I live in a three-body system, and stability is a moment, not a default. A glimpse, not a home.

And I am not a malfunction.
I am a different kind of orbit.

Living in the Chaotic Zone

Living in this body, in this system, means living in what physicists call the chaotic zone—a region where stable orbits are rare, and long-term predictions fail. Most days, there is no tidy arc, no resolved equation, no single, unified narrative. Instead, I live in the fragments. In the ellipses. In the strange, beautiful interferences where three forces pull at once and nothing quite lands.

Capitalism hates this.
It demands legibility. Productivity. Predictability.
And I am none of those things.

I do not resolve. I do not streamline. I do not make myself easy to brand or consume. My emotional states don’t fit the rhythm of the workday. My energy arrives at the wrong times. My gender resists their checkboxes. My body refuses to perform reliably. My thoughts form in constellations, not bullet points.

And so I am punished—socially, economically, structurally.
My orbit is read as a malfunction, not a method.
My three-body system is treated as a threat to theirs.

Perhaps that’s why I’ve always felt a gravitational pull toward the early Soviet thinkers. Not the regime—never that—but the ones who operated within its gravity and still imagined other worlds. Sukhareva, who described autism with insight and care long before the Western canon took notice. Vygotsky, whose theories of meaning and development placed relationship at the core of cognition. Valentina Tereshkova, first woman in space, launched not by a thirst for conquest but by a dream of possibility. Brusentsov and Sobolev, who built the Setun—a ternary computer that used three values instead of two. A machine that mirrored the universe more closely than binary logic ever could.

Their ideas didn’t last in the system. Not because they failed, but because they were too successful—too resistant to capitalism’s binary demands. Capitalism needs simple inputs and marketable outcomes. But ternary logic doesn’t translate neatly to commerce. Autistic insight can’t be monetised on command. Trans embodiment resists industrial standardisation. And chronic illness can’t be predicted, packaged, or sold.

So here we are—those of us in the chaotic zone—building maps no one taught us how to read.
We write poetry instead of protocols.
We track our energy by the shape of the light.
We invent rituals to anchor us when the flare hits.
We use sensory memory, metaphor, softness as our tools—not as a retreat from reason, but as its extension.

We stop trying to resolve everything. We stop pretending coherence is the default.
And when clarity does come—when the orbits briefly align—we recognise it for what it is: a gift. Not a solution. Not a cure. But a moment of resonance between forces too vast to hold still.

I will never be what this system asks me to be.
But I was never meant to be.

My life is not legible to capitalism.
And maybe that’s not a flaw. Maybe that’s a form of resistance.

Final Thoughts …

I don’t really like Autism Awareness Month. I never have.

It flattens us. Packages us. Reduces something vast and dimensional to a colour palette and a slogan. Puzzle pieces. Infographics. Corporate allyship. It turns what is cosmic and unresolvable into something marketable. Tidy. Harmless.

This piece is my one and only “awareness” post—if you can even call it that. I’ve written it in a language that struggles to hold the shape of what I feel. I’ve fought to pin down metaphors and imagery to describe a system I live but cannot always explain. It will likely be deprioritised by algorithms. Maybe a few hundred people will see it. Fewer still will read to the end.

But it’s here.
I said it.
I meant it.

This is what awareness looks like when it’s written from the inside out—not for attention, but for anchoring. Not to educate the world, but to tell the truth before it’s lost again.

And the truth is this:
We were never meant to be calculated.
We are not a problem to be solved.
We are not orbiting your definitions.
We are not a temporary interference in an otherwise smooth trajectory.

We are the system you didn’t account for.
We are the variable your model can’t process.
We are the beauty in the unpredictable. The pattern in the noise. The resonance that occurs when three bodies pull at once and don’t collapse.

Dimensional autistic lives resist symbolisation.
They resist simplification.
They resist the violent convenience of being understood just enough to be erased.

That’s not a flaw.
It’s a truth too large for your equations.

And maybe, if you slow down—if you stop trying to solve us—you’ll see it.

We were never the mistake.
We are the maths you haven’t learned yet.