When Kindness Feels Like Intrusion: Why Time Doesn’t March for Me

On Trauma, Autism, and the Cost of Safe Spaces: Why I Built a Sanctuary I Can’t Invite You Into.

A reflection on trauma, sanctuary, and the unspeakable truths held in autistic bodies. A poem, and the story behind it, for anyone who’s ever needed a script just to say “no.”

Introduction

It started, as these things so often do, with something small. A kindness, really. A friend I trust, someone who’s shown up for me in ways that matter, reached out in a moment of crisis. It was last autumn. The air had just begun to turn, and so had I—quietly unravelling beneath the surface. They asked, simply, “Do you need me to come over?” And my body did what it always does. It flooded.

I couldn’t answer. Not because I didn’t care, but because the question had already done what questions sometimes do to me: pierced the membrane that keeps then from now. Suddenly I wasn’t in the moment they intended—I was in all of them. The Ridge—my home, my refuge, the sanctuary I fought to build a hundred miles and a hundred lifetimes away from the rooms where I was broken—shifted under me. Not literally, of course. But neurologically. Somatically. I couldn’t hold the distinction anymore between a friend arriving in care and a threat arriving unannounced. My system, my GLP system, doesn’t process time in sequence. It processes in constellation. So the past was the present. It always is.

That’s when I began digging again. Back into the research. Into the literature, the silences, the places where answers should live and don’t. I was looking for myself, the way Neo searches for Morpheus—each knowing the other is out there but unsure where, or when, or whether the other is even real. I followed the white rabbit. Down into journals, articles, trauma studies, autism research. And what I found—what I keep finding—is that no one is looking for people like me. No one is mapping complex trauma in gestalt language processors. No one is charting the unspoken scripts, the ways harm nests in echo and resonance and never fully lets go. There’s no protocol for this. No suggested therapeutic path. No clinical studies. No market.

And still—here we are. I’ve been waking in the wee hours, startled from dreams I can’t recall but feel in my lungs. Panic that arrives before language, the kind that builds not from fear of what might happen, but from memory of what did, stitched into the nervous system like a haunted lullaby. I’ve made it to the end of the school year on borrowed spoons, loitering on the edge of shutdown most days, patching myself together with instinct and routine. And then this morning—energy. The kind that feels like lightning, not hope. The kind that says: get to a keyboard before it fades. Something had broken loose in the Theatre of My Mind. Words, images, the scaffold of a shape. I grabbed for my research notes. I read the message again: “Do you need me to come over?” And the answer surged up, not as prose. Not even as argument. But as poem. As refusal. As script.

Not for the friend—they’ve done nothing wrong. But for myself. For the part of me that still needs to understand why I can’t say yes. Why the question tears through me. Why the Ridge, though safe, cannot be shared. Not fully. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

This is the poem that came.

“Do You Need Me to Come Over?”

It begins with a kindness.
An offer: soft, round-edged.
"Do you need me to come over?"

A sentence like a cup of tea.
But my body spills.

What you mean is
you care.
What I hear is
I’m coming inside.

Inside:
not here, not now,
but then.
When I was small.
When the door never locked.
When closeness came
with teeth.

The Ridge is not that place.
This home—mine—
was bought in blood and exit signs.
A hundred miles from the rooms
where I was first unmade.
It is quiet here.
The light obeys.
No one has ever touched me
without permission in this place.
And still—
when you ask to come in,
my breath forgets how to be mine.

It’s not you.
It never was.
But the veil is thin,
and my system wired
for pattern, not probability.
For shape, not context.
The now is the then
is the threat
is the memory
is the flare in my chest
when the question arrives.

I know your intent.
I know your heart.
But my knowing
doesn’t speak louder
than the scripts I didn’t get to write.

The Ridge holds me
because I asked it to.
Because it does not ask back.
Because every wall here
was raised with a single vow:
Never again.

I wish I could say
this gets easier.
That time unwinds the knots,
that language arrives
like a saviour.
But there are no studies
on how we—
the gestalt-weavers,
the echo-children—
carry trauma.

No market for pain
that cannot be resolved.
No protocol
for how the body learns
to flinch from love.

This is not healing.
This is containment.
This is sanctuary
with a pulse.

I want to say yes.
But I live in a body
that flares like a fuse
at the knock of a question.

So I say nothing.
And mean everything.
And keep the veil drawn.

Aftermath …

And after the poem, silence again. Not the calm kind, not peace. The kind that arrives in the aftermath of telling. The kind that makes you wonder if saying the thing was too much, or not enough. I sit with it, this unease. This knowing.

I think of all the parents I’ve worked with over the years—their worry, their confusion, their heartbreak. My autistic child won’t come out of their room. They won’t come to the party. They say it like something’s broken. Like it’s a phase to be coaxed through or a behaviour to correct. And I never blame the kids. Not once. I understand, maybe too well. I understand it in my bones. It wrecks me. Because I’m that child. I never stopped being them. I just bought my own room. My own house. My own two acres at the end of a mountain road. My own party that no one gets to attend.

The Ridge—this place—was meant to be shared. I built it that way. A Ninja Warrior course for my kids. A fight training platform. A fire pit for stories and songs and bare feet under stars. There are no streetlights here to dull the night sky. Just the hush of dusk and the soft exhale of the rabbit brush. The sunrises blaze pink across the horizon, and the sunsets bleed gold into the valley. It’s everything I dreamed of when I was small and trapped and couldn’t make the world stop hurting me.

And I want to share it. I do. It’s in my blood, after all. My people don’t hoard joy. We pass it round. We build it in circles, with food and laughter and dancing that refuses to die, no matter how many times the colonisers tried to kill it. Joy is not a secret in my culture. It’s a declaration. A resistance. A right.

But then there’s me. I remain me. I wake in this beautiful place and still carry the old echoes. Time doesn’t march for me—it spirals. It repeats. It returns. I live not in chronology but in overlap. I walk out to light the fire pit and find myself, suddenly, at age five again, small and voiceless. Or twenty-three, flinching from the same kind of kindness. Or yesterday. Or tomorrow. It’s all the same when your system holds the past in the present tense.

And I wonder, sometimes—if I shared all this, if I said, Here’s why I can’t invite you up, would they understand? Would they see the sacredness of the boundary, or just its thickness? Would they think I don’t trust them? That I’m selfish? That I’m cold? I don’t know. And not knowing is where I go quiet. Because the way my mind works, there’s no clear if A, then B. There’s if A, then maybe a thousand possible outcomes, each branching, each fragile, each one carrying the risk of misunderstanding or harm. The maths of it generates heat. The heat becomes friction. The friction becomes shutdown. And so I choose the path I know:

“Thank you, I’ll be OK.”

It’s not true. But it’s smooth. It closes the door gently. It lets the moment pass without combustion. It protects them from my pain, and me from their confusion.

And maybe, just maybe, somewhere out there is another autistic GLP, curled on their bed in the dark, skipping the party, unable to say why. Maybe they’re dreaming of a Ridge of their own. Maybe they don’t have the words yet, but they feel the shape of them forming.

Maybe this is the script I never had.