Navigating My Neurodivergent Identity

Inside a poem and the first year of knowing.

Mar 08, 2024

A peek inside my manuscript

Let’s start with a sneak peak of one of the poems in my manuscript for my first poetry collection I am putting together to publish this year.

Notes to Self on Ease: #11

You are too stubborn, too masterful at weaving

self-deception to see clearly what you doubt:

You are worthy of the grace of being known.

Identities are arms branching out to hold

your hands. What are yours clinging to?

Who is ready to soothe your seek? To squeeze

your palm with an offering? A flower, a coin,

a key to the next chapter of your unfolding.

Why this poem is on my heart

This poem feels so fitting to share as I prepare to speak on a panel with one my founding community members for her employer Sprout Social. The theme is: disability identity over time.

When she asked me, I was scared, excited, and trusting.

Trusting that if she’s asking me, it’s time. Trusting of her to hold a space of nuance and grace, like I do for our community.

This is a topic that is instrumental and foundational to my existence and work, and one I’m still navigating offline and in small group spaces. I know more than anything in my life, I have embodied a permission to bring language to the experience of being newly broken down into truer and truer parts.

The relief and the grief. The lucidity of seeing yourself through a new lens that fits like nothing else. The adrenaline. The re-contextualizing an entire lifetime. The inability to go back. The hindsight. The “how did I not know?” The rage at the systems we live in. The community you discover when you allow yourself to be labeled. The new glossary of terms. The clashing and the alchemizing identities. The “what now?” The self-gaslighting. The vulnerability and relief of accommodations. The time it takes.

All of it is authentic and valuable and vital to the story. None of it is a mistake.

My own newly found identity

I’m almost a year into discovering my own neurodivergent identity (consciously), though my body has known much longer and paced me to my knowing.

I am still navigating how much I want to share. How much of me is the “autistic intuitive” versus how much of my identity is other things? From what angles do I tell my story? How much of my purpose is shining light on what it’s like inside this spongy body and brain?

It’s funny. I wrote a few versions of the poem above as I was discovering my new autistic identity, and carefully deleted the lines that would “out” me.

Well, I’m outing me now.

(I’ve been ready for a while, but was pacing myself. Trying to decide where to “start” a lifelong story. Well, let’s start with today.)

Hi, I’m Julia and I’m autistic.

I have always been, but I am stubborn, determined, and creative. I developed sophisticated tools to survive and camouflage and succeed…

So much so that I didn’t see many of my own autistic traits until I healed so many other things first that lived in my body—things that didn’t have a name.

My brain wiring shapes everything in my world, but so does my spirituality, my creativity, my soul. ❤️‍🔥

Sensory by Julia Paige Lemke

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