What Safety Feels Like Before You Realize You're Safe
At first, it doesn’t register as peace.
There’s no wave of relief, no gentle swelling music.
It’s more like something goes missing. Something just . . . isn’t there. The tension, the second-guessing, the script. Gone.
No scanning for hidden meaning. No repeating your last sentence. No staring at their eyebrows, or hands, or fixating on the pause between their words to decode what you might’ve missed.
It’s not that you feel good—but that you stop feeling like a problem.
Your posture doesn’t change. But the grip under it loosens. Your hands aren’t clenching. Your jaw doesn’t hurt.
You don’t notice these things in the moment since you're not trained to notice the absence of harm. You’ve spent your life memorizing what discomfort feels like but no one taught you how to recognize its opposite.
Because this isn’t “relaxing.” This isn’t “connection.” Those are big, clear, easy-to-market feelings.
This is subtler.
Like how your body doesn’t recoil when there’s unexpected silence.
And your words don’t feel like weapons you need to disarm as you speak them.
And nothing tenses when you say exactly what you mean, and it doesn’t dissolve in midair like it usually does.
No smile for their comfort. No shrink-wrapped tone to assuage the truth. Just presence, in real time, without apology.
This isn’t what people talk about when they say “feeling safe.”
But for some of us, this is the only kind we’ve ever longed for.
The kind you don’t script. Don’t explain. Just recognize—once it’s already here.
That’s the beginning of belonging.
And the silence that follows doesn’t ask for a mask. It asks for nothing at all.
— Autistic Ang
"You don’t notice these things in the moment since you're not trained to notice the absence of harm. You’ve spent your life memorizing what discomfort feels like but no one taught you how to recognize its opposite."
Growing up I had those safe places that I just enjoyed being in.
From my second oldest brothers room when he'd just let me be or read me a story or read out loud his school textbook.
From my grandmother's room in the attic where she would spend part of the fall and winter where she would tell me about her early life traveling around the west with her sister and father and his issues with women he married or learning games and a bit of gentle speech therapy, I was sad to see her go on world cruises or head off in the summer to her rented cabin.
Out on my tricycle, a couple of milk and cookie stops, it was freedom to move with polio affecting one leg.
Doing errands to the small local grocery store or drug store.
Going on our typical three week camping trips, new places to explore or just to sit and contemplate (oldest brother was into photography so caught me often just being) and dad just spending some time with me and questions.
Staying with my grandmother at her cabin, a week with my best friend, a week on my own and sometimes a week with my cousins. Then the extra weeks at summer scout camp on my own and many of the camp councelers had been in my brothers troop so knew that I was a weird but nice bratty brother from all the camping trips I and dad went on with them.
The tree in the backyard that I'd climb 50 feet up in or the hole in the wall in the basement or being old enough to stay in my grandmother's room in the attic while she was gone in the summer of the house we moved to and waking at 3am to go out on the deck and lie down on the wide railing three stories up and "mentally talking to other kids about navigating this weird world"... Then years later a voice coming to me and asking "If you change your mind would you survive until help arrived?", no but I guess I can survive 6 more months of where I was until moving in with my second oldest brother and his wife for the summer.
And the list can go on, I have never really thought of these as absence of harm that was a constant but subtle fact of home life.