When You Stop Explaining Your Quirks and Start Decorating with Them

It doesn’t start with pride.

Maybe one day, you don’t give the usual half-joke about your “little routines” when someone asks why you do things that way. You just say, “It helps,” and move on.

Maybe you stop adjusting the way you sit. Let yourself stim a little. Let yourself not smile when someone expects it. Let your face stay neutral. Let your voice be flat. Let your hands keep moving.

Things don’t necessarily get better because of it. But something in your body does.

There’s this gradual, steady unraveling of every rule you’ve followed just to be tolerable. The fake enthusiasm. The masks that once felt clever. How every instinct got filtered down until it sounded safe enough for someone else to handle.

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None of that vanishes overnight. But one by one, it all stops making sense.

You start changing the room instead of changing yourself. Move the lamp. Lower the sensory ceiling. Buy the same shirt again because it feels right.

This has nothing to do with making noise and everything to do with making sense.

Because it works.

Because your body lets go in ways it never could while you were still trying to be acceptable.

The strange part is most people don’t even notice. That used to sting.

But now, it feels like freedom.

Recognition helps, though it’s self-permission that makes it easier to breathe.

And once you give it, everything begins to fit a bit better. You didn’t become someone new—only stopped cutting pieces off to belong.

Turns out, nothing needed fixing. It simply needed room.

And this time, the space you’re building won’t kick you out.

— Autistic Ang

(New podcast episode here)

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