Dear Jamila, From Your Autism

A letter from my autism

I know exactly when it starts to happen.

You feel it before anyone else sees it: the shift in your face, the lag in your expression. Your smile lands half a second too late. Your eyes glaze just a little too long. There’s a vacancy in your gaze you can’t quite patch over. And you feel them noticing—not what’s wrong, but that something is. That something about you isn’t quite syncing up.

Confusion becomes discomfort. Discomfort becomes distrust. Distrust becomes dislike. You’ve seen it happen a hundred times in a hundred rooms. And every time, it unspools the same thread in your chest.

You get frantic, trying to catch what’s slipping. You reach for the social fabric—its norms, its cues, the Next Right Thing—but it unravels between your fingers like something spun from mist. You try hot, you try funny, you try to play mysterious and confident. You know the script. You just can’t make your mouth or your body follow it. The sound is stuck. The gesture’s delayed. The thing that’s supposed to make people feel at ease only makes them look at you longer, more uncertain.

This is the “can’t wall.” You know it well.

It’s not stubbornness. It’s not resistance. It’s not refusal.

It’s a neurological impossibility that descends like fog. You see the step you’re supposed to take—but your body won’t let you take it. And the more pressure you feel—internally, externally—the higher the wall gets.

This is PDA, too—Pathological Demand Avoidance, though even that name feels like a trap. Because you’re not avoiding. You’re collapsing under the weight of perceived expectations. Even the gentle ones. Even the ones you set yourself.

And then there’s that moment—sharp, familiar, inevitable—when you meet someone new.

Before a single word has finished forming in your mouth, you already know.

You’ve gone off-track.

Not by much. Just a fraction. Just enough that your timing is off. Just enough that your tone doesn’t match your intention. Just enough that you’ve answered the question too literally or missed the small social step between sentence and smile. And it hits you like cold water on the chest.

That sinking certainty: They’ve clocked it.

And with it comes the humiliation. Not theatrical, not dramatic—just quiet, constant, like a shadow settling over you. Imminent. Inevitable. It begins to bloom in your stomach even as you’re still trying to course-correct, to recover the moment, to slide yourself back onto the rails of “acceptable,” of “normal,” of “easy to be around.”

But it’s too late.

You’ve already been marked as a little too much or not quite enough. Too intense. Too odd. Too quiet. Too much eye contact or not enough. You’re already calculating whether they’ll excuse it, whether they’ll write you off, whether you’ll spend the next hour overexplaining your way back into their good graces—graces that feel like glass on a windowsill, ready to fall at the slightest shift in weight.

This is the part people don’t see.

They don’t see the effort.

The constant recalibration. The inner monologue on overdrive. The small, aching heartbreak of being misread and misunderstood, again. The way you replay every interaction like a film reel with no sound, trying to spot the exact frame where it all tipped out of your hands.

There’s a razor-thin line they draw—and redraw—between “quirky” and “queer.”

Between charmingly offbeat and uncomfortably strange. Between “endearing” and “too much.” One minute you’re the darling rule-breaker, the delightful surprise, the one who colors outside the lines just enough to be interesting. And the next?

You’ve taken it a step too far.

The glint in their eyes dims. The smile doesn’t reach their face. Suddenly, you’re not intriguing—you’re inappropriate. Diabolical. Disruptive in all the wrong ways. You feel it in your chest, that rapid reclassification. Like a trapdoor swinging open beneath your feet.

You were never quite sure what earned you their affection in the first place, but you know exactly what lost it.

And still—you try. God, how you try. Walking that tightrope, rehearsing your lines, second-guessing the moment you reach for too much truth, too much laughter, too much difference. Watching the social fabric unravel again in your hands no matter how delicately you try to hold it, fingers trembling, heart racing, weaving and re-weaving something you were never meant to carry alone.

They call it a choice. They call it resistance. They call it defiance.

But I know the truth.

Sometimes, it’s not that you won’t.

It’s that you can’t.

You’re up against the Can’t Wall again—unseen by most, but solid as stone to you. The place where every attempt to comply collapses into paralysis. Where the next right thing becomes unreachable. Where the words are in your mouth but not on your tongue, where the steps are known but suddenly impossible to follow.

And the more they push, the higher the wall grows.

But I’m not here to push.

I’m here to stay.

To sit with you at the foot of that wall and remind you: your difficulty is not your defect. Your overwhelm is not your failure. The way your body says no when the world demands yes is not broken—it’s brilliant.

You are not too much.

You are not too far.

You do not need to carry shame for the ways you seem to slip sideways out of people’s grasp—or how they slip out of yours.

You are loved. You are learning. And you are already whole.

And I love you for it.

Lovingly, tenderly yours,

Your Autism

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If something in this piece stayed with you — if my writing has ever made you feel less alone, more understood, or reminded you of your softness and strength — I’d be deeply grateful if you’d consider supporting my work directly.

I’ve just begun a long-awaited writing sabbatical in Sicily to focus on my book In Kinship, and I’ll be sharing more reflections, creative pieces, and dispatches from this tender chapter here. This season is about keeping the fire lit — not just for the book, but for my health, my wholeness, and the many stories still inside me.

Asking for support is something I’m slowly learning to do with grace. And receiving it with gratitude is something I’m practicing daily.

If you’ve ever wanted to say thank you for a piece of writing that held you — here’s a way to do that:

🌿 Venmo: @Jamila-Bradley
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Thank you for helping me make space to write, heal, and offer what I can to the collective body of work that is kinship.