Author's Note

Author's Note {.author-note}

I did not write this book from a distance.
I wrote it from inside the experience it describes.

For years, I thought something was wrong with me — that my shutdowns were failures, that my silence hurt people, that my overwhelm made me unreliable or unlovable. I didn't have language for what was happening inside my mind, my nervous system, or my emotional world.

Maybe you've felt that way too.

This book is not written from the perspective of a clinician standing outside the storm, observing patterns in other people. It's written as someone who lived inside the storm without a map — someone who had to learn, slowly and painfully, that silence is not distance, and overload is not a moral issue.

If parts of this book feel like they're reading your internal life out loud, that's intentional.
If they feel validating, I'm grateful.
If they feel uncomfortable, that's okay too — healing often begins where language finally touches what we've never been able to explain.

Everything in these pages is meant to show you that you are not broken.
You are wired a little differently — beautifully, deeply, perceptively — and that wiring deserves understanding, not shame.