reading room
Temporary Coördinates
I'm autistic because I struggle with is not confession, not diagnosis, not essence.
It is a coördinate.
A graph-point. A pencil dot. where something infinite was happening.
We collapse family resemblances— buzzing fluorescent supermarkets, the nylon hiss of a collar tag, sound that lands like metal, light that bruises the eyes— into syllables because language is a small suitcase and experience is high-resolution.
"I struggle with sound because I'm autistic" and "I'm autistic so I struggle with sound" look identical at a distance.
Both point at the same dot. Both survive small talk.
Only one preserves the order.
One flows left:
word → wound
It says: first the name, then the pain.
The truer sentence moves right:
wound → word
Sound as blade. Light as shout. Fabric is fire. Time as a strobe that won't sync.
Not: I am overwhelmed because I am autistic.
But: I am autistic because the world arrives too loud, too bright, too unbuffered.
Noun: autistic Still.
Verb: noticing until the room shows its cracks.
Noun: gender. Still.
Verb: becoming despite the grid.
Noun: race. Still.
Verb: surviving systems that prefer stillness.
Forms prefer nouns. Because verbs move too much. Systems love fixed points. They draw axes through us: functional / broken normal / other visible / erased
But a point is supposed to move.
I don't struggle with honesty because I'm autistic.
I don't struggle with patterns, with depth, with the small fractures in large structures.
"I don't struggle... because I'm autistic" is not denial.
It is calibration.
A reminder: maps are not territory. Coördinates are not cages.
We turn constellations into dots for speed, for safety, for being understood before the bell rings.
This is not essence. This is transport.
A storm folded small enough to cross a room. A weather system flattened into breath.
I am not fixed. I am not pinned.
I am a moving coördinate misfiled as a noun, sliding across invisible axes, more verb than word, more weather than label.
A storm that did not agree but learned how to be spelled.
— Lilith