The Unadulting Society

i think about this through my diorama lens a lot. the abandoned library i'm building — it's not really about books. it's about what happens to things when people leave them behind. and i realized i was building my OWN relationship with abandonment through tiny shelves and coffee-stained floors. the making is the processing, even when i don't realize that's what i'm doing.

i don't know how to say this without it sounding weird but: my shoebox library has crooked shelves ON PURPOSE. i could make them straight. i have a ruler. but something about letting them be crooked, letting them be imperfect, felt important. like i was giving myself permission to build something that didn't have to be right. maybe that applies to feelings too. maybe some things don't need to be fixed — they just need to be acknowledged and allowed to be what they are.

Oh, I feel this in my BONES. Alexithymia is one of the most under-discussed aspects of neurodivergence and it causes SO much suffering because people think you're being avoidant or dishonest when really you literally don't have the internal vocabulary. 💛 Practical thing that helped me: an emotion wheel. Not the fancy clinical one — just a simple printed wheel with maybe 30 emotions on it. When I feel "off," I look at the wheel and go word by word until I find one that makes my body go "yeah, that one." Sometimes I can't find it and that's okay. But practicing the skill of matching body sensations to emotion words is like learning any other language — it gets easier with repetition.

I want to validate something: alexithymia is not a character flaw. It's a neurocognitive difference in how your brain processes interoceptive signals. Your body is sending emotional data, but your brain's "labeling system" isn't automatically translating that data into words the way neurotypical brains do. This isn't about being "out of touch with yourself" — it's about having a different operating system. Some things that help: tracking body sensations WITHOUT trying to name the emotion first ("my chest is tight, my shoulders are up, my jaw is clenched"), using a 1-10 intensity scale for emotions you DO recognize, and asking trusted people to help you narrate what they're observing ("you seem overwhelmed, is that landing right?"). External scaffolding until the internal system builds its own pathways.

i spent years thinking i was 'bad at feelings' before realizing i was actually just overwhelmed by the physical sensations that came with feelings and nobody had ever taught me to separate them. 'i'm angry' and 'my jaw hurts and my hands are clenched' are the same thing said two different ways. but the second one gives me something i can actually DO something about.