I didn’t slip.
You let go.

You saw me unravel
and called it behaviour.
You saw fear
and called it attitude.
You saw a nervous system on fire and wrote non-compliant
in tidy black ink.

You chose the story
that required the least from you.

You wanted clarity
from a body in survival.
You wanted order
from a brain storing memory
as threat.
You wanted calm
from someone who had never been safe.

When I couldn’t deliver pain
neatly,
chronologically,
without shaking—

you stopped listening.

That wasn’t caution.
That was dismissal
with a clipboard.

You didn’t miss autism.
You avoided it.

Because seeing it
would have meant slowing down.
Would have meant doubt.
Would have meant responsibility.

It was easier
to call me difficult
than to admit
your framework was wrong.

You labelled my reactions.
You never questioned their cause.

You praised compliance.
You punished distress.

You mistook masking
for health.
You mistook shutdown
for agreement.
You mistook silence
for consent.

And then you called it neutral.

Understand this—

When systems misread neurodivergence,
they don’t just fail.

They expose.

They teach the world
that my boundaries bend.
That my confusion is leverage.
That my credibility is conditional.
That my body is negotiable
if I can’t advocate fast enough.

You cleared the ground
and walked away.

I told you.

In panic.
In collapse.
In dissociation.
In the way my body screamed
what my mouth could not organise.

You wanted evidence.
I gave you symptoms.
You wanted logic.
I gave you survival.

You rejected both.

You will say
you didn’t know.
But ignorance
is not innocence
when you refused
to look.

If you had seen autism
instead of pathology,
trauma
instead of temperament,
difference
instead of defect—

some harms
would never have found me.

Not because I was fragile. Because I would not have been
unprotected.

Here is what remains.

I carry what you refused to hold.
I live with what you declined to name.
I survived what your silence allowed.

You kept your titles.
Your reports.
Your distance.

I carry the imprint
in muscle and memory,
in reflex,
in the way my body learned
to expect nothing.

This was not confusion.
This was not complexity.
This was not unfortunate.

You assessed.
You prioritised.
You decided.

And now—

my voice goes quiet
on purpose.

Not because I have nothing to say,
but because I no longer trust you
with my words.

—Frost ❄️