Unmasking the Process

Neurodivergence, Restraint, and Why the Writing Was Always the Work

In a recent post I mentioned that I’m nonlinear, and a few people likely thought, “oh yeah, that’s for sure”, and others thought…”wait, now WHAT?”

Which makes sense, because from the outside I probably seem pretty relational. I read people easily. I connect quickly. I’ve always worked well in roles that require communication, collaboration, and trust-building.

And that’s all true.

But the following is likely more accurate: what probably started as early emotional sensitivity slowly turned into something more complicated.

When you’re naturally tuned in to people, you notice tone shifts. You feel tension before anyone names it. You sense when something is about to go sideways long before there’s evidence anyone else would accept.

That kind of awareness can be a gift.

But over time- especially in environments where your perception isn’t validated- it can quietly turn into self-editing.

You soften conclusions.
You wait longer than you should.
You look for confirmation before trusting your own read.

That’s not intuition anymore.
That’s masking.

And it’s subtle, because it doesn’t look like hiding.
It looks like being agreeable.
Like being adaptable.
Like being “good with people.”

For a long time, I thought that was just maturity.

Now I see that some of it was also survival.

When I went back and reread essays from 2019 through 2021, I was struck by how clearly I was already talking about things that would later become the core laws of the system I’m building now.

I was writing about how tone carries more truth than content.
How silence communicates just as much as words.
How patterns matter more than single incidents.
How emotional safety has structure, not just intention.

At the time, those were personal realizations.
Now they’re formal principles.

Which tells me something important: the perception was always there.

But those early essays also carried a lot of restraint.

I was noticing everything- emotional shifts, power dynamics, breakdowns in safety- but I wasn’t fully releasing what I saw. The world wasn’t ready for my thinking, and honestly, I don’t think I was either. There was too much shame layered onto trusting my own perception, too much risk in being fully visible in it.

So she didn’t vanish.

She went underground.

Still noticing.
Still absorbing.
Still trying to regulate through environments that weren’t built for someone wired the way I am.

I even said it out loud back then, without quite understanding what I meant. More than once, I wrote about struggling to “use my words.”

And now I get it.

It wasn’t that I didn’t understand what was happening around me.
It was that I hadn’t yet built a language big enough- or safe enough- for what I was already tracking.

Which is why the first line of the first post I wrote when I started again in February stopped me in my tracks when I reread it:

“I’ve written every day for the last four years… they just aren’t in black and white.”

The awareness never went away.
What was missing was authorship.

Permission to trust it.
Permission to publish it.
Permission to build from it.

What changed in February wasn’t perception.
It was unmasking. It was finally letting my internal models exist outside my head.

And that matters, because my brain does not solve problems linearly.

I don’t wake up with tidy action plans. I wake up with emotional signals, fragments of insight, and a sense that something is forming but not fully visible yet.

Writing is how those fragments become coherent.

Not because I already know what I think- but because I don’t… until I see it on the page.

For a nonlinear brain, insight often arrives as recognition before explanation.
I feel the pattern before I can prove it.

Writing is how I slow that recognition down long enough to translate it into language, structure, and eventually systems.

Once I can name something, I start seeing where it’s been showing up all along: in relationships, in workplaces, in institutions, in systems that repeatedly miss emotional harm until it becomes undeniable.

That’s when something stops being personal and starts looking structural.

And that’s when my brain switches from sensing to building.

Here’s the paradox of me, though.

I am deeply relational.
People matter to me.
Context matters to me.
Emotional safety matters to me.

But my clearest thinking happens when I’m working autonomously first.

Not because I don’t value collaboration- but because too many external expectations too early interrupt pattern formation. My brain needs space to let the model finish itself.

Then I bring it back into relationship, because that’s who the work is for.

So yes- I’m relationally driven.
And yes- I build best in solitude at first.

Both are true. And both are necessary.

Which is why the writing was never a detour from the work.

It was the work.

It was where intuition became structure. Where emotional awareness turned into conceptual clarity. Where years of lived experience started asking system-level questions.

A few weeks after those February essays, I began development on what I’m building now. Not because I suddenly had a business idea, but because the patterns had finally organized themselves clearly enough to be translated into something real.

That’s what unmasking has looked like for me.

Not becoming louder or tougher. Just trusting my own perception sooner- and needing less permission to follow where it leads.

I still care deeply about people.
I still want collaboration and connection.

But I no longer override recognition in the name of harmony.

And that has changed everything- what I’m building, and also how I’m building it.

What I’ve come to understand is that my study of myself was never meant to keep me inward. It was always moving me outward- toward connection, toward co-regulation, toward understanding what people need from each other when communication starts to break down. I go inward first because that’s how my nonlinear brain organizes emotional signal. But the purpose is always relational.

Insight, for me, is not the destination. It’s the bridge to safer interaction. And now that I trust that process, I’m finally building from it instead of apologizing for it.