When the Past Wakes Up Before I Do
When the Past Wakes Up Before I Do
Personal Essay — Completed November 2025
Currently under simultaneous submission
Short Description:
This essay explores how writing a memoir about late-diagnosed autism can alter the landscape of memory itself. Revisiting childhood, family dynamics, and long-buried emotions triggers vivid, insistent dreams that return emotional truths the waking mind was not ready to face. The past resurfaces not as narrative, but as sensation, revealing what the body stored long before diagnosis gave it language.
The piece reflects on autistic emotional processing, the emotional backlog created by years of masking, and how memory can re-emerge through dreams when writing opens doors that were never meant to stay closed.
(A publication link will be added once the piece is placed.)