How do you live with yourself

A neurodivergent mother’s record of imagination, restraint, and institutional harm.

The imagination I was born with

Part of my neurodivergence is fatalism; part of it is hyperphantasia; part of it is the inability to look out at a beautiful landscape without imagining loss, rupture, and death, because even as a small child on the ferry to Victoria, while other people were looking out over the water and the mountains and the trees, I was picturing myself tumbling over the side, picturing my stuffed animal falling first, picturing myself jumping in after him, picturing both our bodies pulled under and thrashed against the boat’s engine, picturing my funeral, picturing his, and wondering who would come and what they would say and whether they would remember me.

And I carried this into every part of my life, because when I met someone I didn’t like, my brain would instantly run a movie of their demise—oops, choked on a chicken bone; ow, slipped in the shower—and just like that, I was at their funeral, listening to people say kind and false things about someone who had hurt me or hurt others or just hadn’t liked my child.

It made it hard to relate to people when I was little.

My Grade 1 teacher, Miss Richards, was sweet and kind and patient, asking me to count by fives, asking me to say the alphabet, trying to coach me into compliance in a room where I already knew the rules and already hated them, because I had gone from chasing garter snakes up mountains to sitting cross-legged on carpet squares while being asked to act like I didn’t already know how to read, how to add, how to think.

And while she did that, I was quietly imagining how she might die in a way that wouldn’t hurt too much.

I went to the Encyclopædia Britannica and looked up causes of death—heart attacks were common, drowning was long and terrible, you would still be conscious while your lungs filled, burning alive wasn’t quite as horrific as I’d assumed because apparently you passed out quickly from the smoke and didn’t usually feel your skin catch—but in the end I decided that drugs would be best for Miss Richards, who I loved, because something like Valium or Percocet—if that existed then—would allow her to slip away softly, without pain.

This is what my imagination has always done—vivid, unrelenting, unsparing, unchosen.

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The part that keeps me safe, the part that makes me dangerous

I have always tried to like my children’s teachers, and I have always tried to make them like me—like me enough to see my children as human, as worthy, as more than a problem they were assigned to manage—because I figured out early that many people didn’t like my children, not because of who they are, but because of what they saw when they were dysregulated, what they decided those moments meant, what they assumed about character instead of asking about context.

That look of disgust people get when they think about your child’s worst day and decide it tells them everything they need to know.

That scowl, that judgement, that little breath of contempt.

They saw a personality flaw; I saw a child in distress.

People do horrific and astonishing things when they’re under threat—lift cars, defecate, vomit, gnaw off limbs—and those images lived in my brain when I was still very young, coming without warning like a movie I couldn’t unsubscribe from, a reel that kept playing regardless of the context I was in.

And still I learned to smile.

Still I learned how to nod.

Still I studied how to perform interest so that neurotypicals would feel reassured, so that they wouldn’t see that while they were speaking, I was imagining them dead—imagining it quickly, sometimes mercifully, sometimes with precision, but always privately, always silently, always with the full force of restraint that I have trained in myself since childhood.

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The violence of being too competent to matter

One of the most frustrating parts of this story—one of the most quietly cruel parts—is that we have never been believed about being neurodivergent, never once truly seen, because we have always been just a little too articulate, a little too clever, a little too high-functioning, a little too composed to be pitied, a little too competent to be considered legible, eligible, grievable.

Like if we had been more fucked up, then maybe they would have helped.

And all that time I was performing likeability, smiling politely, choosing my words with care, rehearsing my tone, suppressing the entire theatre of death that was running inside my head—I always felt like screaming.

You.

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The dirge of restraint

If people believe that we are the sum of our thoughts—that our darkest, most involuntary, most unwanted images define us—then I would be in jail by now, because by that measure I have imagined murdering half the people I’ve ever encountered, and yet I am a pacifist, and I am gentle, and I am extraordinarily well-practiced in containing what lives inside me.

I have lived with intrusive thoughts for a long time.

I have never acted on them.

But I have sat across from people—calm, professional, smiling people—who told me they were removing my child’s support, told me it was temporary, told me we needed to build tolerance, told me he would be fine, told me it was only for a few days while they reset, and while they spoke I pictured their body riddled with bullets, and I asked how their day was going.

That is what self-restraint looks like.

That is what it means to live with imagination this vivid, and still be civil, and still be called uncivil for saying “fuck,” and still be punished for being impolite while being actively harmed.

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The punch card logic of institutional harm

You—you, the smiling professional—have normalized the harm you enact so thoroughly that you have begun to believe your own script, begun to perform your lines as though they are true, begun to select from your menu of reassurances as if they are real options: “We want your child at school,” “It’s only for a few days,” “We need to build a safety plan,” “Have you considered a medication review?” “We think your child doesn’t feel safe because they sense that you don’t trust us.”

I sit across from you wondering how you can say these things so gently, so sweetly, like this isn’t a kind of violence, like this isn’t scripted harm softened by cadence and tone.

It reminds me of Stepford wives, or punch card machines—early computers running gas chambers, now running IEP meetings—with radio buttons for acceptable responses, everything polite, everything tidy, everything designed to ignore the needs of the actual child sitting at the centre of this entire performance.

And I participate, because I have to.

Because I need to keep him safe.

Because I don’t get to scream.

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The body of memory

I already carry so much—already hold intrusive thoughts that come unbidden, already manage a mind that sees everything, already ruminate for years, already dream every night of bones and stench and flesh and death—and then, when someone hurts my child, there is more to carry, another layer to manage, another weight to absorb.

The PTSD, the vivid reenactments, the cellular imprint of meetings where I was made to feel monstrous for defending my children.

The dreams, where I walk through hallways that no longer exist.

The images, where I pick over the dead body of memory, gouging through rotting flesh to expose the bones, white and hot in the sun.

The memories, stacked atop the stench, trying to override the decay, trying to plant new thoughts where only grief has taken root.

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The unspeakable part

When I talk to principals now—when I sit across from someone who is calm and confident and utterly unmoved by my child’s pain—I often have intrusive thoughts of their death.

A bed of nails, slowly pressing in.

A guillotine, cutting cleanly through the smiling brain that believes its own benevolence.

And still I smile.

Still I nod.

Still I ask how your day is going.

Because I have studied restraint, because I have learned performance, because I am trying to survive while you smile through harm.

And I do not understand how you live with yourself.

But I live with myself by telling the truth.