Calling

Calling, 3’ x 4', Mixed Media on Canvas, 2026

Trigger warning for some darker topics:

In my experience, if i was a bird, I’m not sure if most other birds, would understand my song.

My experience with AuDHD/CPTSD has been lonely, since i was an infant. I have felt like a human repellent, even towards other neurodivergent people. I learned as young i could that I must know human behavior for my own survival, being neurodivergent was not going to cut it in my household, and certainly not in the world. So i learned behavior, psychology, awareness. Deeply. Intensely. My nervous system learned that my safety depended on it.

Often this was just observing others from afar. Always curious, never involved. Eventually my isolation grew boring, and more painful. I built a mask "good enough" to shove myself into spaces i did not belong, and inevitably everything i built would always crumble, as the mask could never be perfect. My needs would come out, My pain, my intensity, my obsession with decoding human behavior that comes across as suffocating and critical.

As I grew older, the mask did not become better, it became more fractured, and I started developing addiction, autoimmune conditions, and significantly worsening mental health that became the priority over my neurodivergent. (I did not understand all of their overlap for many years.)

After a massive wake up call(or 5 or 6 lets be real) that is an entire other very long story, I FINALLY realized this was no long sustainable to my health. I started a new intensive therapy dedicated to feeling safe unmasking my neurodivergent and heal deeper so i could trust letting my walls down around others.

3 years since then, the journey is still ongoing, and will certainly never end. But I’ve gotten to a point where I feel like the most me I have ever been, and masking is significantly less. I’m still learning the smaller, more complex, or subtle ways that I mask, and I still mask in my close friendships sometimes.

This doesn’t mean things still do not crumble. While in the past i thought I had mastered detachment, I had built such a hard shell around my heart from so many years of abandonment, neglect, pain, and rejection, that was never safe for me to fully feel. So when my CPTSD healing met the sharpest point with my unmasking journey, well, yikes.

This painting is an homage to loneliness. Right now i am currently mourning some friends that I have lost, in the same pattern.

Getting that lifelong abandonment and rejection wound triggered after presenting your freshly unmasked self wholeheartedly to others is a feeling i wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.
We do have to keep telling ourselves that we have to shine as bright as the star that we are, so the other brightest stars can find us too. Just because we haven’t found our place yet, doesn’t mean its not there. While everything has not fallen into place,

I can tell you that since I haven’t faltered my light in the last year, and stood in bravery and vulnerability, i have met such beautiful people who i have never felt more supported by, no matter the mask, the mindfck existential dread i inflict on them (ha ha), the moodiness, the over communicating, the social faux paus i miss, the tears, the being too goofy, the loudness, the non verbalness, the me.

It doesn’t take away the pain from the loss. But for me, it alchemizes it into something greater.
I am some type of free, and the little girl that was never allowed to be free, is free too. That is worth it all and more.
A lesson i have learned this year: stand tall in your loneliness, become your deepest self, and shine your light, loneliness and all. Find who else is looking above the crowd.

Anyone else in their unmasking / CPTSD healing journey, or just struggling with similar themes: ur not alone. :) im here SUFFERING!!!! too :')

Thank u for reading. An ant bit me while i wrote this. :(