I have always been too much. I have always been not enough. I have only recently understood why.

Most people think they know what autism looks like. A child. Withdrawn. Non verbal. Obvious.

That is not my story.

I have never been diagnosed. And the traits are mild enough that I could convince myself I am conjuring it. But the more I understand how autism presents in adults, particularly those who spent a lifetime learning to navigate a world not built for them, the more I recognize myself.

I am not using this as an excuse. I am using it as a map.

I am the version that goes unnoticed. The one that masked so well it became invisible. The one that connected too deeply rather than too little. The one that felt everything too intensely or not at all. While appearing either fully present or completely distant. Never in between.

The one that was always too much. And never enough. Simultaneously. I am not built for small talk and pleasantries.

I am a loner. It began as wounds. Then it became a choice. I settled into it quietly. Without announcement.

But solitude frightens people. In my late teens my sister told me what my mother had said: “you don’t have any friends.” It was not concern in her voice. It was criticism.

Everyone wants me to fix it. As if solitude is a wound still bleeding. As if I am broken and simply haven’t realized it yet.

In my early twenties I discovered something. Solitude was not the absence of connection. It was a philosophical state. A place where the mind settles and the noise of others clears.

A mind like mine demands constant translation from the world. Every social interaction. Every unwritten rule. Every pleasantry and every criticism lands differently than intended. Solitude is where the translation stops. Where I am no longer performing a language I was not born into.

Aristotle said that whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god. I am neither. But I understand that my solitude is not a deficit. It is a chosen terrain.

People cannot fathom that I chose this. That I found contentment here. Contentment that most people spend their whole lives searching for and only find in midlife, if at all.

I do not go looking for connection. People appear. We cross paths. A conversation happens. And something in me recognizes something in them.

They are not pretentious. They are already themselves.

When I do connect fully, the depth gets misread. As if showing up completely means I have made them my entire world. They cannot carry what they have misread. Society has taught them that carrying another’s weight comes at a cost to their own.

I am like a hotel with open doors. People can stay as long as they want. They are free to leave anytime. This is not Hotel California. There is no price for leaving. No guilt. No chains.

I am a good host when they want to stay. I simply remain. Open. Available. I reach out once. To see if there is interest beyond where we already meet. If there is none, I know my place immediately.

Most do not stay long. Sometimes weeks. Sometimes months. Then they reflect. And what seemed natural in the moment begins to feel abnormal through the lens of what society says connection should look like. So they recalibrate. And I become too much.

There is a filter most people carry without knowing it. One that tells them how to behave, with whom, and at what level. I was not born with that filter.

Once, a friend brought her six year old son to visit. I got down on the floor and played with him. Fully. Without self consciousness. Without the performative distance most adults maintain around children. Afterward she said: “you’ll make a good mother.” She meant it as a compliment. But what she was really observing was that I had simply treated him as another person. Another playmate.

Another time a coworker brought her children to the office at the end of the day. An eleven year old and a seven year old. I was horseplaying with them. Fully. Loudly. Joyfully. To the point where their mother had to apologize to our manager.

I was not performing for the children. I was not being childish. I was simply showing up. The way I always do. Without regard for what age appropriate behavior is supposed to look like.

That is not immaturity. That is the absence of hierarchy.

I simply show up for them. Fully. Without reservation.

I am too much for a world that prefers surfaces. Not enough for a world that expects the conventional. I have never been either. And I have never pretended to be.

I understood the impulse. But I wanted my degree first. Get the thing done, then go. There was something almost stubborn about it, a refusal to let the world distract me before I had earned the right to be distracted by it.

The question was never really where. It had always been Alaska.

The indigenous cultures of Alaska, the Tlingit, the Athabascans, the Yup’ik, had worked their way into my imagination in a way I couldn’t entirely explain. There was something spiritual about them that pulled at me. Ancient knowledge systems shaped by one of the most unforgiving landscapes on earth. People who had not merely survived in that wilderness but had built entire ways of understanding the world from within it.

In my second year of university, I bought the Lonely Planet guide to Alaska. The internet existed, barely. The World Wide Web in those days was a scattering of static HTML pages, thin on detail and painfully slow to load on a 56k modem. The Lonely Planet guide was still the authority. My OCD meant the planning became its own obsession. The trip was two years in the making. Routes mapped, ferries plotted, points of interest slotted into the itinerary down to the day. I was already living it on paper long before I had set foot on Alaskan soil. This was to be some kind of becoming, a test of what I was made of, mentally and physically, somewhere far from the familiar. I knew that once I started my career, the opportunity for slow travel and wandering without a deadline, would be gone.

The irony was not lost on me later. All that planning, and by the time I finally left, I just wanted to get it over with.

It was my first time in the United States. I landed in San Francisco with a backpack, a meticulously planned itinerary, and absolutely no idea what I was walking into. I spent the day walking Market Street down to the waterfront, stopping to photograph whatever caught my eye. That night I returned to the airport for an early morning flight north. I camped in the terminal seats rather than pay for a hotel. I was not the only one with that idea. Two girls had settled into the seats nearby, blankets and eye masks lifted from the plane, the same calculation made independently. There was a particular solidarity in that.

At SeaTac I needed exact change for the bus into the city. I stood there with a $20 bill, asking anyone who passed if they could help. Nobody stopped. I remember thinking, “man, people are rude here!” In hindsight, a disheveled backpacker fresh off an early morning flight, carrying everything she owned, was not exactly someone people were rushing to engage with in a city with a visible homeless problem. Eventually one girl, Asian, took pity on me and broke the note. I have not forgotten that small kindness.

I had a reservation at a youth hostel downtown. My first stop was a Starbucks to ask for directions. The barista kept telling me she couldn’t hear me, no matter how many times I repeated myself. Was it my accent? Did she think I was homeless? Or did she simply not want to help? I never knew. I gave up and walked out thinking, “man, people are rude here!”

Seattle was doing what Seattle does in May, raining quietly and without apology. On the corner of 4th and Pine stood a Seattle’s Best coffee shop. I remember watching people pass by, cups in hand, and thinking it an odd thing until I realized they were thermoses. A small cultural gap, but one of many as I noted at the time.

I took a bus up to Everett to tour the Boeing plant, the largest building in the world by volume at 96 acres under one roof. No cameras, no bags, no hand carried items. I walked the catwalks above the plant floor, planes lined up far below in various stages of assembly. The rule was simple. Drop something onto a plane and you bought it.

I returned to Seattle and the next day made my way to King Street Station. The Kingdome dominated the skyline as I boarded the Amtrak north to Bellingham. The end of the road, and the beginning of the Alaska Marine Highway.

The Alaska Marine Highway attracts a particular kind of traveler. Most on board were young backpackers. Some were as young as sixteen, Americans heading north to work the canneries for the summer, earn a season’s worth of money and see what Alaska had left to offer once the work was done. A different kind of coming of age. Inside the Bellingham terminal we all waited together, backpacks, hiking boots and belongings sprawled across the floor. When it was time to depart we boarded in single file. Everyone made a beeline straight for the solarium, the open air deck at the top of the ferry. Pitching a tent on the solarium was a backpacker tradition, a rite of passage on the Alaska Marine Highway. We claimed our patch of deck for the 37 hour journey to the first port of call, Ketchikan.

For all my planning, I had not accounted for the tent. Mine was not freestanding, just a single pole, useless on a flat deck. I ended up on a reclining deck chair under the partially covered solarium, overhead heaters keeping the chill at bay. The Lonely Planet guide had let me down on that one. But all was not lost. There were plenty of fellow adventurers keeping me company.

As we pulled away from Bellingham I took photographs of the tent city on the solarium, the sunset faded to the west as we sailed between the many islands of British Columbia. In those photographs are faces I didn’t yet know. A photographer and his friends, Eric, Mir and her mother, Fred. People who would become part of the journey later, though in that moment they were just strangers sharing a deck and soaking up the moment.

When I arrived in Ketchikan some adventurers disembarked while most stayed on for another 25 hours to Juneau. My campground was seven miles away. I walked it. What I had not accounted for was that my Timberland Gore-Tex boots had never been broken in. By the time I reached camp, the damage was done. A toenail had separated from my toe. All those routes mapped, all those ferries plotted, and it had not occurred to me to wear my boots in before I left.

I quickly realized that seven miles from the ferry terminal was not practical. The next day I moved into town, just two miles from the terminal in the opposite direction. Ketchikan enjoys 162 inches of liquid sunshine a year, with only two weeks of actual sunshine. It happened to be one of those days where blue skies can be seen. After some sightseeing I decided to stay up all night on an open park bench overlooking the cruise ships.

A Peruvian man on his break from one of the cruise ships wandered over to the park. He spoke little English and I spoke little Spanish, though I had taken elementary Spanish before the trip and we managed. He told me he and his mother worked in the ship’s laundry. They didn’t make much money, just worked all the time. I had my boots off to rest my feet. He noticed, and gently asked if he could touch them. I was indifferent, so I let him. He touched them softly. Then a creep came and sat next to me. I don’t remember much of what was said, only that at some point he mentioned that things happen around here. I took that as my cue. I gathered my boots and headed back toward the ferry terminal where there was a Motel 8. I shelled out $70 for the night.

The next morning I waited at the ferry terminal building, which sat on stilts. It was there that I felt my first earthquake. I swayed with it, the moment passing before I had even registered what it was.

The second leg of the ferry to Juneau was a different experience. Most passengers had stayed on through Ketchikan, so the solarium was almost empty. Only the photographer and his friends had pitched their tent. Fred was stretched out on a deck recliner, soaking up whatever little sunshine he could. It was on this leg that I officially met him. He was from Hawaii.

The culture handed us a definition of love that is feeling-driven. The rush of falling in love. The butterflies you feel in your chest when you are attracted to someone. The high of being in love, where suddenly you are lifted out of ordinary reality into a world where only the two of you exist. For a while it feels like nothing can come between you. The rest of life, its noise and weight and boredom, falls away. You are untouchable together. And for a while, you both feel it. That mutuality is real. The problem is not that the feeling exists. The problem is that the culture told you it was all you needed.

And then, quietly, it is not enough.

Because what the culture called love was, in large part, a chemical reaction. Dopamine flooding your brain. Norepinephrine making your heart race. A temporary suppression of the parts of your mind that notice flaws and calculate risk. Your body manufactured the feeling. And underneath all of it, quieter but more honest, was a sexual need looking for a socially acceptable container. We dressed it up in the language of soulmates and destiny because naked desire felt like too small a reason to reorganize your entire life around another person. This is not to say that love is only sex. It is to say that sexual desire is one of the primary engines the culture hid inside the language of love, and hiding it made it almost impossible to see clearly.

Desire narrows what you can see. It does not reveal the person in front of you. It constructs them. We said love is blind as though it were a charming quirk rather than a precise description of what was actually happening. You were not seeing the person in front of you. You were seeing what you needed them to be. And they, sensing what you needed, became it. Or tried to. People are remarkably good at performing the version of themselves that keeps someone they desire close. This is not change. Change is something that grows from the inside, something you do for yourself. What happens in desire is something else entirely. You suppress the parts that might cost you the person. You amplify the parts that seem to be working. And they are doing exactly the same thing. But a performance has a run time. Eventually the effort of maintaining a self that was never quite true becomes exhausting. They drop it. You drop it. And you call that change. You say they are not the person you met. You are right. But they did not change. They just got tired of performing. And if you are honest, so did you.

The desire did not reveal either of you to each other. It constructed two people who did not quite exist. And when both constructions collapsed, you were left standing in front of a stranger, and they were standing in front of one too.

So you do what the culture taught you to do. You watch something on Netflix and a character tells you that love makes you weak. You think to yourself: Yeah, I’ll do better next time around. You learn the wrong lesson from the right pain. You armor up instead of opening up.

And this is how a hamster wheel works. Not through force. Through hope. Every new relationship carries the genuine hope that this time will be different. Every heartbreak feels like important data, like you are learning something, like you are getting closer. The effort feels real because it is real. And so, you start another lap.

I should say here that I have never been inside this culture. I did not receive it the way most people did. After my schooling years, I watched it happen in real time. Friends disappeared. Not because the friendship meant nothing, but because they were busy getting on the wheel. The calls got fewer. The plans never materialized. Everyone consumed by the search, by the relationship, by the maintenance of the feeling. And the ones who did find someone became a world of two. Sealed. Complete in their own eyes. They no longer needed me, or anyone outside the relationship, because the culture told them that finding the one means the one should be enough. I was still there, on the outside, watching people I knew disappear entirely into a togetherness that had no room for anyone else. The culture had done exactly what it was designed to do.

The culture sold us love as a feeling because feelings are instant gratification. They fit into songs and movies in a way that reality never could. And so the wheel keeps spinning, fed by the same story, over and over again.

Until you don’t. Some people exit the wheel not through wisdom but through exhaustion. They have run long enough, loved hard enough, lost enough times, that the hunger for the feeling quietly dies. And in that stillness, sometimes for the first time, they begin to see something they could not see while they were running. That love was never the feeling. That the feeling was just the door. And that the door was never the destination. The exit from the wheel was never a better feeling. It was this: Two people choosing to carry each other.

That is what love is. Not a metaphor for sacrifice, not a feeling, but two people who mutually choose to hold each other’s full weight.

It means holding the full reality of another person. Not the version of them that is convenient, not the version performing their best self, but their actual weight. Their fear that resurfaces even after years of working on it. Their patterns that do not fully resolve. Their failures. Their contradictions. The parts of them that are not easy to love in any simple sense. You hold all of that, and you do not put it down when it becomes inconvenient.

This requires a self that is genuinely strong. Not performing strength, not the strength that refuses to ask for help, but the interior kind. The kind that can hold weight without collapsing into resentment. The kind that gives without keeping score. The kind that does not need to be thanked for every act of holding because the holding itself is the point.

Most people arrive at love before they have built this strength. They arrive full of feeling and short on capacity. And the feeling convinces them they are ready. The feeling is not a reliable guide to readiness.

But carrying is only half of it. The other half is what breaks most people who consider themselves good at love.

You must also be able to be carried.

And that requires something the culture never taught alongside its love stories. It requires that you believe you are worth carrying. Not the performed version of you, not the version that has it together, but the actual you, the one that is tired and unfinished and sometimes too heavy even for yourself. If you do not believe you deserve to be held, you will never let anyone hold you. You will keep giving because giving feels safe and receiving feels like asking someone to love a person you do not fully love yet.

What carrying and being carried looks like from the outside is almost nothing. It looks like two people having dinner without performing for each other. It looks like one person sitting with another through something difficult without trying to fix it. It looks like asking for help and the help arriving without ceremony. It looks like showing up, again, on an ordinary day, for no reason except that you said you would and you mean it. Follow through, over a long time, is what love actually looks like.

Love at this level cannot be faked. The feeling can be manufactured, performed, mistaken for something it is not. The practice cannot. Either you are carrying someone or you are not. Either you can receive or you cannot.

You choose each other. You carry them. You let them carry you. Not because it is always beautiful but because carrying each other makes life easier. And that, more than any feeling, is what love is actually for.

The wheel does not stop because you find the right person. It stops because you become someone who no longer needs the rush to stay. And in that stillness, something becomes visible that was never visible while you were running. It was never the feeling. It was always something higher. A consciousness that two people arrive at together, not through passion, but through the daily practice of carrying each other. That is the highest form of love.

If you know the U2 song “One”, go back and listen to it again. Not as a love song. Not as a wedding anthem. Listen for the line that says “we get to carry each other”. Not we have to. We get to. Hear it now as the privilege it was always describing. Two people choosing each other not because the feeling demands it, but because carrying each other is the highest thing they have found to do with their lives.

She was my manager. The last time I saw her, I was 30 and she was 15 years my senior. That was almost 18 years ago, and I found out nine months after the fact that she was gone.

She was 63. Still young. Still, by any honest measure, in the middle of things.

I have lost colleagues before. Not all of them to the slow drift of careers moving in different directions. Some died suddenly, while we were still working together, still sharing the same hallways and coffee. That kind of loss has its own texture. There is no distance to cushion it, no time to prepare, no gradual fading that might soften the blow. Just presence, and then absence, with nothing in between.

But there is another kind of loss that gets less attention. The colleague who moves out of your daily life through the natural motion of things. A firing, a resignation, a restructuring, a new chapter. You lose touch, not from any failure of affection, but simply because work relationships live inside the container of work, and when the container changes, so does everything in it. You are not family. You don’t belong to each other’s private worlds. No one is obligated to find your number when something happens.

And so you go on living, assuming they are out there somewhere, still themselves, still moving through the world. Until one day you find out they are not.

She was a people manager by title and by genuine vocation. She had studied it and practiced it and refined it with the seriousness of someone who understood that managing people is not an administrative function but a human one. I remember learning about situational leadership and telling her that I was trying to place her within it, to identify which style she used, but she kept exceeding the categories. She spanned almost all of them.

She smiled and said: “Yes. I work hard at that.”

No false modesty. Just a quiet acknowledgment that excellence is intentional. She was the kind of manager her whole team of twenty wanted to celebrate. We took her to Olive Garden for her 45th birthday. We had other outings as a team. I can still see moments of them vividly.

Our one-on-one meetings were not in conference rooms. We did loops around the mall beneath our office building, and we always ended up in Williams Sonoma. During one of those walks she was very honest with me about how she truly felt about working. She replied, “I have been around the block.” I heard it and filed it away. When my mid-forties came around, I felt exactly what she felt.

We were talking about my work one day, not long after I had started the job, when she looked at me and said: “You made sure every bolt was screwed on tight.”

I felt seen. Specifically, carefully seen. I went home and wrote her an email, opening up in the way you only do with someone who has already demonstrated they will handle what you give them. She wrote back and called it an insightful analysis of myself.

I remember the morning her mother was coming to visit. She walked into the office giddy like a child, a joy she could barely contain. She swept me and a colleague up immediately and took us to breakfast. No agenda. Just her happiness, offered freely to whoever was nearby.

At 45, she was a grandmother. A six-year-old grandson. An infant granddaughter, a girl, I believe. Her mother was still in her life, still coming to visit.

I remember telling her that she was truly rich. I meant it exactly as I said it. Not metaphorically. Rich. Full. Surrounded by people who loved her and needed her and called her grandmother and daughter and all the names that accumulate around a person who has lived well.

She had to walk me out the door in 2008. I hold no bitterness about it. The world was coming apart that year, and she did it with dignity. What I remember most is the tear she tried so hard not to let fall.

That was the last time I saw her.

I walked out. Almost 18 years passed. I carried my frozen image of her, the 45-year-old woman who did loops at the mall and lit up when her mother called and knew how to see people, and I assumed she was out there somewhere, still being exactly that person.

She was not frozen, of course. She kept going. She kept growing. The infant granddaughter grew up. The six-year-old grandson became a young man. Her mother aged. She herself moved through nearly two decades of life that I have no access to, years of change and accumulation and becoming, right up until the moment she stopped.

This is the part that philosophy cannot resolve for me. It can only name it.

We freeze the people we lose at the moment we lose them. We carry them in amber, vivid and specific and permanently the age they were when they last stood in front of us. But they do not freeze. They keep living without us, becoming versions of themselves we never get to meet. And when they die, we mourn twice over: the person we knew, and the person they became.

I grieve the woman I knew at 45. But I also grieve the woman she was at 63, the grandmother with more time behind her than ahead, the woman who was looking forward to retirement.

I think about the colleagues I have lost over the years. The ones who died suddenly while we still worked together, their desk still warm. The ones who drifted away and died in lives I was no longer part of. We spend so many hours with these people. We know their habits and their moods and the particular way they handle a hard day. We know them in the specific, unsentimental way that proximity creates. And then one way or another they are gone, and we grieve them in private, without ceremony, because we were never quite family.

But that does not mean they did not matter.

I wish I could have coffee with her. I wish I could ask her about the last seventeen years.

I forgot the word. And then one conversation, at 49 years old, it came back to me. Not because someone taught it to me again. Because the right moment woke it up.

That is how my mind works. It took me nearly half a century to understand that.

I have dyslexia. I know this now with the quiet certainty of someone who has finally been handed the right map after decades of navigating without one. The map does not change the terrain. The difficult ground is still difficult. But suddenly there is a name for why certain paths were always harder than they appeared to be for everyone else.

As a child I could not spell. I could not read easily. Writing was always a labour. The page never came easily. My older sister had a brilliant mind. School came naturally to her in the way that breathing comes naturally. For me there was always preparation. My childhood was structured almost entirely around it. Prepping for dictation. Prepping for spelling tests. Prepping for oral exams, compositions, mock exams. While other children had space to simply be, my days were organized around the next thing I needed to survive.

I remember a spelling test in grade seven. Twenty words a week. The test was never meant to be prepared for. It was designed to reveal what you had naturally absorbed. I got all twenty wrong. The following week I prepared. That was simply what you did. It never occurred to me that the relentless preparation itself was information. That a child who had to work this hard just to reach the starting line that everyone else found themselves at naturally was telling everyone something important. Nobody read it that way. And neither did I.

There was a moment in high school. The teacher called my name and asked me to read my work aloud. I had missed that we were supposed to write something. Without a word my friend slid his poem across to me. He could see I had nothing. I read it one word at a time. Taking an eternity over something small. Nobody acknowledged what was visible to everyone in that room. A girl reading one word at a time. The struggle completely in the open. And still unseen.

I walked out of that class feeling one thing only. Exhausted.

Not humiliated. Not angry. Exhausted. Which is what chronic unacknowledged struggle produces in the end. Not drama. Just a deep bone level tiredness from a lifetime of finding ways through.

The exhaustion followed me. Into a career. Into meeting rooms where I would be speaking and suddenly stop dead. The next word simply gone. Not at the tip of my tongue but vanished entirely, retreated to some far corner I could not reach under pressure. The mind going blank. A full minute of silence. Wanting to end the meeting right there.

I built a professional life around the edges of what I could not do.

There was a moment a couple of years ago. A colleague introduced himself and I could not catch his name. He repeated it twice. I still could not hear it. So I reached for the badge hanging around his neck and read the spelling. And then I could hear it. The written word unlocked the spoken one. My brain needed to see it before it could process the sound.

I thought about that moment afterwards. I wondered if reaching for his badge had seemed strange. Possibly offensive. The social implication arriving late, after the moment had already passed.

That is also how my mind works.

Plato’s anamnesis was about the soul recognizing what it always knew. But there is another dimension to the idea that interests me more now. The things that were always true about us, waiting to be named. The self that existed before she was measured and found wanting.

That girl prepping for dictation at the kitchen table every night, she was not inadequate. She was a person whose particular mind required a different kind of attention than anyone thought to offer her. The intelligence was always there. The curiosity was always there. What was missing was never inside her. Nobody around her knew what they were actually seeing.

I have spent most of my years living with a mind I did not fully understand. Building compensations so habitual they became invisible even to me. Constructing a self image from instruments that were never calibrated for the way I actually work.

And now, in the stillness that follows a life of constant preparation, I am doing something I have never properly done before. Looking back at the terrain. Seeing its shape. Recognizing rather than learning. Remembering back.

Anamnesis.

Exactly when it was supposed to arrive.

Which makes me wonder if the people still sitting alone with the raw questions, without the walls, are not outside of faith.

Before I had a name for what I am, I called myself an atheist.

It was the simplest word available. Not the most accurate one, but it drew the clearest line. And the moment I used it, something interesting happened. The people around me who claimed to be the most godly became the most concerned. A friend looked at me with quiet concern and said I pray for you as if my soul were a lost cause in need of rescue. She meant it kindly, I believe that. She genuinely hoped I would be saved.

What she didn’t know, what I couldn’t say out loud, was what I was thinking in that exact moment.

I wondered which one of us was really doing the work.

Because I had my own thing. It didn’t have a name yet, but it was real. I was spiritual in ways that didn’t fit neatly into any box she would recognize. No church, no doctrine, no label she could point to and feel comfortable with. And yet I had to stand there and argue for my own inner life. Justify my own conscience to someone who had already made up her mind about the state of my soul.

What I also didn’t say out loud was that I knew things about her. That she carried a quiet deception, small enough to seem harmless, consistent enough to be a choice. A benefit she held onto long after she was entitled to it. Maintained without guilt. Without confession.

But she prayed for me.

Then there was the pastor.

He was not just a pastor. He was my friend. My colleague. Someone I knew well.

He saw an opportunity and encouraged me to pursue it. He was convincing in the way that people who speak about faith with authority often are. I took him seriously the way you take seriously someone whose entire vocation is supposed to be built on integrity. I did the work. I showed up. I started building something real.

And then slowly, in the way these things always reveal themselves, what he actually wanted came into focus. A title. A salary, before there was any revenue, and positions for his family. The architecture of personal gain dressed up as collaboration.

He had not seen an opportunity. He had seen me.

And nobody was praying for his soul.

And then there is a pattern I have noticed, not in everyone, not even in most, but enough to make me wonder. People who quote love thy neighbor with genuine conviction on Sunday and struggle to extend that same love to neighbors who look or love differently. People who feel deeply called to protect the unborn but feel less urgency about the gun that ends a five year old’s life in a classroom. I don’t say this to attack anyone’s faith. I say it because these contradictions are real and they trouble me.

And if God exists, what does he make of all this? Of the ones who invoke his name to exclude, to judge, to scheme, to accumulate? Of the prayers offered with one hand while the other quietly takes what it shouldn’t? I think about that sometimes. Not with anger. Just with genuine curiosity.

Because if God is what most traditions say he is, I suspect he is less impressed by the performance than we are.

There is something else that has always stayed with me. In many traditions, sin has a reset button. You confess, you are forgiven, the slate is wiped clean. And then life continues.

I have never had that avenue.

What I have instead is permanence. Whatever I do, whatever harm I cause, whatever truth I bend, I carry it. There is no booth, no prayer, no ritual that lifts it from me. It simply becomes part of who I am and what I have to live with.

And so I think harder before I act. I think harder before I speak. Not because someone is watching. Not because I fear punishment. But because I know that I will be the one carrying it home. That it will sit with me at 3am when everything is quiet and there is nowhere to hide from yourself.

I wonder sometimes if that is not its own kind of spiritual discipline. Different from confession. But no less serious.

I have no pew to sit in. No doctrine to consult. No congregation to hold me accountable or applaud me for showing up.

That is where I wrestle with what I owe the world. Where I sit with the questions that have no clean answers. Where I try, imperfectly and without witness, to live in a way that needs no prayer to validate it. Maybe that is what philosophy always was. Before the churches. Before the doctrines. Just a person alone with the hardest questions, refusing to look away.

Do I know how to love?

For a long time I didn’t have language for how I love. And there’s a reason for that.

The conventional model of love assumes attraction arrives as one bundled thing: romantic, sexual, emotional, all moving together. That never made logical sense to me. The Split Attraction Model isn’t something I discovered through experience, it’s simply the framework that stopped being illogical. It described what was already true.

Then I encountered the concept of autistic love.

Something in it resonated deeply, the way it describes love lived in actions rather than words, in precision rather than performance, in showing up rather than saying the right thing. Labels aside, the framework described something real. And it gave me language I had never had.

Autistic love doesn’t perform. It doesn’t follow the expected script. It lives in acts of service: precise, consistent, unglamorous care. I am loyal to a fault. I absorb what you haven’t said yet. I will carry your discomfort so you don’t have to.

That’s how I love. In loyalty. In absorption. In carrying what others leave unspoken.

This too fits a pattern I have come to recognize in myself. I carry a highly intense, rigid sense of justice: a strong internal compass for right and wrong that doesn’t bend to social convenience. I simply didn’t have a name for the court it was pointing toward.

I live without a divine judge as a reference point. No ledger kept by another, no external verdict waiting at the end. Spiritual existentialism tells us that meaning isn’t given; it’s built, choice by choice, action by action. You are what you do. Simone de Beauvoir argued that authentic freedom expresses itself through others. Jean-Paul Sartre said we are “condemned to be free.” In a life where judgment belongs only to yourself, meaning is proven in action. And yet, there are forces I have always felt but cannot name. They do not judge. They do not absolve. They simply accompany. Acts of service are both an answer to something I cannot fully explain, and an expression of love. The court is still mine. But I have not always walked toward it alone.

So here is what I have always known:

At the end of a life lived without a divine judge, we each face the philosophical court. Our own consciousness, asking simply: what did you actually do?

Not what you intended. Not what you felt. Not what you called it. What you did.

This language, these frameworks, this truth that was always there. That is how I live with intention.

I show up. In the way I am capable of showing up. Consistently, precisely, genuinely.

Actions do not lie. The court has always known this.