Not My Normal...

By Ryan / AWRYTE

When the world started to open back up again, people kept using that word—normal—like it was a finish line. Like everything would just snap back into place once we returned to the office, the classroom, the break room, the highway, the pickup line.

But for me, “normal” wasn’t something to race toward.

It wasn’t a relief.

It was a threat.

I had finally built a world I could breathe in.

Now, I was supposed to just- hand it back?

As a single neurodivergent mother of three, I knew exactly how much energy it had taken to get through the first shutdown.

But in some twisted way, that time also gave me what the rest of the world had always denied me: a sensory environment I could actually control.

No glaring lights.

No sudden hallway conversations.

No navigating the impossible logic of social scripts at school functions.

Just my home, my kids, and a routine that worked.

And now that the world was eager to get back to the way things used to be, I was expected to smile and play along like that was good news?

The return to in-person work hit me the hardest.

I had gotten used to adjusting the volume of the world.

I could wear my soft clothes.

I could work with my back to the window.

I didn’t have to sit under fluorescent lights or make small talk with patrons while pretending I wasn’t mentally sprinting toward a meltdown.

I didn’t realize how many accommodations I had built into my days until I was told to strip them all away and get back in line.

And then there were the kids... We had carved out a rhythm that finally made sense.

Our mornings weren’t frenzied.

Our evenings weren’t spent recovering from school-triggered shutdowns.

We had rituals that brought calm—slow breakfasts, family walks, mid-day dance breaks.

It wasn’t perfect, but it felt like us.

And now, that “us” was getting bulldozed by alarms, bus schedules, permission slips, and all the well-meaning chaos of “getting back out there.”

What no one seemed to get was that the lockdown hadn’t made me more fragile.

It had made me more aware.

I could finally hear what my nervous system had been screaming for years.

And I knew how to listen to my kids better too.

I could see the difference when they weren’t masking all day long.

I could tell when they were truly at ease—not just compliant.

The world wanted them to fit back into boxes I had watched them outgrow.

I tried.

Of course I tried. I smiled in the Zooms. I packed the lunches. I said the right things at drop-off. But I also came home and cried on the floor more than once. Not because I couldn’t do it—but because I could, and I knew how much it was costing me.

Still, we adjusted.

Slowly.

Imperfectly.

We built a new rhythm, brick by brick.

I started communicating what I needed instead of apologizing for it.

My kids learned how to name their overwhelm before it exploded.

We made quiet time a non-negotiable.

I asked for accommodations at work.

Sometimes I got them.

Sometimes I didn’t.

But I stopped treating them like favors.

That’s the thing about “normal.”

It only works for the people who built it.

For the rest of us, it’s a daily negotiation between survival and silence.

I’ve stopped chasing "normal."

I’m more interested in possible now.

What’s possible when we stop pretending the world was ever designed for all of us?

What’s possible when we say, out loud, “That doesn’t work for me”?

Lockdown taught me to slow down, yes.

But it also taught me to see.

To see which parts of my life were built for performance, and which parts actually fed my spirit.

It gave me the clarity I had been masking over for decades.

I’ve carried that into my parenting too.

I’ve stopped trying to prepare my kids to be palatable.

I’m preparing them to be clear. I’m teaching them to know their needs—and to trust that their needs matter even when they don’t look like anyone else’s.

And when people talk about “resilience,” I know they don’t mean what I mean.

They mean pushing through, getting by, keeping up.

I mean knowing when to stop.

I mean resting before collapse.

I mean asking, “Is this safe for me?” before asking, “Will this make them like me?”

Online communities helped. Other parents. Other neurodivergent adults. People who didn’t need me to explain every detail before believing me. People who said, “Yes. Same.” Those connections kept me upright.

They reminded me I wasn’t failing—I was just finally feeling.

The hardest part of all of this? It’s realizing how quickly the world forgot.

Forgot what we learned.

Forgot what we promised.

Forgot how many of us thrived in the quiet, the slower pace, the restructured days.

But I didn’t forget.

And I’m not going back to pretending this version of normal ever worked for me.

I’m still figuring out what our version looks like.

But I know this: it includes softness.

It includes clarity.

It includes unapologetic boundaries and the understanding that neurodivergent lives aren’t less—they’re just not built for speed.

We don’t need to return to normal.

We need to return to ourselves.

We are AWRYTE.