From Mind to Body, and Home to Me Again
by Charlee Yara Vines
Have you ever felt like… I’m not like them… and I’m not like that description either, not like the neat diagnosis on paper, and yet you know you experience the world as if you’re moving through mud while others walk on dry ground?
For a long time, I tried to live as if autism was something happening in my thoughts: a set of “quirks,” a list of traits, a file held in someone else’s hands, and I had to pull threads from it to prove to the world that I was treading through water day by day. Then my mind would snap back: you imposter… stitching words together to make up you.
But autism doesn’t live in the paper I’ve had to prove. It lives in the body, in my body. In the unseen places that run my day.
It lives in the way fluorescent lights can feel like harshness behind the eyes. In the way a crowded room tightens around my being like weather. In the way my voice can switch off, and it wasn’t from refusal, it was a system overload. It was my nervous system shutting down to protect me. It lives in the way I can be brilliantly tuned to detail, pattern, emotion, energy… and then suddenly reach my limit. My limit. A limit that can’t always be seen, felt, or even explained in the words I try so hard to find.
When the world labels autism as levels, or “mild,” or “high functioning,” it often means, “this is what your autism is like for us to witness”.
Not what it is like for me to inhabit.
Masking is the great mind-project: analyse, edit, rehearse, perform. It asks the autistic person to live from the neck up, translating instinct into acceptability. It can look like “coping” or competence. Just today, a psychologist told me I must be high functioning. He based his assumptions on how I gathered myself and presented myself so that he could experience me.
And he has no idea: it can cost the body everything.
Moving from mind to body has meant one radical shift believing my sensations are information, not inconveniences. My body is not overreacting. It’s communicating.
Sometimes it’s loud: panic, shutdown, pain that feels like the mask has been driven deep into the bones; nausea where emotion has been shoved into the gut. Sometimes it’s quiet: a tight throat, hot ribs, a subtle urge to flee. Either way, it’s a message and learning to listen is how I come home.
Here are a few body-first questions that have changed my life:
Is this tight, fuzzy feeling my body saying: nourish me? What food could actually steady me today?
Do I feel unsafe or compressed in this space, situation, or with this person? If yes, can I use my voice, or my feet, to leave?
What helps me discharge stress safely? (Walking, shaking, humming, EFT tapping, crying, dancing, breathwork, lying on the floor and rocking.)
What is “too much” today, even if it wouldn’t be too much tomorrow?
For many of us, regulation isn’t found in more thinking. It’s found in rhythm. In basic sensory care. In movement that reconnects body and mind. In choosing environments that don’t demand we disappear in order to belong.
Autism is not a problem of character. It isn’t a tidy presentation. It’s a nervous system reality, and it’s individually lived. The more we meet it through the body, the more we stop surviving, and start coming home to ourselves again: shame-free, honest, and real.
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