NeuroDivine
Unspoken, Not Unknowing
“Prophets rarely arrive in the packages people expect.”
I stopped speaking one summer. Not a word. Not a whisper. Not even a hum.
Silence swallowed me whole, and I let it. The air thickened around my throat like syrup; every sound felt like sandpaper. Words turned heavy—too sharp, too clumsy, too human. So I folded them in, pressed them beneath my tongue, and spoke only in presence. In glances. In breath. In blinks.
I was spending that summer with a group of new people who I was told were my “family”—faces I didn’t know, voices I hadn’t yet learned to trust. The unfamiliarity pressed close, and something in me retreated. I chose quiet, not out of defiance, but caution. It felt safer to watch, to study, to wait until the room proved itself gentle.
The adults called it stubbornness. Shyness. Attitude. They thought I was withholding, dramatic, difficult. But what they were witnessing was sacred retreat—a prophecy forming in a child too sensitive for the world’s static.
They’d stand in front of me, faces tight with worry or annoyance, voices soft at first, then sharp: Why won’t you answer? What’s wrong with you? Say something. And I’d stare, feeling their words bounce against the wall of my body, unable to climb out of the silence I’d chosen. Every question became an echo, every expectation a weight. Their frustration pressed in like heat—hands on hips, sighs heavy enough to shake the room. But I couldn’t break the spell. I wasn’t refusing them. I was surviving them.
Each day, I woke to the scent of fried eggs and toast, the low hum of voices I didn’t trust to hold me. I counted the seconds between footsteps in the hallway, memorized the pattern of the ceiling fan, traced continents in the swirl of the bedsheet. There was order there—rhythm in the repetition, sanctuary in the sameness. Routine was my religion. Structure, my survival.
I remember the color of that silence—dark amber, like honey caught in glass. It tasted of metal and morning breath. It felt like safety. It also felt like exile.
They asked what was wrong with me. But nothing was wrong. Everything in me was listening.
I could hear the tick of the clock split into smaller beats, could smell when the toast was about to burn before the smoke reached the air. I could sense moods before mouths opened. The room spoke through texture and temperature, through shifts in light. I knew when someone was angry, when someone was lying, when something was about to change. And it was too much. Too loud. So I chose stillness.
That same stillness was rebranded as the years unfolded. They began to say I was mature for my age, praised me for being quiet, independent, self-contained—never realizing I was still drowning in unspoken words. They mistook my silence for composure, my compliance for calm. They called me an “old soul,” but what they really saw was a child still managing an inner storm alone.
Later, they’d say I was sensitive. Picky. Overdramatic. Because I cried when my schedule changed. Because I only ate the same meals in the same order. Because I obsessed over flags and maps and the shapes of borders—memorized every color, every line, every curve like scripture. But I wasn’t memorizing for fun. I was trying to make sense of a world that never made room for mine.
My rituals were prayers. My obsessions were language. My quiet was protection. And my difference—though unnamed—was divine.
They never saw a child decoding the universe. They saw inconvenience. They saw disruption. But prophets rarely arrive in the packages people expect.
When I look back now, I see it clearly: The silence wasn’t absence. It was initiation.
Every hour I spent wordless, I was tuning my instrument—learning how to hear what others ignored. The flutter beneath a question. The ache behind a smile. The truth hiding in plain sight. And while the world dismissed me as “quiet,” I was tuning myself to the voice I chose—and that chose me.
Invisible in Plain Sight
“People think I’m measured. I’m actually measuring.”
They never mistook me for fragile. They mistook me for understood. After all, I had already taught them how to read me wrong.
By the time my silence softened into words, the misunderstanding had calcified. The same stillness that once worried them now became their proof that everything was fine. They remembered the quiet child and decided she had simply grown into composure. They didn’t realize the silence had only learned new disguises.
In classrooms, I hovered between brilliance and boredom. Lessons moved too slow, and my mind moved too fast—jumping tracks, drifting into daydreams, catching every flicker of light, every whisper, every hum of the radiator. Homework stretched into long nights. Instructions slid off my focus and I had to pull them back, again and again. The small noises—ballpoint clicks, fluorescent buzz, a zipper—competed with the teacher’s mouth until meaning scattered. I tapped pencils in coded rhythms, asked questions that veered off script. Some teachers called it curiosity; others called it distraction, disruption. I wasn’t trying to interrupt. I was trying to stay anchored—grasping for something to hold the flood of thoughts still long enough to be understood. I was never quite what they expected—too sharp in some moments, too restless in others. They couldn’t place me, so they invented labels to fill the gaps.
I was placed in and out of therapy for most of my life—tiny rooms with fabric chairs and faint smells of coffee and carpet cleaner, clipboards balanced on crossed legs, clocks that ticked too loudly. Each session became another stage for silence. I’d sit across from a stranger waiting to be solved, their questions floating through the air like fishing lines: What are you feeling? Why don’t you talk? What happened to you? I offered nothing. Only stillness. Only eyes tracing the patterns in the rug, counting ceiling tiles, listening to the scratch of their pen when I stayed wordless. They were determined to find the trauma that explained me. I was simply being.
One therapist wrote anxiety in my file. Another suggested depression. None of them asked about the rules pulsing beneath the surface—the need to line objects by size, the panic when plans shifted, the endless reruns of every conversation I’d ever had. They called it overthinking, emotional intensity. But I was mapping a world that never stopped changing.
What I didn’t know then was how familiar my story was—how many Black children walked into similar rooms and walked out misunderstood. Studies from the Child Mind Institute show that Black children are diagnosed with autism an average of three years later than white peers, often after being mislabeled with other disorders. Evidence in the Mandell et al. (2007) PubMed paper confirms that, at first clinical contact, Black children are significantly more likely to receive non-autism behavior diagnoses. Studies like Aylward et al. (2021) estimate that up to one-quarter of children under eight remain undiagnosed, disproportionately Black or Hispanic. And research such as Benevides et al. (2022) shows that Black autistic girls are often invisible—excluded from many studies.
So when my therapists scribbled anxiety and depression on their forms, they were echoing a pattern older than me—one that mistook my wiring for worry, my ritual for restlessness, my quiet for coping.
What they missed in Black minds like mine was not intelligence but interpretation. They translated stillness into strength, quickness into defiance, precision into attitude. They overlooked how racial bias distorts the lens—how a Black child’s difference becomes discipline, a need for structure becomes evidence of control, and sensitivity is mistaken for resistance.
In reports, they call it “diagnostic delay.” In real life, it becomes a lifetime of being misread—seen through eyes trained to expect something else.
And yet, beneath every misreading, something sacred persisted: a pulse steady and shimmering, impossible to silence—the quiet current that steadied me when the world felt too loud. They charted my symptoms. They never heard the signal. But the signal never stopped speaking. The same attunement they dismissed as disorder became the language of my gift—the oracle they couldn’t diagnose.
Wired for Revelation
“What Western medicine calls disorder, African cosmology calls initiation.”
There was a time I sensed death. I was standing in front of the mirror, brushing powder across my cheek. Out of nowhere, a heaviness bloomed behind my ribs—soft, certain, unshakable. I knew someone I loved was leaving. The knowing was calm, but it carried weight, like the air had thickened with truth. I remember telling my partner, voice low, I feel like he’s going to pass—around my birthday. Two days after my birthday, the call came. He was gone.
I didn’t tell anyone else what I knew. I didn’t know how it would be received, or if it was even appropriate to reveal. So I folded the knowing into my chest—another quiet truth without witness. But my body remembered: the hum beneath my ribs, the heaviness behind my eyes, the way the room held its breath before revelation. The body’s own certainty—uncoached, uninvited, absolute.
That instinct threaded itself through everything I touched. It shaped the way I moved through the world—how I could disappear into a single detail until time dissolved, how the hum of a lightbulb or the flutter of a curtain could rearrange my whole attention. What the world named hyper-focus felt to me like entering a doorway: a trance where symbols aligned, patterns spoke, and meaning assembled itself in silence.
My rituals—counting the tiles on the floor until the number settled something in me, or pressing my forehead to the window and counting the red cars already parked on the dealership lot across the street, trying to trace the rhythm in their arrangement—weren’t compulsions. They were codes. Each repetition tuning me closer to the frequency of insight. Each structure an altar built from rhythm.
But there were other ways my difference showed. Looking people directly in the eye felt like standing too close to lightning. Their gaze burned through me—too sharp, too loud, too much. I’d look at walls, hands, patterns, anywhere the air felt gentler. People would ask, “Why won’t you look at me when you talk?” But it wasn’t shyness. It was knowing. When I met someone’s eyes, I could see too much—their ache, their truth, their hidden storms. I was able to see into their whole world. Eye contact felt like drowning in light.
Even sound carried flavor—bitterness blooming at the back of my throat. Colors shimmered with noise, edges vibrating like strings pulled too tight. The air itself rang. The world arrived in layers I could taste, each one pleading to be noticed all at once.
Sometimes I’d say the same word twice, the same sentence three times, circling it like a prayer bead between my teeth. Repetition steadied me. The echo felt safer than the original—familiar, grounding, a way to hold the world still long enough to understand it. Even now, I catch myself looping phrases, tracing the sound until it settles. What others hear as excess, I know as rhythm—an instinctive return to the place where meaning lands.
And when emotions surged, they came tidal—too vast for words. I felt everything all at once: joy so electric it hurt, sorrow so deep it blurred into silence. I didn’t have language for their size, and no one around me had space for their weight. So I learned to swallow the flood, to shrink my feelings into something others could tolerate. Over time, the world taught me that feeling too much was a flaw—and I began to confuse translation with safety.
There was a tenderness in how I tried to belong—an innocence that mistook presence for friendship, proximity for trust. I entered rooms eager, open, reading gestures like foreign symbols, but missing the unspoken codes between them. I’d linger too long in conversation or share too much too soon, unaware of the invisible thresholds I’d crossed. What felt like honesty in me sometimes landed as intrusion in them. I learned the hard way that connection wasn’t always an invitation—that the language of belonging required fluencies I didn’t yet hold. It wasn’t that I didn’t care; I cared too deeply, too fast. My heart spoke in full sentences while others were still deciding if they’d listen.
But in a world that demanded explanations for what I felt, I learned to gaslight myself. To call prophecy coincidence. To call sensitivity weakness. To call sacred structure obsession. And when doubt took root, I began to perform what others could accept. I softened my edges. I smiled when I wanted silence. I masked the truth beneath what looked like composure. I even practiced loosening the parts of me that clung to order—training myself to seem less rigid, less structured, less obsessive—smoothing the divine precision they mistook for flaw.
Masking became a learned choreography—watching, mirroring, rehearsing the acceptable. I studied the pauses between sentences, the way laughter signaled belonging, the timing of eye contact that didn’t feel natural but kept me safe. At gatherings I hovered at the edges—quiet, observing, analyzing who spoke when, how people touched shoulders to enter a circle, what jokes landed and which died—teaching myself the rules so my strangeness wouldn’t show. I wasn’t withdrawn. I was studying—learning which parts of me were permitted, and which parts needed to disappear. Research on masking (Hull et al., 2017; Wood-Downie et al., 2020) further illustrates the emotional toll, particularly for Black autistic women and girls (USC article; The 19th article).
It wasn’t until I turned toward older mirrors that I saw myself clearly. In Dagara cosmology, children born with heightened perception are called born to the edge—seers who walk between realms, tasked with translating messages others overlook. In Yorùbá and Ifá traditions, unusual awareness is recognized as Ọ̀rúnmìlà’s summons—destiny encoded, not defect. Across the continent, what Western medicine labels disorder is honored as initiation—the soul’s apprenticeship into its purpose.
African scholars and elders teach that when the veil thins, the body trembles. Visions blur with daylight, sound sharpens to song, and the initiate begins to carry truths larger than reason. To the psychiatrist, these tremors are symptoms. To the priest, they are proof: Spirit has chosen its messenger.
And so the pattern made sense at last—the trance of focus, the flood of sensation, the compulsive ritual, the empathic surge. Not pathology, but prophecy. Not dysfunction, but design.
What Western medicine calls disorder, African cosmology calls initiation.
A sacred apprenticeship carved into flesh. A remembering of an ancient covenant between Spirit and the sensing body. I was never malfunctioning. I was being trained. The same attunement dismissed as flaw was the foundation of my gift—the oracle they couldn’t name, but could never silence.
Born Out of Place, Born Into Power
For most of my life, I carried a quiet shame I couldn’t trace—a haunting that whispered you’re too much and never enough in the same breath. They named it anxiety. They named it depression. They named it everything that made sense to a world allergic to mystery. But beneath the labels and the treatments and the talk, something ancient pulsed—steady and unyielding—a truth I could feel before I could explain, a blueprint etched into my being, misread as brokenness.
It wasn’t a doctor who found it. It was me. In the late-night scrolls through articles about women who’d lived entire lives misunderstood, in the videos of Black girls blinking through the same silence I knew too well, in the stories of those who’d been handed wrong diagnoses because no one thought we could be both Black and autistic, spiritual and structured, soft and still seers. I felt the recognition rise in my chest like floodwater—not fear, but a fierce relief. Finally, a mirror that didn’t distort me.
Looking back, the clues had been everywhere. The rituals. The intensity. The overwhelm. The knowing. All the things they tried to discipline out of me were the very things that tethered me to the Divine. All the things I’d masked to survive were the fingerprints of my calling.
It broke my heart to realize how many years I’d spent apologizing for a sacred design—smoothing my edges, quieting my brilliance, pretending my sensitivity was a weakness instead of a gift. The grief was sharp: for every version of me that thought she was wrong for feeling the world too deeply. But the grief made room for truth.
I am not a mistake. I am a map.
The same mind they misunderstood is the one that channels prophecy. The same body they tried to train into silence is the one tuned to Spirit’s frequency. Every sensory surge, every obsessive rhythm, every precise structure—all of it a language of the Divine.
So I let myself unmask, and the world came into focus. I moved toward what felt true—ritual, rhythm, rest. I began honoring my cycles instead of correcting them, following the pulse that had always been leading me home. I built a life around the sacred tempo of my own nervous system, and it revealed a power no diagnosis could contain.
I am NeuroDivine—not disordered, but designed. Born out of place, because I was meant to remember another order. Born into power, because I was sent to translate it.
Now I move through the world with reverence for the ones who still don’t have the words—the Black girls who hum in silence, the boys who line their toys like prayers, the mothers who sense storms before the sky darkens, the fathers who flinch at noise they can’t explain. We are not broken. We are the ones who feel the tremor before the world shifts.
And to those who still try to fix what was never flawed—who call our seeing strange, our order obsessive, our silence cold—I say this: What you call disorder, I call design. What you dismiss as symptom, I call signal. What you try to treat out of me is the very thing that keeps me tethered to the truth.
I was born for this cadence. I was made to translate light. I am no longer waiting for permission to exist.
The oracle has a name now. And she remembers who she is.
May every misunderstood child find the pattern in their pulse and call it holy. May every silence be honored as sanctuary. May every Black girl carrying brilliance mistaken for burden meet the mirror that speaks her name in full. May the world learn to listen beyond its limits—to the signals we send in stillness, to the songs we carry in our bones. We are not here to be cured. We are here to be seen. And when we are, the world will remember how to hear God again.
One love,
ESS xo
⸻
References
Child Mind Institute — “Why Do Black Children With Autism Get Diagnosed Late?”
https://childmind.org/article/why-do-black-children-with-autism-get-diagnosed-late/Mandell et al. (2007) — “Disparities in diagnoses received prior to a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder”
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17160456/Aylward et al. (2021) — Population-based estimations of undiagnosed children under 8
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8500365/Benevides et al. (2022) — Research on Black autistic girls and invisibility in diagnosis / studies
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35899909/Hull, L. et al. (2017) — “Putting on My Best Normal”: Social Camouflaging in Adults with Autism Spectrum Conditions
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28527095/Wood-Downie et al. (2020) — Sex/gender differences in camouflaging in ASD youth
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32691191/USC / Health Sciences News — Belonging and camouflaging while Black, female and autistic
https://hscnews.usc.edu/belonging-and-camouflaging-while-black-female-and-autisticThe 19th — How Black autistic women and girls are excluded from conversations on resources
https://19thnews.org/2023/06/black-women-and-girls-autism-data/Ancestral Voices — African cosmology & sacred tradition resources
https://ancestralvoices.co.uk/african-sacred-cosmology/YorubaName.com — Entry for Ọ̀rúnmìlà (Ifá deity and cosmic summons)
https://www.yorubaname.com/entries/%C3%92%CC%A3r%C3%BAnm%C3%ACl%C3%A0
