Kate Didd

I got to thinking again and yes, I know that’s always where the trouble begins.

Somewhere on that sprawling spectrum of autism, ADHD, or whatever label the world wants to use to pin me down, I exist. Awkwardly. Electrically. Unapologetically. I’ve stopped trying to name the exact square on the chart I fit into.

All I know is this:

my brain does not live on the same map as everyone else’s.

It’s not “wrong,”

but it’s also not what they consider “right.”

It’s a wild machine that improvises reality,

rearranges logic,

and speaks in visions instead of linear thought. And when I tried to find a personal pattern in that when I zoomed in, hoping to make sense of myself

I accidentally found a lineage.

A generational echo.

A bloodline stitched together from the misunderstood.

I come from French witches who whispered to the night.

From pirates who swallowed saltwater and rebellion,

from wayward farmers who worked fields like sacred temples,

from gypsies who listened to the language of the wind and followed it.

We were wanderers.

Shapeshifters.

Outsiders.

We were autistic and ADHD before the dictionaries had anything to say about it.

We were neurodivergent before the world ever thought to ask why some minds spin differently.

We were dismissed as wrong

not because we lacked depth,

but because we didn’t speak our brilliance in the tongue the world demanded.

We carried strange truths that slipped out crooked.

Thoughts that tumbled out like liver-blabber

half poetry, half confusion,

never landing exactly where we meant them to.

And because of that

because of a misunderstood sentence,

a sideways thought,

a misplaced prophecy

we were despised.

They didn’t have diagnoses then.

They had fire.

Possession, they called it.

Insanity.

Danger.

They tied our wrists and burned us alive trying to cauterize the brilliance that scared them.

They dragged us across oceans,

buried us beneath their fear,

and wrote us out of the story.

But what they couldn’t destroy was the mutation.

The wild wiring.

The spark.

When I speak now

when I try to explain myself and the words slip sideways,

when my thoughts fly faster than my mouth can catch,

I can feel those ancestors humming in my bones.

They’re the reason I speak in metaphors.

The reason I see a hundred meanings in a single moment.

The reason grief leaks out as poetry

and joy becomes prophecy.

They lived inside chaos,

and they taught me how to survive it.

Every time someone looks at me like I’m speaking in riddles,

every time I watch a conversation dissolve because I couldn’t translate my thoughts into the language their ears need

I feel it.

The old ache.

The old punishment.

The fear that being misunderstood still means being rejected,

exiled,

or burned.

Because for us

it once did.

This bloodline remembers trauma like scripture.

Our DNA speaks in warning:

“Be careful what you say.

Say it gently.

Say it safely.

Or don’t say it at all.”

And yet

the words come anyway.

They pour out half-wild,

glinting with truth and disarray.

I’ve made peace with the fact that sometimes my thoughts arrive dressed for a different century.

Sometimes they smell like a pirate ship,

sometimes like sage and fire,

sometimes like dirt from an untouched field.

I used to think it made me broken.

Now I see it makes me ancient.

Because under the stuttered language,

beneath the chaos and misfires,

there is clarity.

We were never meant to be correct.

We were meant to be other.

To see differently.

To disrupt the mute agreement of the world.

To speak truths so feral most people couldn’t stand to hear them.

And yes

maybe that’s why they hunted us.

But here’s the insight I didn’t expect to find:

What they called madness

was intuition.

What they saw as chaos

was depth.

What they feared

was simply a brain that refused to lie.

Neurodivergence was our inheritance

not a curse,

but a compass.

A second sight disguised as disorder.

So if my words come out crooked,

if my thoughts crackle and spill,

if I miscommunicate a truth that only makes sense three days later

that’s just my ancestry speaking.

I am the descendant of misunderstood brilliance.

Of strange minds and strange hearts.

Of people who died for thinking differently.

I honor them every time I refuse to shrink.

Every time I let my brain speak in its original dialect.

Every time I let the miscommunication be part of the message.

Because maybe the point was never to fit.

Maybe the point was simply to remember:

We were never broken.

We were just speaking a language

the world hadn’t learned yet.