04/08/2026
It’s Autism awareness month!
Today, I find myself wondering how I would explain Autism to someone who has never encountered it—someone who exists on a completely different plane from my own.
In our world, we speak in terms of regressions, therapies, and social skills. We describe differences in ways that feel clinical, structured—safe. We say things like, “They move to a different rhythm than most.”
But what is rhythm, really?
When you hear that word, what comes to mind?
A drumbeat echoing through a room?
The sway of a body in dance?
The steady ticking of a clock?
Rhythm exists everywhere.
In the quiet rise and fall of our breath.
In the pulse beneath our skin.
In poetry, in patterns, in the turning of the earth itself.
It is continuity. repetition (there’s some irony here.) and familiarity.
To explain Autism to someone who has never experienced it… I think it would feel like handing them the world for the very first time. Letting them see patterns they’ve never noticed, feel sequences they’ve never followed, hear music they didn’t know was playing all along.
Because that’s what Autism feels like to me.
So often, we focus on behaviors—because they are what others can see. They are what people pause on, question, or try to correct. But I wonder… have you ever listened beyond that? Have you noticed the rhythm underneath? Have you felt the uniqueness of the beat?
Sometimes it makes people uncomfortable—not because it’s wrong, but because they don’t yet know how to move with it and differences are unfamiliar. Unfamiliar can feel intimidating.
But when you slow down… when you truly listen… when you allow yourself to learn the rhythm instead of resisting it—something remarkable happens.
A new kind of dance emerges. One that could never exist if everything moved the same way.
So remember, friends—we are all just frogs in a very big pond. And personally, I think that when we are all together, the croaking pattern sounds the most beautiful.
We need to include each other, embrace our differences and watch the beautiful new rhythm take form.
