The Shape of Collapse

On fracture, instability, autistic discovery, and building a home

The divorce was a fracture.

A part of me saw it coming. I’d been dreading it for years before it finally happened.
A part of me knew it would destroy me, but I didn’t want to acknowledge that.
I didn’t know how.

So yeah, I saw it coming. Intellectually, subconsciously.
Emotionally, structurally, it tore through me like nothing ever had.

Ironically, she was probably autistic too. We were young, and we were trying—but in opposite ways. She was more intellectually mature. I was more emotionally aware (in a trauma-induced sort of way that still needed a lot of work), but masking without knowing it, compensating for sensory and cognitive overloads I couldn’t name.

We both had fractures we didn’t understand.
And for a while, that pulled us together. Until it didn’t.

Why I Don't Trust the Road

When she asked for the divorce, it wasn’t exactly a surprise. But it was a collapse.

It felt like my entire world had been ripped out from under me.
Like everything I’d built—not just our life, but my sense of who I was—had suddenly been upended, with nothing beneath to catch me. So for a while, I fell.

The recovery wasn’t linear. Or heroic.
It was just… survival. Slow, recursive, directionless.

I wandered. Collected the broken pieces, tried to figure out which ones still belonged to me. To find something stable to stand on, to rest on, to call home.

But I didn’t know what home was.
I sure as hell didn’t know how to build one.

I fucked up so much along the way.
Failed relationships. Failed attempts. Failed versions of myself.

I was trying so hard to stabilize.
But I wasn’t grounded. I wasn’t coherent. I was just… surviving.

Then came 2020.
I lost two close friends.
The pandemic hit.
My grandfather died, and we couldn’t even properly grieve him.
I started having anxiety attacks.
I found medication. It helped.

Then I caught COVID—one of the first strains. It nearly killed me.
I was bedridden for nearly a month. It took almost a year to fully recover.

I was a walking husk for—well—a while. Hidden behind two masks, only one of which I knew how to take off. Performing functionality while quietly disintegrating beneath the surface.

When Awareness Becomes a Weapon

And then I discovered I was autistic.

That realization was another rupture. But this one was different.

Yes, it broke everything open—again.
But for the first time, there was something solid underneath.
Something that made sense—not as a label, but as a frame. A way of being that explained all the things I had never been able to point to, much less name.

I wasn’t rebuilding myself in the dark anymore. I had a foundation. And for the first time in my life, that foundation felt like home.

And then—again—everything changed.

My best friends and roommates moved halfway across the country.
My grandmother died.
My dad was in and out of the hospital. I thought I might lose him too.
And I was buying a house. Moving.
Wondering how in the world I was going to hold any of this together.

But I did.
My world was in total chaos—I wasn’t.

This time, I was grounded.

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Architecture

I don’t build
top down or
bottom up. I
start with a
window and
balance it on my
knee and build
walls around it
and drag that
entire mess around
until I find stable
ground upon which
to rest.

The roof is
an afterthought
and sometimes
it leaks.

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Restorative Power in the Stillness

That’s how it’s always been for me.
Not a clean arc or a strategic rebuild.

A slow, dragging, recursive process of trying to find structure—not because I wanted to build something impressive, but because I needed something real to stand on. Something I could trust.

This writing? It’s part of that.
It’s how I make sense of what’s happened.
It’s how I stabilize what was once unstable.

And more than anything, it’s how I try to offer something back—something for people like me, who’ve been misread, displaced, or unmoored for too long.

Not a map. Not a guide. Just…
something solid.

A shape.
A frame.

A home to build from. ∞

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