Every Summer I Become Less Solid

On coherence, coalescing, and the conditions my mind actually needs.

Photo by Ethan Robertson on Unsplash

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Every summer, I become less solid.

I found out I was autistic about a year ago, at fifty-one, and I’m still spending a fair amount of my energy untangling the lies I believed before I had that context. The diagnosis provided clues I couldn’t have found on my own, and it’s also led me to increasingly accurate language for things I’d been misreading about myself, or even against myself, for decades.

Before I get into what happens every summer, I need to say something about how this mind works at baseline. I process everything from whole to part. Meaning arrives before language, the whole before the pieces, the system before the steps. This isn’t a “learning style,” although it does inform how I learn. It’s the cognitive architecture on which everything else runs. For me, coherence is what happens when that architecture has the conditions it needs to operate without fragmenting. Everything I’m about to describe is downstream of that.

This piece is about one of the most persistent and confusing misreadings. It's about what happens every summer when my kids are home. It's about why it's always been hard in a way I couldn't explain, and why I used to turn that confusion into evidence against myself. I love my kids completely. Spending time with them is one of my favorite things to do. So why is this always so hard? Objectively, I know it's a universal parenting experience, but I've never known any other parents who have the severe consequences I have. I thought I must have been doing something wrong, or that I was simply selfish or not cut out for parenting.

Gradually, I’ve come to understand that none of those explanations were correct. The words I needed were “coherence” and “coalesce”. If coherence is already in your vocabulary from following my work, then coalesce is where this piece lives.

A word on the verb: I use coalesce rather than cohere because the process matters as much as the outcome. Cohering sounds like a state you arrive at. Coalescing is what you do to get there. To coalesce is the process by which the self that spread across the field gathers back until there’s enough of me in one place to function.

It’s not necessarily rest or recovery, though I sometimes do those things while coalescing. What I’m describing is the pulled-toward-center condition that makes everything else possible. I can absorb and even understand while spread out. What I cannot do is integrate: make it solid, permanent, and part of the structure (whole) I actually function from. And developing language for it comes later still.

Coherence, as I mean it, is never fixed. It’s a dynamic property, something I’m always moving toward, in whatever configuration the conditions allow. Sometimes that looks like pieces pulled toward the center, dense and integrated. Sometimes it’s wider, flatter, more distributed across the demands of the field. The configurations aren’t equally coherent, but coherence is always the aim, and I’m most fully myself when I can pull toward the center. If I tried to show it in a video, I’d render differently shaped, differently textured pieces of a life vibrating in relation to each other: sometimes pulling into something roughly spherical, sometimes spread flat in a wide array.

Every summer, I spend a large share of my time spread out rather than pulled toward the center. Bilbo Baggins described it better than I could: like butter scraped over too much bread. The pieces are still mine. Nothing is lost. But they’re too widely distributed to be gathered into the shape that lets me function from the inside out.

Summer removes the conditions, not the capacity.

Summer has been a complicated nightmare for years. My kids are my favorite humans, but no matter how much my husband and I plan in advance to keep summer from sucking, we haven’t been able to eliminate, or even reduce, the toll it takes. Sometimes that toll is genuinely painful. The conditions that make my cognition comfortable disappear almost entirely when school ends, and there is no planning around it. Believe me, we’ve tried.

I have worked from home for a decade and so has my husband. During the school year, this arrangement works beautifully. The house is quiet, the schedule is predictable, the blocks are real, and I can sustain the focus my cognition requires while leaving space for transitions. Working from home also addresses my sensory differences, supports my schedule and time management, and allows me to self-direct my work.

Summer collapses that structure entirely, because the foundation is built on my cognition having the conditions it needs to function well.

My kids are eleven and thirteen now, and the older one is largely independent, but the younger one still needs an active presence that can’t be scheduled around. Regardless of how amazing she is, this is a condition we have to account for when we schedule our work blocks, which also have to accommodate appointments that fluctuate from week to week. And the external orientation that presence requires is the opposite of what my own cognition requires.

In practice, this means work blocks get cut in half, and the remaining half is compromised. The door is never fully closed, even with the best-laid plans. Some part of me is always checking whether someone needs something, which means some part of me is never fully present in whatever I’m doing. It’s not that I get interrupted constantly. It’s that I can’t stop being prepared for interruption, and that readiness has a cost that shows up as trying harder and harder to stay focused until I burn out.

What would take two hours under the right conditions takes three or four under these ones. The remaining time that isn't work is externally focused — kids, logistics, presence — with no internal recharge between. The math doesn't work. Half the time, twice the difficulty, zero recovery.

This isn’t only a summer problem, though it’s worst in summer. When my kids were small, the monitoring state was every day, all day, year-round, until the evenings, when they were asleep. The school year gave me daytime hours, but evenings, weekends, and school breaks still belonged to the always-on state. What the school year actually gives me is the conditions to catch up to baseline. Not to thrive, just to recover enough to function. Summer sets me back from a starting point that’s already a recovery position. That’s why September arrives; I’m not immediately returning to normal. I’m returning to the place from which I can begin catching up again.

What made this sustainable for a while is that I got accustomed to pushing past my healthy limit, holding more than the system was built to hold, for longer than it was built to hold it. I did this my whole life, but with enough recovery time peppered in that it didn’t completely burn me out or collapse me until other extreme life factors were added to that weight.

What was categorically different in the years before last summer’s collapse was not just the degree but the kind. Unintegrated information accumulated, including incoherence and contradictions related to my areas of responsibility that couldn’t be resolved, along with a general delay in the coalescing phase that never lasted long enough to complete my processing. That accumulation taxed my working memory and degraded my coherence. I believe this is what made the collapse inevitable.

I have learned the hard way that pushing past my limits can’t go on forever. What follows isn’t just fatigue. It’s burnout, a fragmented state many say builds up over a lifetime. You borrow against your future capacity without realizing it. Eventually, without ample recovery, this can culminate in collapse.

I can attest that recovery is nonlinear. Some skills and capacities may never fully return. I used to be able to hold a lot in working memory: threads, context, complexity, all of it live at once. I can still do it sometimes, but it’s unpredictable now. I can’t rely on it being available. What used to be my bare minimum now looks like my maximum. And even that isn’t possible sometimes.

There’s a cost to being external.

That same monitoring state, the one that made parenting so costly for so long, also makes it hard to do too many kinds of work at once. My diagnostic report called this “switching.” The coherence problem doesn’t only appear in summer. It shows up wherever attention is split across too many competing demands. During the school year, I solve this by bundling tasks by the type of coherence they require. I don’t do analytical, artistic, or intuitive tasks on the same day if I can help it.

Peopling is its own category: meetings, appointments, social engagements, and work calls. I haven’t fully solved this one. I’ve tried bundling them all into a single day to protect integration time on either side, and I’ve tried spreading them out to avoid burning through my reserves all at once. In theory, I prefer bundling because it creates cleaner blocks of uninterrupted internal time. In practice, too much external focus in a single day leaves me depleted in a way that’s hard to recover from quickly, so I end up spreading things out more than I’d like.

What makes peopling expensive isn’t only the directed focus, such as tracking the other person, the conversation, and the room. It’s that a parallel process runs underneath the whole thing: monitoring my own output in real time. Facial expressions, tone, volume, the suppression of the gestalt language patterns my mind runs on, and the translation of whole-to-part thinking into something sequential enough for another person to follow.

Everyone loves a tangent, right? This seems like a good place for one. Let’s get sassy, shall we?

The autistic and ADHD communities have a word for this: masking.

I’m not using it directly here, and I want to explain why. The term has come to imply inauthenticity. As if the masked version were the false one, and the fix were simply to stop. As if the people who exhausted themselves adapting are somehow at fault for adapting. You need to look no further than the clinical apparatus itself, which offers “supports” for people like me that are largely structured to teach us how to mask better, the very thing that’s harming us, and to call it “treatment”.

That’s precisely what I spent my whole life doing before I understood any of this. To believe that people are “performing” from some sort of intentional, deceitful place is ridiculous. People who believe that aren’t paying attention. They clearly don’t understand the effort it takes, how it contributes to burnout, or the reasons those wise and completely necessary adaptations develop in the first place.

Some will say everyone masks, and research confirms it. But what's different is the effort, the frequency, and the outcomes. For most people, social adjustment happens without thinking. For autistic people, it requires actively managing the whole system, simultaneously and continuously. So, when “all people mask” is used as a deflection from trying to understand an autistic person’s story about how masking impacted their life, and let’s not mince words here, because most masking stories I’ve read are coming from a place of “Holy shit, my life just fell apart, what the fuck?” you are punching them while they lie bleeding on the ground.

And for what it’s worth, even the research I linked, which confirms that masking is more prevalent and costly for autistic people, frames it as “concealing aspects of identity,” which misses the point entirely. Are you fucking serious? We’re not bumbling around in a trench coat and a fake mustache, hoping nobody notices. We’re translating how our minds work into a format the environment will accept. Those are not the same thing.

If you can’t tell, I’ve been without my mask for a while now.

I’m a poster crone for that story, so don’t come knocking on my hut with that tired deflection. If “all people mask” brought everyone to the bottom of their life’s barrel, a lot more would be done about the conditions that make masking necessary. The severity of the outcomes for autistic people is clearly different. Suggesting otherwise, even with good intentions, is kicking someone’s barrel down a bumpy hill into a bog. And if someone understands they’re punching down and says it anyway, the good intentions were never really present to begin with. We deserve better than that.

The impulse to dismiss a story like this — to call it a sob story, a victim narrative, or an overshare — usually says more about the listener than the teller. People who reach for “that’s life,” “just get over it,” or tiny violins aren’t being realistic. They’re uncomfortable and asking the person in pain to manage that discomfort for them. I spent decades hiding my pain to spare others from having to sit with it. I’m not doing that anymore. But I’d also push back on the framing entirely. By the time most of us write about masking, burnout, or collapse, we’re not bleeding on the page. We’ve already done enough work to turn it into something useful. We’re not asking you to hold our wounds. We’re handing you maps we drew after we survived. The least you can do is look at them.

And I want to say something else: it’s completely valid if your nervous system can’t hold someone else’s story right now. I’m someone for whom empathy is deep and felt in my body, and sometimes I’m not in a place to sit with other people’s pain. The difference is that it never brings the impulse to shut them down. I walk away and come back later, when I can give the story the respect, care, and attention it deserves. From me to you, dear reader: however long it takes you is however long it takes. Nobody else gets to dictate the pace of your learning and healing.

Which brings me back to the part that still gets under my skin because of the contradiction embedded within it.

I see it all over the place, and it’s maddening. People who claim to want to “help” by telling gestalt-oriented autistic people like me to just be ourselves, and then, in the same breath, criticize our writing that circles, rambles, and struggles to get to the point in fewer words. Those are not different pieces of advice. They cancel each other out. Circling and rambling is being myself, and I’ve avoided speaking in public most of my life for this very reason. That it shows up in my writing now is me finally unlearning the polished, formal writing style I had adopted over decades. It’s a work in progress. As am I.

My writing, yes, even before AI, has been very different from the way I speak. This has confused people who know me in person and later read my writing. And the opposite is true for people who read my writing and then meet me. That gap has taken real work to even understand, let alone close, and it will probably take me thirty more years to undo what the previous thirty years created.

This tangent is closer to the way I speak when I get passionate about something that affects people I love. And yes, that includes me, but right now this heat is in service of those who haven’t found their feet yet.

The gestalt language patterns, the whole-to-part movement, and the pulling of threads from multiple directions before landing somewhere are not communication failures. That’s my mind working the way it’s supposed to. That’s me, unmasked. Asking me to suppress it in the name of authenticity is not an invitation to be myself. It’s an invitation to be a more palatable version of someone else.

Whether it’s parenting, peopling, or the constant self-monitoring underneath both, it all draws from the same pool.

All systems have limits, and this one is no different. The thread running through everything I’ve described is what cognitive scientists call vigilance: a low-grade monitoring state sustained by a sense of safety and responsibility because demands from those who depend on you can arrive at any moment. It draws on the same resources that sustained, deep focus requires. So even in the quiet moments, the quiet is borrowed. It becomes contaminated by the knowledge that it might end at any time. I’m not missing hours. I’m missing the kind of hours that don’t come with a half-open door.

Despite what I believed for decades, this never meant I was inconsistent in the way that word typically implies. This is about a resource conflict between two cognitive modes — sustained, inward attention and reactive, externally cued attention — that I finally understand cannot coexist. Summer doesn’t remove my capacity. It removes the conditions on which my capacity depends.

We live in a culture optimized for the reactive mode.

This isn’t only a parenting-in-summer problem. It’s the shape of contemporary work and life. Constant availability is the implicit expectation in most jobs I could be hired for now. Message-based work culture, the assumption that you’ll see and respond to things quickly, and the collapsing of any real boundary between work hours and everything else are the baseline. Even outside of work, the ambient pull of a phone is its own low-grade demand for vigilance, always asking some part of you to stay reachable.

What this produces, at scale, is a population whose conditions increasingly favor reactive attention and increasingly starve sustained attention. And it’s worth sitting with the fact that this is happening to nearly everyone at once because it raises an uncomfortable question: when an entire culture’s conditions shift to reward one cognitive mode over another, what happens to the people whose minds were built to need the one being phased out?

I think this is at least part of what underlies the rise in adult ADHD and autism diagnoses. It’s obviously not the whole explanation. Better recognition of previously missed presentations, especially in women and in people who’d spent decades adapting in pursuit of safety and belonging, is real and significant. But some of the rise may also be something else: an environment that’s begun producing the appearance of attentional dysregulation by removing the conditions their attention needed and never restoring them. A chronic phase that was supposed to be temporary. The vigilance state ceases to be a response to a busy season and becomes the resting condition, present even when nothing is actually demanding it.

I want to be careful here because this is genuinely contested ground. The point isn’t that these diagnoses are manufactured. It’s that the same surface presentation can stem from more than one underlying cause, and symptom checklists alone can’t yet distinguish among those causes. That ambiguity is worth naming rather than papering over.

Support is centered on the wrong layer.

Let me be clear about what I’m not saying. I’m not the diagnosis police. Whatever label, framework, or language tips the scale toward self-understanding and less suffering, I’m fully for it. My critique isn’t aimed at anyone’s experience of their own mind. It’s aimed at the infrastructure itself.

The tools used to diagnose ADHD and autism measure observable traits and self-reports of those traits. They don’t assess cognitive configuration. They can’t tell you why your attention works the way it does, only that it does and that it’s a deficit.

In my case, I’m nearly certain the architecture is the cause — the whole-to-part, gestalt processing I’ve been describing, and the coherence requirements it generates, are what drive the switching difficulties, the rigidity, the irritability, the shutdowns, all of it. Sensory sensitivity is always present for me — light, visual noise, smells, and sound, especially when it’s coming from multiple sources at once, register more intensely than they seem to for most people, and that’s just baseline. But the threshold for what becomes intolerable isn’t fixed. It scales with the coherence state and the load, and the two affect each other. Low coherence increases load. High load degrades coherence. Sensory sensitivity rises as both do.

When I’m coalesced, and the load is manageable, I can function without fragmenting. When I’m distributed or carrying a deficit, the same inputs that were merely noticeable become genuinely overwhelming. The sensitivity is structural, and the amplification is a signal; sometimes reflecting the load, not just the current input. I’m only claiming this is true for me, not for all autistic people, but it stands to reason that it must be true for others, so I’m leaving this here.

None of the suggestions after my diagnosis addressed cognition or self-understanding. That’s not what’s on offer.

What’s on offer is a set of strategies — not free ones, mind you — designed to help you fit more smoothly into a world that wasn’t built for you. The field is beginning to acknowledge the costs this imposes on autistic people, but the therapies still largely treat dominant social performance norms as the goal: small talk, eye contact, sequential communication, calibrated self-disclosure, and questions kept within acceptable frequency. The full unwritten script for being an acceptable person. This is reinforced by the support/treatment offerings on my diagnostic report just as much as by people who tell me to get to the point faster.

Does anyone not notice why people mask in the first place? We literally get the pressure to do so from all angles.

At work, the stakes are higher. These norms are baked into the definition of professional conduct. You're not just expected to communicate like everyone else. You're expected to perform a version of yourself that reads as competent and trustworthy, because without that performance, the actual competence and trustworthiness you bring won't register. They're not measuring what you're capable of. They're measuring how well you can perform those qualities on the outside.

As if moving against your own cognitive architecture were neutral. As if you haven’t already learned that doing so indefinitely burns you out. No one offers a map of how your mind actually works. No one helps you understand why you are the way you are or why several elements of ordinary life cause you so much difficulty. No one teaches everyone else that minds are different, that all minds and needs are valid, and that everyone should make room for difference. What I see instead is people saying they believe this, but that’s form, not substance. Saying it is not doing it. The system requires adjustment only from us; and when adjustment is made for us, the implicit expectation is that we be grateful for the attempt. The effort. To kiss the boots and throw a parade.

Bitch, please. Effort is all I’ve ever known.

They hand you adaptations calibrated to someone else’s neurology and call it support. The contradiction doesn’t register because they don’t have access to the internal architecture that would make it visible. They can’t see what they’ve never had to navigate.

I do use mental health therapy, and I have a genuinely supportive, affirming therapist who listens and helps me stay grounded, but he’s not needed because I’m autistic. He’s needed because I was traumatized while autistic. And I’m not arguing against that support. I need it to work through the CPTSD reactivation. But it isn’t how I’ve come to understand myself. That work has happened by following other writers, examining my own experiences and behaviors, and writing exactly as I’m doing here. My therapist reads some of it. He says he wishes all his clients would do this because of how far I’ve come.

I’ve always been an autodidact, not by preference but by necessity. Nothing is real to me until I’ve tested it myself and rebuilt it from the inside. Understanding has to move through my own experience before it sticks because that’s the only condition under which I actually know something. The understanding I needed was never available anywhere else, and even if it had been, I would have had to find my own way into it regardless. The diagnosis handed me a cover on an empty book. I’ve been writing what’s inside ever since. The clinical apparatus doesn’t reach this layer. It never has. I have my doubts it ever will.

Occupational therapy was offered primarily for the sensory piece. I declined. My daughter has worked with OTs for years, so I know the toolkit: sunglasses for light sensitivity, avoidance strategies for visual noise and smells, environmental modification. I’d already arrived at all of it on my own. And the deeper truth is that managing the coherence conditions mostly takes care of the sensory ones anyway, especially when I spend the majority of my time in my own environment. That understanding didn’t come from a referral.

Organizing tools were offered secondarily. I “scored well” on that part of the assessment. I want to point out that it is not because organization comes naturally, but because external scaffolding was how I’d been managing my career and life for decades. Effortfully. It contributed to the depletion and vigilance I’ve been describing. But I had the tools down. Schedules, timers, to-do lists, color-coding, interconnected systems. I’ve been using all of those my entire life, building and rebuilding them, and spending much of it managing them. And, keep in mind, these systems are mainly created by and for linear thinkers. Nonetheless, I’m more than familiar with these tools. They’re how I’ve navigated conditions that weren’t built for my cognition for decades, in many cases creating a whole extra layer of effort on top of whatever I was trying to keep track of. They solved a problem that, I now understand, only existed because I believed there was something wrong with me that needed managing. What they also did, without anyone noticing, was create additional load.

After the collapse, I’ve been restructuring how I organize my life. It’s a work in progress, but what I have now isn’t from a “ten steps to perfect organization list.” It’s more of a centers-of-gravity system, and it’s completely mine. The occupational therapy I’m doing here on Substack, the writing itself, has had the greatest impact on my progress. Finding my own way into self-organization is second.

Speech therapy was offered to address my tangential speech patterns, what I’d call gestalt language processing, the way my thinking moves in wholes rather than linear sequences, pulling threads from multiple directions before arriving somewhere. The offer was essentially: let us help you be clearer, stop talking in circles, and make it easier for other people to follow. Which is fine advice, I suppose, if the goal is palatability. But that’s what I’ve been doing my entire life. Suppressing the way my mind actually moves so other people find it easier to receive, and still only getting it partially “right”. And that, more than anything else, is what burned me out.

Pardon me, but no fucking thank you. I’ve got this.

The understanding that actually helped didn’t come from anything the system offered. It came from writing myself into clarity, from following people mapping similar territory, and from treating my own experience as valid data rather than a set of symptoms to be managed. The cognition has never been faulty. The conditions were wrong, and the story I was told about myself was also wrong. Fixing the story turned out to matter more than any tool, system, or intervention aimed at making me easier for the world to digest.

A note before I move on: I’m not bagging on services that people need. They are necessary. For many people, especially those earlier in their self-understanding, these tools and supports are genuinely helpful. What I’m saying is that after fifty years of adaptations — building systems, suppressing my language patterns, managing the performance — these particular offerings do fuck all for me. I’d already done the work they were offering to teach me. What I hadn’t done, and what nothing in the system offered to help with, was understand why any of it was necessary in the first place.

Coherence is a spectrum, and there’s a fuel cost to managing your own zoom.

Here is where my version of this starts to look different from the universal one, and why the difference matters.

Coherence, for me, exists on a spectrum.

At one end is what I experience as my most natural state: monotropic, fully internal. When I’m in this state, you can snap your fingers next to my ear. You can talk directly to me. You can fill the room with noise. I’m not here, at least not in a way that registers as an interruption. My attention has tunneled so completely into what I’m doing that the external field essentially recedes.

Inside that tunnel, though, it’s never narrow. It follows threads, branches, and finds connections: more like a dense root structure than a beam. I’ve described this internal space in different ways in different contexts: a dense root structure, a whole house, a multi-scalar nested web. All of them are accurate. They’re different representations of the same architecture.

In January, just emerging from a period of cognitive darkness, I was beginning to understand how monotropism applied to me. This piece is what I couldn’t see yet back then. For most of my life, I confused this state with dissociation, which is also something I have experienced when traumatized, but they’re not the same thing. Dissociation is hiding, absence. This is presence so complete it excludes the periphery. It’s where I do my best work and, I’ve come to understand, where I actually feel most like myself.

At the other end of the spectrum is wide-open external, receiving everything, tracking the full field, distributed across what’s present rather than gathered at the center.

In between are different levels and distributions of focused external attention: attending to a conversation, a group, a room. Present, engaged, genuinely there.

I love being with people. I want to be clear about that. Some of the most alive I ever feel is in real connection, when I can tunnel into a person or a conversation the way I tunnel into a problem. That’s when presence feels mutual rather than performed. Pragmatic Harmonism, responding to Contact at Depth, put it better than I had: meaning didn’t transfer from one mind to another — it became something the relationship itself could sustain. That’s the external tunnel. It’s one slice of a much larger mechanism, but it’s the one that brought this piece into focus.

If you've read Contact at Depth, you'll know I write about holding myself closed. That's a relational state: self-protection before trust. This is different. The internal monotropic state isn't closure. It's home base. The two can coexist, and when they do, that's usually when the deepest contact happens.

But holding myself in the middle register of engagement requires actively resisting the pull toward the tunnel. My attention doesn't default outward. It defaults all the way in, whether that's a problem, a project, or a person.

At a party with other families, I can monitor the field and track my kids, or I can have a real conversation. Not both. If I go fully into the conversation, my kids could be anywhere, which is why my husband has quietly become the one who holds the vigilance I’ve dropped. If I stay in field-monitoring mode, the conversation doesn’t happen. I’m not available for it.

The tunnel isn’t a choice I make. It’s what attention does when I stop actively preventing it. Alcohol lowers that prevention threshold. So does depletion. After the collapse I experienced a year ago, the tunnel happens faster and with less warning than it used to because I have less left over to hold it back.

For someone whose resting state is already outward-facing, I imagine monitoring is lower-cost because it doesn’t compete with anything. For someone whose resting state is internal, active monitoring blocks the mode in which repair and integration occur. The vigilance doesn’t just use resources. It prevents the process that restores them.

This is why “introvert” was never quite right for me, even though I used the word for years. Introversion is about where you draw your energy from. What I’m describing is about where my processing lives. People do drain me — the competing voices, movement, sensory input, the monitoring, the translation — but that’s not the whole story, and it misses the most important part. I want to be with them. The drain and the desire coexist.

My cognition runs most efficiently somewhere else entirely.

The fuel runs out. The early warning is usually word-finding difficulty. Language, especially spoken language, is expensive, and when it starts to stutter, it means the prefrontal cortex has been managing external orientation long enough that higher-order functions begin to go offline. After a collapse I experienced about a year ago, that threshold arrives faster and with less warning than before. The runway has shortened. The signal is the same, just closer to the edge.

I have a coalescing requirement.

Here is the part I wish I had understood thirty years ago.

I cannot go external before I’ve coalesced. Not really. I can show up — I’ve done it thousands of times — but I’m showing up distributed, spread flat, not yet whole enough to be fully present. In those moments, I feel anxious and sometimes want to escape to privacy. Historically, I’ve handled it by canceling plans or leaving early. I told myself the cancellations meant something was wrong with me. It confused me so much that I wanted to attend the party, the concert, the dinner when I marked them on my calendar. Why did the anxiety build leading up to it? How could I face my friends after I’d promised them I’d be there? It made no sense, but I accepted the confusion until I understood it this way.

There’s also a practical reason I can’t simply go internal when I need to, and it has nothing to do with preference. Going fully internal in public isn’t safe. A body that’s here but not present reads as strange. The flat affect, the fixed gaze, the absence of the microexpressions people rely on to feel met: these are interpreted as rudeness, vacancy, or dysfunction. Most people who know me outside my home have never seen this state. Not because I’m exactly hiding it, but because the conditions that would allow it — genuine safety, no social consequences, no one who needs me to remain legible or available — don’t exist in public. So the internal state stays private, and the monitoring that depletes me continues.

I’ve always had a coalescing requirement I didn’t have language for, in a life that didn’t have room for it. I suspect many others wired similarly know what I mean.

The cycle, as I now understand it, works like this: I coalesce: the self that spread across the field gathering back until there’s enough of me in one place to function from. From that whole, I can go external: into a conversation, a relationship, a room full of people I love. Being external distributes me. Attention moves outward, spreads across the field, engages with what’s present. At some point — sooner now than before, and not always with clear warning — the distribution reaches a limit. I need to return.

And then the middle phase begins again. The coalescing. And it is long, longer than it seems to be for most people I know. The transition from deep internal presence to outward engagement with my family often takes an hour or more of what looks, from the outside, like nothing: a low-stimulation bath, something undemanding on a screen, mindless phone games. Not rest exactly. Not avoidance. A transition state while the pieces move back toward each other.

The direction from external back to internal is, at least, the restorative one because internal is where I repair and integrate. But it still takes the time it takes, and that time doesn’t compress just because a schedule says it should. That means I often have to stop before the cycle is complete.

A six-hour block can’t become eight. A week away can’t become two. My mother’s eightieth birthday brought out-of-town family and days of sustained external focus, all of it genuinely wonderful, none of it integrated in real time because I lacked the return phase in between. By the end, I was shutting down mid-conversation. Migraine. Sensory deprivation. Heating pad. Even though my family’s love was real, it didn’t protect me from a coalescing requirement that had been deferred for too long.

Note to self: Must improve self-advocacy in all contexts. I’m not sure what I can do about the unpredictability of that wall, though.

It happened again this past weekend. Our thirteen-year-old’s friend had a genuinely enjoyable birthday party, with good conversation, good food, and good people. Then I hit my wall and had to leave early. The migraine was on the verge, but I got home and into bed before it took me all the way under. A couple of hours of engagement didn’t used to cost that much, but I haven’t fully recovered from the recent week of house guests. I hit the wall early because I was starting from an already depleted state.

The recovery periods are always long, and the calendar doesn’t wait for them. My nervous system doesn’t reset just because the event is over. All brains and bodies have limits. The difference is where the wall is and how hard and suddenly you hit it.

Summer doesn’t take away my coherence. It changes the configuration from something that can gather toward the center to something spread across the continuous, unpredictable demands of a full house, a changed schedule, and children who need me at intervals I can’t predict or control.

The vigilance I described earlier — the half-open door, the monitoring state — isn’t just a productivity cost for me. It actively prevents the coalescing phase from completing. I can’t gather toward center while part of my system is tracking the field for the next demand. The two states are incompatible. And when coalescing can’t complete, going external again means going out already distributed, which brings the anxiety, the cancellations, and the sense of moving through my own life rather than living it.

By September, when school resumes and conditions shift, I don’t snap back. Rebuilding takes days, sometimes weeks. This used to confuse me. I thought restorative conditions would restore me quickly. But I’m not returning to normal. I’m returning to the place where catching up becomes possible again. A system that’s been prevented from coalescing for months isn’t just paused. It’s been running without the phase integration requires, from a starting point that was already a recovery position. Reassembly takes time. There’s no shortcut through it.

What I’ve lived and what I remember don’t always arrive together.

Extended periods of packed calendars and minimal coalescing time produce a particular kind of estrangement. Not depression, exactly, and not dissociation, something more like watching my own life from just outside it. Present for all of it. Not fully inhabiting any of it. The events occur. I participate. But the layer that would make them mine — integrated, solid, carried forward — doesn’t always form in real time.

I think this is what happens to memory when the coalescing phase is skipped. Experience that arrives while I’m distributed can’t be processed from whole to part in the moment. It gets stored as fragments: pieces without a whole to belong to yet. Some of those fragments surface quickly. Others assemble slowly, over years, sometimes decades, as the larger picture gradually completes when a piece finally finds where it fits. This is why certain memories from high-load periods feel less like memories and more like evidence. Things I know happened because I have proof, not because I can feel them as lived.

The inverse is also true. The more coalesced I am when I experience something, the more vivid and immediate the memory. Experiences I was fully present for arrive in memory as whole, felt, located in time. The architecture that makes meaning possible in the present is the same architecture that makes memory coherent afterward.

This means the cost of chronic under-coalescing isn’t only functional. It’s also autobiographical. Years lived spread flat don’t just feel thin in the moment. They remain thin in memory.

Trauma is it’s own axis here, which also severely impacts how experiences are processed and stored in memory.

I began grieving this about twenty years ago, though I didn’t have the language to describe what I was grieving. A relational rupture and the death of my younger brother, my only sibling, landed on top of years of burning the candle at both ends. Two jobs, college, a packed social calendar, never coalescing, drinking to hover above the life I couldn’t fully inhabit. The system reached its limit.

What followed was severe blood pressure issues, chronic fatigue, back pain, and eventually diagnoses of CPTSD, chronic fatigue syndrome, and fibromyalgia. That was the second-worst coherence collapse of my life. It was the first time I began to come to terms with the fact that I might want it all, but my body had limits I couldn’t override indefinitely. At that point, I wasn’t even aware of the role my mind played.

What I understand now that I didn’t then: coherence doesn’t automatically return when conditions improve. It’s something I have to actively manage, always. That management is a full-time job running beneath everything else. It used to collapse only under extreme conditions. Now, a year after my most severe collapse, I can’t yet tell how much I’ll recover or whether I’ll find enough ground to enjoy my life rather than just navigate it. I can’t tell whether what I’m carrying right now is summer, collapse recovery, an aging autistic body, or all three at once. There’s no way to know yet.

If I were not continuously building this map, I would lose hope entirely. So I respectfully — and in some cases, not so respectfully — decline the critique that I write any other way. This writing serves many purposes. One of them is keeping me upright and moving forward.

I’m holding the compass, finding my way through my own experience and evidence, retroactively at first and only recently as things are happening, a gift I don’t take for granted. This is new to me since last summer’s collapse. I didn’t know I could do this before. Maybe the trauma itself made it possible.

This is a valid system requirement.

I spent most of my adult life unaware of any of this. I stacked calendars, stressed over them, canceled plans, and judged myself for it. I wanted it all: the full schedule, the full presence, the full life. I still want it. That wanting is real, and the gap between what I want and what the coherence cycle actually allows is a real loss. It would be foolish to believe otherwise.

But I’ve come to understand that this gap is a design constraint I was working against without a map. The coherence requirement is simply how systems like mine operate. I’m grateful to finally know this and to share it with my kids, who are learning this vocabulary earlier than I did. I consider that one of the more important things I can give them.

We are taught that the coalescing need, the long middle, and the inability to stack the calendar without cost are deficits. Failures of productivity, resilience, or social commitment. I call bullshit. They’re valid requirements of a valid kind of mind. A kind of mind that, when it has what it needs, can do things with attention, pattern, and synthesis that the always-available, always-external mode simply cannot.

The guilt and shame of it can take a long walk off a short pier, as my late father would say. What’s underneath is just the truth of how this works. And the truth, once you can see it clearly, turns out to be a much more useful place to build a life from than the misreading ever was.