Untranslated
For most of my life, I lived between two worlds: an inner world vivid, beautiful, and alive with connections, and an outer world filled with misunderstanding. At 56, I finally understood the distance between them.
Begin with The Correct Lens
Why this exists
I have always seen the world in patterns—in the turning of the seasons, the rise and fall of waves, the way everything moves through a beginning, a middle, and an end.
And I have always recognized something within those patterns: two truths can exist without either becoming less true. Autumn is an ending and it is beautiful. The ocean can knock the wind out of you and still carry you.
This site is a record of what I can finally see when I look back—the distance between who I was and how I was understood, what that distance cost, and the woman who kept finding a way forward. Some of what happened was devastating.
And still, there she is.
The way I was understood does not erase who I knew myself to be; both truths can exist.
Maybe this is what taking off the mask looks like for me—not becoming someone new, but claiming my side of the story and allowing the person who was always there to speak in her own language.
Unapologetically untranslated.
Seventeen essays · Four movements · One coda
One life, finally seen through the correct lens.
Part I
The way my mind learns, connects, anticipates, and makes meaning—and what happens when that way of seeing is mistaken for something else.
For most of my life, I lived between two worlds: an inner world that was vivid, beautiful, and alive with connections, and an outer world filled with misunderstanding and disconnect. I spent a lifetime trying to understand why those two worlds felt so far apart—and why I could never seem to bridge the space between them. At 56, I finally understood the disconnect.
Read the essayI was never bad at learning. I was trying to learn without a map—and asking to see the whole was often mistaken for defiance.
Read the essayWhat happens when your mind sees the connections, causes, and consequences that remain invisible to everyone around you—and you cannot unsee them?
Read the essayI thought being able to describe forty-eight shades of emotion was emotional intelligence. Other people sometimes heard something more alarming.
Read the essayPart II
The weight of being misunderstood, the refuge I built inside myself, and the beautiful systems that helped me keep going.
I learned to hold pain and beauty at the same time—to keep turning the pieces until the light caught something differently, and I could keep going.
Read the essayI spent years trying to alter the weight of believing something was wrong with me, before realizing that the coat I was carrying had never belonged to me at all.
Read the essaySolitude became safer than connection. But safe was never the same as whole.
Read the essayPart III
Learning to locate myself outside the wrong middle, trust the mind looking through the new lens, and grieve what became visible once I could finally see clearly.
When the world assumes everyone is somewhere in the middle, what happens to the people whose experience lives somewhere else on the curve?
Read the essayI went looking for a doctor while losing my vision. I found someone whose steady belief in me helped me see myself differently.
Read the essayThe diagnosis gave me the correct lens. Then I had to learn how to trust the mind looking through it—and ask whether we were holding the same map.
Read the essayThe diagnosis brought relief. Then it made me reread my life—and grieve what it cost to spend so many years being measured against the wrong middle.
Read the essayA lifetime of being overruled slowly eroded my trust in what I knew. Now I am reaching into the current for the woman who learned to doubt herself.
Read the essayPart IV
The moment I stopped asking what was wrong with me—and began asking what had been asked of me.
I went looking for support and found another lesson in how to disappear: an accommodation designed to make everyone else comfortable with my autism.
Read the essayI spent a lifetime paying with my boundaries, my voice, and the shape of my life for the hope that I would not be misread. The payoff never came.
Read the essayWhen every painful experience is renamed as ordinary, you stop trusting your own measure of hard—and begin requiring proof before you are allowed to pull away.
Read the essayThe girl I was, the woman I am, and the woman waiting ahead walk into the trees together—soft, strong, and finally whole.
Read the essayCoda
After the reckoning, a small rescue dog reminds me that what happened to us does not have to become what we give back to the world.
A rescue dog who had every reason to fear the world still runs toward it with joy—and teaches me that what happened to us does not have to become what we give back.
Read the essayThe woman behind the words
I am a systems thinker, an analytics leader, a mother, and a late-diagnosed autistic woman. I have spent my life seeing patterns—across data, organizations, people, and the emotional terrain most of us are taught to flatten.
At 56, learning I was autistic gave me the lens to understand both the beauty of that mind and the cost of living in a world that repeatedly mistranslated it.
I do not write as an authority on autism. I write as the authority on my own life.
Untranslated is where I look back through the correct lens—with honesty, grief, humor, nature, and a little dog named Wilson—and finally tell the story from the inside.
A life untranslated
It is the story of finally seeing who was there all along.
Unapologetically untranslated.