I heard the music before I watched the film.
The songs found me at a strange time. I had just received my diagnosis — autistic, and gifted — and I didn’t know what to do with myself. That is the only way I can describe it. I didn’t know what to do with myself. The results sat on the table. I sat with them. There was nowhere to put any of it.
The lyrics kept replaying in my head. Not as background noise. Something more insistent than that — finding the cracks, circling back, saying the same thing over and over until I was ready to hear it.
I got on the treadmill. I had never been a runner. I am still not, really. But I ran, and I kept running, because my body needed somewhere to put what my mind couldn’t hold. I ran until my knees hurt. I ran until one of my toenails turned black, and eventually fell off. The songs played on repeat and I let them, and somewhere in the running and the looping lyrics and the strange grief of those weeks, something was slowly working itself loose.
I don’t watch shows. I get too absorbed, too wrapped up — the boundary between the story’s emotional world and my own is too thin, and I don’t like the feeling of living inside something I know isn’t real. I have always been this way.
But I had been living inside this music for weeks. So I watched K-Pop Demon Hunters.
Rumi hides her demon marks. There is shame in carrying something the world around her does not understand, and so she covers it, performs around it, becomes so practiced at the covering that it starts to feel like the truth. She knows her marks are there. She has always known. The hiding is a choice — exhausting, necessary, deliberate.
I recognised something in that. And then I noticed the difference.
Rumi knew her marks were there. I didn’t. I had spent nearly forty years not knowing I had them — not hiding them, not managing them, not choosing to cover them up. Simply not knowing they existed. The exhaustion I carried, the burnout that kept returning, the particular cost of ordinary things — I had attributed all of it to character flaws I couldn’t seem to fix. Not to marks. Not to something that had a name.
What I want to write about here is what happened once I knew.
Because knowing is not the same as accepting. That part surprised me.
When the diagnosis landed, my first instinct was not recognition. It was resistance. A quiet, persistent argument I kept having with myself. These aren’t scars. I’m not a demon. I thought of the ways I didn’t fit the picture I held in my mind — the sense of humour, the sarcasm, the ability to read a room on a good day. I thought of all the ways I had managed, compensated, held it together. Surely that disqualified me. Surely all of that counted for something.
There is something particular about the blindness of it that I keep returning to. I am an occupational therapist. I knew what autism was. I had spent years navigating my son’s diagnosis before it finally pointed back at me. And still — you can understand a thing completely and still not see it in yourself. The psychologist suggested, gently, that the giftedness had likely masked the autism for decades. That the two together create a particular kind of invisibility: the capability compensating for the gaps so thoroughly that even the person living it cannot find the architecture underneath.
Rumi knew her marks and hid them. I hadn’t known mine long enough to decide what to do with them. But I was starting to feel the same pull she felt — the temptation to keep explaining them away, keep covering, keep arguing that they weren’t really there.
And somewhere underneath that argument, I already knew it wasn’t going to hold.
The question that kept surfacing was a quiet one.
Why did I not realise this earlier?
I thought about all the years of pushing through. The burnout that kept returning no matter how carefully I tried to live. The way I always assumed the problem was my attitude, my discipline, my failure to manage what everyone else seemed to manage. I kept telling myself that all of us struggle, that no one leads a perfect life, that suffering is just part of being human. I wasn’t wrong about that. But I was missing something.
I didn’t know that not everyone struggled in the same way. That what felt like swimming upstream for me was, for others, simply swimming. That the extra cost I paid for every ordinary thing was not a tax everyone paid.
I just didn’t know. And not knowing meant I was never gentle with myself about it.
What I felt was not I wish I were different. It was softer and more specific than that.
It was the sadness of looking back at a life of effort and finally understanding its shape. All that time. All those years of pushing and burning out and pushing again. The quiet shame of feeling perpetually behind — not the shame of hiding something, but the older, more corrosive kind. The shame of not understanding why everything cost so much, and turning that unknowing, year after year, into a verdict about your own adequacy.
I didn’t know. And now I do. And knowing changes how I carry it.
What I wish is not that I were different. What I wish is that I had known earlier — so I could have helped myself. So I could have given myself so much more grace.
I want to be honest about where I am, because I think the version of acceptance you sometimes read about — the triumphant, fully-arrived kind — is not where most people actually live.
I am not proud of my marks. Not yet. I’m not ready to show them off. Part of me still wishes they weren’t there — and I think that’s allowed. Grief doesn’t resolve on a schedule, and this is a grief, even if it’s also something else.
But I’ve stopped trying to rub them off.
That’s the most honest way I can put it. I’m not trying to convince myself I don’t have them anymore. I’m not building new arguments to explain them away. I am, slowly, figuring out how to live with them — how to put on clothes that fit the body I actually have, rather than the one I kept assuming I should have. It’s not acceptance in the shining, complete sense. It’s something more ordinary and more sustainable than that. It’s just — not fighting it anymore.
But here is the thing I keep coming back to, when I sit quietly with it.
The marks make me, me.
If I didn’t have them — if I could somehow extract the autism, the giftedness, the asynchrony, the particular way the world lands on me — I don’t know who would be left. The sensitivity I carried through oncology and palliative care, the ability to sit in silence without rushing to fill it, the way I notice the small things — the tremble of a hand, the tone of a voice — these didn’t come from nowhere. They are not separate from the rest of it. They are the rest of it.
So do I really want to be different? Non-autistic, not gifted? Who would I be then?
It’s a rhetorical question. I know that. And it’s probably not useful to spend too long in it. But I’ve found that sitting with it, briefly, changes something. Because the honest answer is: I don’t know. And the not-knowing loosens the grip of the wish.
There is beauty in broken things. There is a Japanese tradition — kintsugi — of repairing cracked pottery with gold, filling the fractures instead of hiding them. The idea is not that the breaking never happened. It’s that the breaking is part of the object’s history, and that history is worth keeping.
I am not made of pottery. But I understand what it means to stop trying to make the cracks invisible.
We are not alone in this — those of us finding our marks late, sitting with a name we didn’t ask for, trying to figure out what comes next. There are many of us, out there, with our battle scars and our slow reckonings. We can’t turn back time. We can’t un-break the thing. And even if we could, something would be lost.
This is what it is. This is what it sounds like.
In the end, Rumi doesn’t hide. And she doesn’t make a performance of revealing either. She just — stops concealing. She lets the marks exist in the same space as everything else she is.
I’m not there yet. But I’m getting there.
Let the jagged edges meet the light. Let the darkness and the brightness exist in the same frame. Not resolved. Not explained. Just held, together, in the same life.
The toenail grew back.
Slowly, so did I.
Songs referenced: Golden and This Is What It Sounds Like, from the K-Pop Demon Hunters soundtrack.
The full diagnosis story — the year of circling, the assessment, the results I didn’t see coming — is in Expected ADHD, Got Autism. The gifted-and-autistic profile that came back in the report is in The Wrong Operating System. And the reading I returned to after, when reading became possible again, is in I Didn’t Read Any Autism Books After My Diagnosis.
New essays, delivered as I write them. Quiet, occasional, no noise.
Grow with Their Flow 