A post during Neurodiversity Awareness Month

Rabbit hole post -

A recent Stand4Kind post talked about the power of simple mental‑health check‑ins — naming what’s happening inside before it spirals.

That’s what this practice has become for us: a way to help our kids map their internal terrain before it turns into a storm.

And honestly, my wife and I are still learning it too. Parenting a neurodiverse family takes a lot of emotional energy, and some days we forget to extend the same softness to ourselves that we fight to give our kids. But we’re trying. We’re learning. We’re building the language as we go.

Because excitement and anxiety are blur together. Because kids reach for maturity before they have the tools. Because kindness isn’t a mask — it’s a practice. And because emotional literacy isn’t innate. It’s taught. It’s modeled. It’s lived.

Loving People Without Clipping Their Wings: Notes From the Asylum Between My Ears

There’s a moment in the podcast where the host reads Sanni’s letter to Alex Honnold (see below) — a truth delivered secondhand with the kind of gravity usually reserved for someone who actually understands the hero’s wiring.

No flourish. No performance.

Just a clean accounting of what it costs to love someone whose compass keeps swinging toward a cliff face most of us would file under “avoidable risk.”

That moment has been rattling around the asylum between my ears for days, refusing to quiet down and tugging at something I can’t quite name.

And the thing is, it mirrors the emotional math I’ve been trying to untangle in my own writing.

Because the letter from Sanni to Alex isn’t really about climbing. It’s about the emotional calculus of loving someone whose authenticity comes with edges.

Loving people wired differently — my kids, my partner, myself — means learning to support without smothering, to balance autonomy with presence, and to hold excitement, anxiety, and respect in the same breath. It’s the work of staying in relationship even when the terrain refuses to cooperate.

I won’t shrink you, and I won’t pretend your wiring doesn’t move something in me.

And it mirrors so much of my own life — at home, at work, and inside my own skull.

The Emotional Load of Loving People Wired Differently

In my house, we’re a neurodiverse family. That’s not a slogan; it’s a lived ecosystem. Our kids feel deeply, process slowly, and communicate on their own timelines.

Excitement and anxiety share a doorway, and sometimes our kiddos sprint through it without warning. And newsflash – so do emotions! Emotional literacy isn’t a performance for us; it’s a survival skill.

Some days we help our kiddos name what’s happening. Some days we don’t have the capacity to model it. But the contract stays the same: we stay in it with them.

I stumbled into a practice that helps. It started with a podcast — Michael Easter interviewing a coach who works with elite athletes and combat veterans. The coach talked about helping people distinguish excitement from anxiety by asking them to describe how each one feels in their bodies. Simple. Direct. Almost too obvious.

But it stuck.

Maybe because anxiety has never been a frequent visitor for me. The most anxious I’ve ever been was when I asked my wife to marry me — and we’d already been together for eighteen months. Outside of that, my nervous system tends to run steady.

So, hearing someone break it down into physical sensations made me realize: not everyone has the language for what’s happening inside them. Kids especially.

Around the same time, I’d already started shifting how I talked to my kids about their bodies and choices. Instead of “That outfit looks great on you,” I’d ask, “How does that make you feel?” I didn’t want their sense of worth built on my approval or on some external performance metric. I wanted them to build their own internal compass.

So the two ideas merged.

Now, when I see one of my kids sliding toward anxiety or dysregulation — and when the moment is safe enough to circle back — I ask:

“How does your body feel when you’re excited?” “How does your body feel when you’re anxious?” “What’s the difference?”

The first few times, they looked at me like I’d asked them to solve quantum physics. My ten‑year‑old was confused. My PDA‑er needed the right level of regulation to even attempt an answer. And my almost‑six‑year‑old — autistic, brilliant, and operating on his own internal clock — would sometimes bring it up two days later, once it had finally clicked.

But over time, something shifted.

Now, when I ask, I see them snap in. Not perfectly. Not every time. But enough to know the practice is landing somewhere deeper than the moment.

And it’s not just about emotions. It’s about boundaries. Agency. The desire to assert maturity without masking. The courage to say, “This is what I’m feeling,” even when the feeling is messy or inconvenient.

We saw it recently in a real‑world moment — a conflict with peers, some inappropriate behavior, and the classic “boys will be boys” deflection that teaches nothing and protects no one. My ten‑year‑old stood up for herself. She named what happened. She held her ground. And even though the apology that followed wasn’t exactly self‑initiated, she moved through the moment with courage that felt like her own — with a little mom support.

That’s the ripple effect of emotional literacy. It doesn’t always show up in the moment you teach it. Sometimes it shows up two days later. Sometimes two years.

The Workplace Version of the Same Story

Work isn’t that different.

I operate in a system that moves fast, says it values clarity, and still expects answers without offering preparation, coaching, or feedback. I’m dyslexic, which means I see patterns quickly but don’t always compress them into the single static data point people want. I’m a systems‑driven consulting professional in an environment that often prefers the illusion of simplicity over the honesty of complexity.

We’re in resource debt — the kind everyone feels but no one names, because naming it would require changing the system. Clarity is demanded, but the conditions for clarity aren’t provided. Questions get treated as resistance instead of due diligence. Collaboration gets mistaken for deflection. And when I say yes to stretch work because there’s no one else to do it, the cost stays invisible until it isn’t.

It’s a strange thing to be asked for precision while standing in fog.

And yet, like Sanni, I keep showing up with honesty instead of control. I keep trying to support the system without pretending it’s something it isn’t. I keep practicing the virtues — courage, temperance, wisdom, justice — even when grace isn’t reciprocated.

Because that’s the contract I’ve made with myself. It isn’t transactional, and it isn’t misframed by expectation — like Marcus Aurelius, external to all else, it’s simply the most reasonable approach available.

The Internal Version: Loving My Own Wiring Without Clipping It

The hardest place to apply the Sanni‑letter logic is inward — where the cliffs are mine. Some shaped by my choices, others by forces I never touched.

My brain runs hot — part pattern‑recognition engine, part myth‑making machine, part asylum. Endurance training helps. Routines help. Parenting neurodiverse kids lets me watch my own firmware boot and glitch in real time.

Loving my own wiring means not sanding down the edges that make me… me. It means accepting that clarity takes time. It means refusing to shrink myself into a version that fits someone else’s operational preference. It means writing my own version of that letter — the one I keep editing as I journey through reasonable self‑scrutiny.

Why the Sanni Letter Matters Here

Because it names a truth I rarely say out loud —

Even though each day, like Alex, I grow a little more emboldened in the simple, plain work of acceptance and adaptation as I keep walking the path of reasonable self‑scrutiny:

Loving someone — a partner, a child, a colleague, or yourself — requires holding excitement, anxiety, and respect at the same time. It requires acknowledging the cost of someone’s wiring without trying to rewrite it. It requires staying in the conversation even when the terrain is uneven. It requires courage to support without controlling, and humility to name when the load is heavy.

That’s the connective tissue between my family, my work, and my internal life. It’s all the same story — the same terrain repeating in different forms: how do we love people, including ourselves, without clipping anyone’s wings?

The Closing Loop

If there’s a thread running through all of this, it’s simple:

We don’t choose the wiring we’re given, but we choose the contracts we make with each other. We choose honesty over performance. Presence over control. Courage over comfort.

Sometimes we even choose to write the letter — not to change someone, but to witness them.

That’s the climb. That’s the contract. That’s the work.

Sanni’s letter is that dynamic in miniature — the quiet contract between two people standing on their own cliffs, choosing not to shrink or to look away.

Just like I’m trying to do in my own life.