It’s like being stranded behind a pane of glass—your mind can still build cathedrals, but you’ve lost the key to the front door. The everyday stuff—speech, reading, rhythms of social interaction—fractures. Meanwhile, the deep structures, the insights, the recursive loops of thought—they’re still there, maybe sharper. But try explaining that to someone who’s already decided you’re broken. The world doesn’t want difficulty. It wants fluency, smiles, small talk. As soon as it senses asymmetry, it pulls away.
There’s no easy way to say this: people are scared of difference. Not evil, just lazy and frightened. So when brain damage hits someone who’s wired differently to begin with—someone whose strengths are atypical—it’s not just disorienting, it’s alienating. They say intelligence is about pattern recognition, abstraction, creativity. Fine. But none of that matters when you can’t make complex phone enquiries or follow a webform or navigate the kinds of everyday conversation one is generally expected to. The pain isn’t just the injury. It’s watching everyone treat you like you’re not worth the effort to understand.
🤕
Daedelus Kite 