Autistic Inconsistency and the Pain of Unrealized Potential
- Elle Dee
- Oct 10
- 3 min read
There are things I will never know about myself.
Not because I didn’t want to.
Not because I didn’t try.
But because I’ve lived long enough to know what the trying can cost.
And sometimes that cost is more than I can pay.
Those are the paths I couldn't give myself permission to take.
Some I started, then slowly backed away from.
Not out of fear. Not because I'd failed.
But because I could feel how quickly my capacity would unravel under the weight of sustaining them.
That's a difficult thing to explain to others. It was difficult to explain to myself.
That it's rarely about whether I can do the thing.
It’s about whether I can do it as often and consistently as the world seems to expect.
Not because I couldn't
The most painful decisions I’ve made weren’t about things I couldn’t do.
They were about things I could do, but knew I wouldn't be able to do for long.
This is what autistic inconsistency asks of me: to constantly assess the long-term cost of my own capacity.
To recognize that doing something once - joyfully, even brilliantly - doesn’t mean I can do it again tomorrow. Or the day after that.
And the world doesn’t know how to hold people like me.
The world knows how to praise consistency.
It does not know what to do with brilliance that flickers.
So I’ve learned to back away early.
Not because something has gone wrong.
But because I can feel my own sustainability of self slipping away.
It’s a kind of slow, deliberate self-abandonment - leaving before I’m asked to leave.
Quitting before I break.
I break sometimes anyway.
The quiet rewrites everything
My entire life has formed around this rhythm.
The jobs I didn’t take.
The creative work I didn’t return to.
None of them were beyond me.
But all of them required a kind of endurance I couldn’t offer without disappearing inside it.
This is the part that’s hardest to carry.
It’s not regret in the usual sense.
It’s not failure either.
It’s something quieter than both.
It’s knowing I could have done something meaningful
if the world had made room for my rhythm –
or if I’d had the courage to carve out my own.
Instead, I've built a life of soft exits.
Graceful retreats.
Strategic invisibility.
I’ve become someone who moves like smoke instead of stone.
Because permanence feels like a risk I can’t afford.
Who am I beyond survival?
I’m tired of being grit porn.
I'm tired of being celebrated for how well I tolerate what shouldn't have been asked of me in the first place.
I want to know who I am when I’m not holding everything together.
When I’m not fixing the cracks or absorbing the impact or writing a beautiful caption about how I made it through.
Who am I when I’m not recovering?
When I’m not adapting?
When I’m not trying so hard to make a life out of less than I need?
Maybe I’ll never know the version of me who could build without also collapsing.
But I still want to believe I can become a version who doesn’t treat collapse like a character trait.
I want a to create a life that doesn’t require resilience just to exist.
I want softness without raw survival behind it.
I want ordinary days that don’t warrant applause.
And more than anything,
I want to stop being proud of how gracefully I can disappear.
-Elle
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