Archaeological Dig

The books on autistic emotional processing arrived like archaeological manuals for excavating her own psyche. She learned that neurotypical people experience emotions as flowing states—anger becoming sadness becoming relief in fluid transitions, like weather systems moving across an emotional landscape. But autistic emotions were more like geological formations—sedimentary layers building up over time, creating pressure until something shifted dramatically in what could only be described as emotional earthquakes.

She had been storing emotions in her body for decades without realizing it, like a hoarder who had forgotten about entire rooms filled with unprocessed feelings. Her shoulders carried the weight of impossible expectations that had been placed there by people who had never bothered to provide the instruction manual for meeting them. Her jaw stayed clenched against words she wasn't allowed to say—decades of unexpressed truths locked behind her teeth like prisoners in solitary confinement. Her hips remained tight from years of hypervigilance, ready to flee from dangers that never quite materialized but never quite disappeared either. Her stomach contracted around swallowed rage, creating a permanent knot of unexpressed fury at the unfairness of navigating a world designed for different neurological operating systems.

The exercises were simple but profound, like learning to read a language that had been written on her own body without her knowledge. Lying on the floor, she would systematically tense and release each muscle group while paying attention to what emerged from the physical release—emotions that had been trapped in tissue and bone like insects preserved in amber.

Emotions, she discovered, had physical addresses. Fear lived in her chest, creating a tight band across her ribcage. Anger had taken up residence in her shoulders, building itself into permanent tension that she had mistaken for normal posture. Sadness pooled in her pelvis, creating a heaviness she had carried for so long she had forgotten it wasn't supposed to be there.

Daily practice revealed the sophisticated architecture of her emotional suppression system. She learned how she used her diaphragm to compress feelings before they could reach conscious awareness, like a biological air filter designed to screen out inconvenient emotions. She discovered how she held her breath when processing difficult information, as if oxygen itself might make painful truths more real. Her entire nervous system had been organized around the principle of not-feeling as a survival strategy—a biological defense mechanism that had protected her from trauma but also cut her off from the full spectrum of human experience.

The monthly journey to the neighboring village became a sacred ritual, like a pilgrimage to a shrine dedicated to the healing arts. An hour bus ride through countryside that changed with the seasons provided time to prepare mentally for the experience of being touched therapeutically rather than exploitatively—a distinction her nervous system was still learning to recognize.

The massage therapist was a woman in her fifties who seemed to understand bodies as landscapes of stored experience, able to read the geography of trauma like a cartographer mapping uncharted territories. Her hands could read trauma like braille, finding places where energy had become trapped, where muscles had organized themselves around old pain and built permanent monuments to suffering.

'Aromatic massage' meant essential oils chosen specifically for nervous system regulation—lavender for overstimulation, eucalyptus for mental clarity, sandalwood for grounding. But more than the oils, it was the quality of touch that created the healing. Slow, deliberate, respectful contact that asked permission of her nervous system rather than demanding compliance, like a polite visitor requesting entry rather than an invader breaking down doors.

For the first session, she cried for the entire hour. Not from sadness, but from relief so profound it felt like a religious experience. Someone was touching her with intention to heal rather than harm, to give rather than take. Her body remembered what safety felt like—a sensation so foreign it felt like discovering a new sense she hadn't known she possessed.

After weeks of this routine—proper nutrition, regular movement, emotional processing, therapeutic touch—something fundamental shifted in her perceptual apparatus like a software update to her nervous system's operating program. She was sitting in her kitchen one evening, reviewing the day with the methodical precision of someone conducting a scientific experiment on her own consciousness, when the realization hit like a thunderbolt of recognition:

She had never felt fear.

Not real fear. Not the healthy, protective emotion that warns of actual danger like a biological early warning system. What she had experienced her entire life was hypervigilance—constant scanning for threats, perpetual activation of fight-flight responses, chronic anxiety that had nothing to do with present-moment reality. It was like having a smoke detector that had become so sensitive it went off whenever someone made toast, rendering it useless for detecting actual fires.

But fear? The clean, sharp signal that says "this situation is dangerous, take appropriate action"? That had been absent from her emotional vocabulary, like trying to navigate the world with a crucial sense organ permanently disabled.

She thought back through her entire history with the systematic thoroughness of someone reviewing evidence in a cold case: walking alone through dangerous neighborhoods at night, trusting people who radiated predatory energy like warning beacons, entering situations that screamed 'trap' to anyone with functioning survival instincts. She had interpreted this as courage, as fearlessness, as some kind of strength that set her apart from more cautious people.

Now she understood it as damage. Her fear response had been broken by years of exploitation, like a security system that had been systematically disabled by people who needed her to be vulnerable. When every situation is dangerous, the warning system eventually shuts down from exhaustion, leaving the person to navigate threats without any internal guidance about what constituted actual danger.

She had become fear-blind, unable to distinguish between actual threats and the background radiation of constant danger that had been her normal operating environment. The spy who had stolen her research had succeeded partly because her fear detection system was offline—she had missed obvious warning signs that would have been apparent to someone with functioning threat assessment capabilities. The trafficking networks had been able to use her for decades because she couldn't smell danger the way healthy people could, like someone trying to detect gas leaks without a working sense of smell.

But with proper nutrition, regular movement, emotional processing, and healing touch, something was recalibrating in her nervous system like a sophisticated instrument being restored to factory settings. She was beginning to feel the edges of what might be authentic fear—not the chronic anxiety that had plagued her like background static, but the sharp, intelligent warning system that healthy nervous systems used to navigate actual danger.

For the first time in her life, she was learning to feel afraid of the right things. It was like developing a new sense organ in middle age—disorienting but incredibly valuable for someone who had been navigating the world with crucial safety equipment permanently offline.

The irony wasn't lost on her: she was finally becoming properly frightened, and it felt like the healthiest thing that had happened to her in decades.