28/09/2025
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1BVhYL1qAE/
DIVERGING WORLDS
We grew up unseen, unheard.
No doctor with a label,
No teacher with a book,
No parent with a map.
Only words that stung:
Messy, careless, stubborn, lazy.
We wore those words like skin,
Believing they were truth.
We learned to tolerate,
To swallow irritation,
To wear the scratchy jumper,
To keep quiet when noise, light
Or too many faces
Made us want to scream.
We told ourselves:
It must be me.
So we masked -
Until we forgot there was a face beneath.
Now in our forties, fifties, sixties,
We are waking up.
The world suddenly speaks
A language we recognise in our bones.
Children with diagnoses
Say no without shame,
Draw their boundaries without apology.
“I don’t like this texture.”
“I need the light off.”
"I dont want the noise"
And they are heard -
They are supported to feel
Every difference.
We see in them what we needed -
And it breaks us open.
It is not that there are more of us,
There is no rising epidemic,
We have always been here,
An old ocean hiding in plain sight.
It is only that the light has shifted,
And for the first time
We are reflected back.
We grieve the child
Who was told stop being so messy,
To focus more, to stop being silly,
To be better, to be careful,
To be different from who she was,
And we grieve the years
Of forced belonging
That cost us our selves.
But grief is only half the story.
The other half is relief -
To peel away the mask,
To breathe air meant for us,
To finally say:
I am not broken -
I am differently wired,
And I am allowed to be.
We are the crucial ones -
The bridge generation.
The ones who unmask late
So that those who come after
Will never have to.
We carry the quiet years in our bones,
But we refuse to pass them down.
Let the children keep their no.
Let them keep their quirks.
Let them know their smallest truths
Are not small at all.
For we are the masked generation,
And by removing ours,
We are teaching them
Never to wear one.
Heather Lea