Finding the Still Center

Staying open, feeling, and loving in a world that often refuses to feel

Two years ago, I was sitting in the wreckage of my former life, trying to write both an obituary and a tribute speech for my amazing daughter. No mother should have to do this. As I wrote, I begged people to be kinder, to listen, to look into their own hearts so the world could become gentler for kids like Maisa. For adults like me. Two years later, it doesn’t feel gentler.

Maisa's Tribute Speech

Over the past two years I’ve met so many mothers whose brilliant, sensitive, intuitive children couldn’t stay. Mothers so much like me. With children so much like Maisa. They were pattern-recognizers, truth-tellers. Healers. Kids who gave away their birthday money and loved the earth, people and animals more than they felt loved in return. They saw too much and were told they were wrong. They had loving families, yet felt unseen and misunderstood outside of their homes. They could not envision a kinder future that included people like them.

I’ve spent most of my life feeling unseen and trying to translate myself for a world that doesn’t quite speak my language. It’s like living in a foreign country where you can kind of communicate to get your basic needs met, but it is exhausting to do so and you never fully belong. This is what autistic masking feels like: contorting yourself over and over just to be partially understood, while still being misread. It’s a hard way to live. We try so hard to understand everyone else, and to fit in, but it rarely feels like others are doing the same.

I have always known that change is an inside job. I have practiced this for decades and lived it as best I could, even prior to Maisa’s death. I have always tried to be kind and to meet the world with curiosity and grace. What’s changed over the past two years isn’t my awareness, it’s the depth of my embodiment. It’s the energy I am willing to put towards trying to get someone else to understand me. Grief has stripped away what was performative until only what was real could remain. It has resulted in several additional, painful losses, but left me with gifts of clarity and truth.

I used to believe words could fix things. If I could find the right argument, the right evidence, if I kept trying again and again, maybe people would finally understand, would see me. I even became a lawyer chasing that possibility. But no amount of explaining can fix a lack of curiosity. No words can make someone open when they’re not ready. Words alone can’t heal a nervous system that doesn’t feel safe.

So now my practice is simpler: to just focus on being what I was always trying to describe. To stop begging the world to change and keep embodying the kindness, curiosity, and unconditional love I once pleaded for. In the hope that I can create safety, first and foremost for myself, to feel, and then allow others to do the same. For it is in feeling everything that we find our true path to wholeness.

If you are someone who feels too much, who is tired from translating yourself, who wonders if you can survive the weight of feeling so much in a world that often refuses to feel, please know you’re not alone. I thought it would break me too. It hasn’t. Somewhere inside the devastation, the immense ache, through the ebb and flow of countless tears, I have been able to find a still center, like the eye of a hurricane, where love and peace live untouched. I believe you can find it, too.

Peace isn’t a single revelation. It’s the daily choice to stay open and curious, to find small and safe places to feel (next to a tree, an animal, or in the arms of your favorite human), to keep loving, and to surrender to the mystery, even when the world around you doesn’t seem to understand. Staying open, feeling the waves as they come, and continuing to love in spite of it all may be the most radical thing we can do.

The crashing waves and calm water underneath are part of the same ocean.