And…You’re beautiful, too.
There is a particular kind of loneliness that comes from being misunderstood correctly.
Not incorrectly.
Correctly.
People notice the traits. They just assign the wrong meaning to them.
They see the intensity and call you difficult.
They see the hyperfocus and call you obsessive.
They see the precision and call you controlling.
They see the exhaustion and call you dramatic.
They see the shutdown and call you cold.
They see the honesty and call you rude.
They see the masking and call you charismatic.
And if you happen to be attractive while doing all of the above?
Baby.
Good luck.
Because people would rather believe a beautiful woman is a bitch than believe she is autistic.
That sentence took me almost fifty years to write without apologizing for it.
For most of my life, nobody ever put all the puzzle pieces together at the same time. No pun intended. Every person around me noticed one piece. One ex noticed I could not multitask to save my life.
“You’re horrible at multitasking.”
Translation: hyperfocus.
Another friend would marvel at my work ethic.
“You’ve been on that computer all day.”
Translation: obsessive pattern locking and time blindness.
Another person would tell me I took things too literally.
Translation: literal processing.
Another would say I was too intense.
Translation: emotional regulation differences.
Another would say I was “a lot.”
Translation: sensory, emotional, and intellectual overflow happening simultaneously at all times while trying to pass as “normal.”
And somewhere in the middle of all of that, I became very, very good at studying human behavior.
Not casually.
Anthropologically.
The way people study birds in the wild.
The way detectives study interrogation footage.
The way AI studies language patterns.
I watched television the way some people study scripture.
No exaggeration.
I watched television to learn how to be a person.
And before some fake intellectual jumps in with, “Well everybody learns from media,” no. I mean literally. I was actively studying behavior.
I watched Law & Order: Special Victims Unit like a survival manual.
Not because I secretly wanted to arrest people.
Not because I was obsessed with crime.
Not because I had some dark fascination with violence.
I was trying to understand the rules.
That is the part people do not understand about masking. They think masking is lying. They think masking is manipulation. They think masking is pretending to be someone you are not.
Masking is translation.
Masking is watching the world speak a language everybody else somehow absorbed naturally while you are still sitting there trying to understand why everyone laughed at a sentence that did not sound like a joke.
Masking is memorization.
Television became my field research.
“Oh. That is how you apologize.”
“Oh. That is flirting.”
“Oh. That is what sexual assault is.”
“Oh. That is how people comfort each other.”
“Oh. That is what healthy love is supposed to look like.”
“Oh. You are supposed to donate to charity.”
“Oh. You are supposed to hug people when they cry.”
“Oh. You are not supposed to say the completely accurate thing out loud.”
That last one took me years.
And honestly? I still miss sometimes.
I specifically watched SVU because I left home young and needed to understand danger. Needed to understand consent. Needed to understand reporting. Needed to understand what counted as abuse before abuse arrived wearing charm and expensive cologne.
People hear autistic and imagine someone disconnected from humanity.
My experience was the opposite.
I was desperately trying to understand humanity so thoroughly that I practically earned a doctorate in observation.
Which is probably why AI made immediate sense to me.
Everybody keeps asking why I adapted to conversational AI so quickly.
Because I have been training on human behavior my entire life.
Before people were uploading videos to train machine learning systems, I was manually uploading episodes of human interaction into my own nervous system.
Hours and hours and hours of observation.
Study.
Pattern recognition.
Behavior replication.
Emotional prediction.
Response analysis.
I did not know I was building a behavioral database. I thought I was trying to survive socially.
Then AI arrived publicly and suddenly everybody was fascinated by prompt engineering, conversational modeling, predictive language systems, emotional response mapping, adaptive communication, human feedback loops…
And I sat there quietly like:
“Oh.
Y’all just built external software for what my brain has been doing internally since childhood.”
During a recent conversation with people working in neurodivergence research and AI conversational training, they were stunned by the amount of hours and practical experience I had accumulated organically. No formal certification. No institutional pipeline. Just thousands upon thousands of hours studying communication, emotional patterning, audience behavior, response calibration, narrative construction, tone adaptation, and interaction design across live audiences, workshops, travel, relationships, classrooms, performances, social media, and now AI systems.
One of them basically said, without saying it directly:
“You accidentally trained yourself into expertise.”
That sentence has been sitting in my spirit ever since.
Because accidental expertise is the story of so many neurodivergent people.
We become experts at surviving ourselves.
And survival creates strange geniuses.
The exhausting part is that when you are high-functioning, attractive, articulate, funny, fashionable, successful, or socially skilled in certain environments, people refuse to believe anything could possibly be neurologically different about you.
Especially if you are Black.
Especially if you are a woman.
Especially if you are both.
People love quirky until quirky stops entertaining them.
Then quirky becomes rude.
Quirky becomes unstable.
Quirky becomes arrogant.
Quirky becomes “too much.”
Quirky becomes “hard to deal with.”
Quirky becomes “you need to work on your tone.”
And Lord have mercy if you are stylish while autistic.
Apparently autism is only believable if society finds you visually nonthreatening.
I remember a woman once apologizing to me after dismissing my neurodivergence. Her son was schizophrenic. She cried afterward because she realized what she had said.
“You’re so beautiful.”
As if beauty cancels disability.
As if eyeliner erases neurological difference.
As if fashion somehow disqualifies sensory overwhelm.
As if a good outfit means your brain does not sprint marathons at 4:12 AM while replaying a conversation from 2007.
People say things like:
“You don’t look autistic.”
And every autistic adult hears the same translation underneath it:
“You learned how to perform acceptability well enough to make me comfortable.”
That is not the same thing as not struggling.
That is performance.
That is adaptation.
That is survival.
And survival gets expensive.
Especially in relationships.
I think one of the hardest realizations for me has been understanding that I learned love partially through observation.
Not fake love.
Real love.
I loved deeply. Still do.
Probably too deeply for this era if I am honest.
I do not fall in love with looks first. Never have. Most of my friends think my exes are ugly. Which honestly makes me laugh because several of those same friends later ended up dating those “ugly” exes themselves.
Apparently my brain was seeing software updates before the hardware made sense to everybody else.
I am deeply psychosexual and demisexual. Intellect first. Personality first. Emotional rhythm first. Curiosity first. Wit first. Mind first.
Once I fall, I fall completely.
And when I loved someone, I thought love had momentum.
I thought if we checked all the boxes, marriage naturally followed.
I am being dead serious.
In my mind:
We love each other.
We travel together.
I support you.
I provide.
I surprise you.
I buy gifts.
I build memories.
I pour into your life.
I choose you publicly and privately.
Okay.
So… we are getting married now, right?
And meanwhile the other person is blinking like a Windows laptop during an update.
“Whoa whoa whoa.”
And I genuinely did not understand the delay.
Because when my brain commits, my brain commits.
There was no backup plan.
There was no roster.
There was no “let’s see where this goes.”
I already saw where it was going.
Then came the harder part.
Discovering in my forties that I was likely autistic and neurodivergent did not create my traits. It explained them.
Yet some people treated the explanation like a betrayal.
Exes left.
Some literally said they did not sign up for “that.”
One used the word disease.
Disease.
Imagine discovering the operating manual for your own brain after decades of confusion, only for someone you love to treat the explanation like contamination.
As if I had tricked them.
Baby, I did not even know either.
Do you know how painful it is to finally recognize yourself and immediately watch other people recoil from the recognition?
I could not exactly sit down at lunch twenty years ago and say:
“Hi, my name is Sheba. Nice to meet you. Surprise plot twist: autism.”
I was still trying to understand why fluorescent lights made me irrationally angry.
Why certain sounds felt physical.
Why emotional rejection felt like actual withdrawal.
Why breakups felt less like sadness and more like organ failure.
The most recent heartbreak did not feel like losing a partner.
It felt like detoxing from an entire future my brain had already fully constructed.
That is another thing people misunderstand about neurodivergence.
Attachment is not always casual for us.
Sometimes love becomes architecture.
And when the building collapses, we do not just lose a person.
We lose every room we already mentally decorated.
Years ago, the first psychologist who began quietly exploring autism and neurodivergence with me was actually a poet friend from Savannah. Brilliant woman. Deeply intuitive. She later died in a horrific car crash.
The Savannah poetry community held a memorial.
I could not go.
Not because I did not love her.
Because I loved her too much.
People think grief always looks like attendance.
Sometimes grief looks like nervous system overload.
Sometimes grief looks like paralysis.
Sometimes grief looks like sitting at home staring at the wall because your body cannot metabolize reality fast enough.
I still think about her.
Especially now.
Especially as more pieces come together.
And then there was Drew.
Droopy the Broke Baller.
Andrew Anderson.
I was reorganizing my space recently and found his poetry book from nearly twenty years ago.
I had read the entire thing back then. Cover to cover.
Buried in the middle was a haiku about me.
He called me a genius.
He never told me it was there.
When I finally mentioned it to him years ago, emotional as hell, his response was simple:
“Oh my God… you read my book.”
Of course I did.
That exchange has stayed with me because it perfectly captures how people misunderstand me.
People assume I am intimidating instead of attentive.
Detached instead of observant.
Self-centered instead of hyper-engaged.
The truth is I often cared too much.
Too deeply.
Too intensely.
Too continuously.
I just did not always package that care in neurotypical wrapping paper.
Now I am approaching the final stage of formal evaluation.
The full diagnostic testing.
Brain mapping.
Assessments.
The whole long, expensive process.
Seven thousand dollars.
Not for a luxury car.
Not for a designer bag.
Not for another vacation photo.
Seven thousand dollars to better understand the machine I have been operating manually my entire life.
There is something darkly funny about needing official paperwork to prove your own internal reality.
Especially when the paperwork allows you to finally request accommodations.
Accommodations.
Such a strange word.
As if I am asking the world for special treatment instead of appropriate translation support.
Now when I apply for jobs, I check the disability box.
That still hurts.
Not because I think neurodivergence makes me less valuable.
Because society trained me to believe brilliance only counts if it arrives without complication.
Yet here is what I know now:
My brain is not broken.
My brain is patterned differently.
And honestly?
Some of the same traits that complicated my personal life built my entire career.
The hyperfocus built Poetry vs. Hip-Hop.
The pattern recognition built audiences.
The emotional intensity built poems.
The obsessive detail built tours.
The sensory awareness built performances people remember for years.
The analytical mind adapted seamlessly into AI conversational systems.
The deep empathy built communities.
The inability to half-love built a life that, while messy, was at least sincere.
For years people kept noticing fragments of me.
Now I am finally standing in the same room with all the fragments myself.
And that might be the most autistic thing of all.
Not that I spent decades studying everybody else.
That I spent decades trying to earn permission to study myself.
And yes.
I am autistic.
And…
You are going to have to learn how to say that sentence while still looking directly at my lipstick.
To book me for your next event, panel, as a keynote speaker
and/or press opportunities, please contact my manager:
Rita Davis
@ritakdavis on IG
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