Everything Everywhere All at Once: The Sensory Weight of Being Neurodivergent.
A poem from the 90s collection 'Portrait of Shadows'. The signs of undiagnosed Autism (ASD), sensory overload, and how creative insubordination serves as a tool for survival in the neurodivergent body
Life
I seek: Eyes burning in the bleakness
Torn wrists lashed by dreams
A desert heart lashed by distress
A spine bending to the weight of being
I find: The air heavy with doubt
The sudden chill of absence
The brief rain of zest
The driving wind of illusion
I dream: A gaze touched by the horizon
Clenched fists against reality
A heart carving an oasis in the soul
And in the breeze upon my face, the beauty of being
Everything Everywhere All at Once in the Neurodivergent Body
Three acts, three places, and three times. This poem could easily borrow its title from the film Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022). And the “same place” is the body of the neurodivergent girl who processes the contrast between her reality, her feelings in reaction to that reality, and her desires.
This poem is part of the work “Portrait of Shadows” (Retrato das Sombras), written between the ages of 14 and 20, in the mid-90s. In analyzing these verses today, I search for the signs of undiagnosed ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder): a roadmap of a sensory and emotional world that was already there, long before it had a name.
Dreaming—perceived at the time as an escape from a reality that demanded precious time for the actions capable of building that very reality—is what saves. The dream functions as a patch that prevents these two realities, the internal and the external, from leading this organism to collapse.
One of the advantages of not having a full reading of the context is not recognizing the limits of one’s origin and social strata. It is not external definitions that limit us; it is those internalized as value and morality that can ruin everything.
In this sense, ignorance of one’s own shackles was, paradoxically, a tool of liberation. Without being fully aware that the world expected her to collapse under the “weight of being,” that teenager insisted on inventing exits.
The dream, therefore, ceases to be alienation and becomes an act of creative insubordination. It is the exact moment when the girl, surrounded by the harshness of the “bleakness” and the “sudden chill of absence,” decides not only to endure these raw burdens of pain but to place them upon the spinning wheel of imagination.
The poem “Life” (Vida) is the record of this feverish and simultaneous process. It is the document of a very young weaver who, operating almost in the dark and without an instruction manual, managed to transform the indigestible raw material of sensory suffering and social isolation into threads of light, dignity, and resilience. What we read now is not merely an outpouring; it is the material proof of the triumph of inventing oneself.