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I spent 6 years trying to make my son easier to explain to other people. I didn't understand yet that he was never the problem. The teacher called on a Tuesday. "He disrupted the class again. Have you tried a different approach at home?" I sat in the parking lot of the grocery store that same week, after the meltdown in aisle four, crying into my steering wheel. Wondering what I was doing wrong. What method I hadn't tried yet. I had tried every method. What I hadn't tried was stopping. Stopping the correction. The social stories designed to make him seem more palatable. The quiet apologies to strangers. The years of treating who he actually was like a problem I was failing to solve. He wasn't failing at normal. Normal was failing him. When I finally stopped fighting his operating system and started learning how it actually runs, he didn't become a different kid. He became more himself. And I became someone who could finally see him clearly. He's twelve now. He still melts down sometimes. He still doesn't make eye contact at birthday parties. He also builds intricate worlds out of cardboard and knows more about tide pools than most adults I know. That kid was always there. I just had to get out of the way. If any of this sounds like your house, Liven has a short quiz that helped me understand what was driving my own exhaustion. Not his. Mine. Link is below.