Notes from a Time Traveller by Elke Stevens

Eight years later, the realisation arrived quietly, like mist rising off familiar ground, only now seen through a different light.

I was living in Orkney when I finally named it: Autistic.
Two syllables that unravelled decades of misdiagnosis, silence, and shapeshifting.

It was a lightning strike, not a single revelation. It was thunder, painful, when I wished it had been gentle. Like the way the wind speaks across the stones here, whispering truths older than time.

I wasn’t broken.
I wasn’t crazy.
I wasn’t weak.
I was different—and always had been.

There’s a saying I once heard: “Once living abroad, you can only miss what was—or what you imagine it is.” And it’s true because living far from where you were born distorts time. You remember home, but not as it is, only as it was, or as you wanted it to be. You reach backwards through memory and myth, hoping to touch something that no longer exists in its original form.

That’s how autism feels, remembering myself as I once was. As I could have been, if someone had seen it earlier. If someone had offered understanding instead of correction. If someone had said,
“This is a different kind of mind. A beautiful one.”

Instead, I had to leave everything familiar to hear the truth of who I am.
To feel it.
To claim it.

It wasn’t a clean moment. It came in waves, like the tides that roll in and out of Stromness harbour.
And with it came grief. Not just for what I missed back home, but for the girl I used to be, misunderstood in her own language, her own skin.

Now, I see clearly:
Home was never a place.
It was me, unmasked.

And even here, far from where it started, on these wind-bitten cliffs and sacred standing stones,
surrounded by gulls and ancient echoes. I am finally closer to home than I have ever been.

From now on, I will be gentle with myself as I meet the parts of myself with whom I used to be at war.

©️ Elke T.B. Stevens 03/06/25