Notes from a Time Traveller by Elke Stevens

At Island games in Orkney 2025!

After years — maybe decades — of surviving life through masking and disconnection, I find myself learning how to feel again. Not in the abstract emotional sense, but physically, viscerally. My nervous system is no longer numbed. It’s awake now. Sometimes too awake.

The other day, after an appointment, I challenged myself to go to a local cycling race. It wasn’t just about watching. It was about being in it — the crowd, the noise, the movement, the sharpness of air against skin. Exposure therapy, in the rawest form.

I lasted 15 minutes. Two rounds of cyclists whirling past.
But I stayed. I existed in it.

And my body exploded with sensation. Everything was loud and full. My skin buzzed like an electric fence. I was aroused, in ways I didn’t know were possible, overstimulated, intensely alive — and I didn’t know where to place any of it. My nervous system was in a buzz! I drove away in my car and let out screams coming from deep in my tummy, shaking and very alive. Tears followed. Not from sadness, but from the sheer intensity of being. Of feeling. Of not dissociating.

It’s overwhelming, yes. But it’s mine.

This is what reclaiming my body looks like. This is what my autistic embodiment feels like, once the mask is removed and the nervous system stops bracing for impact every second of the day. It’s brutal. It’s beautiful. It’s rebirth and pain and joy and expansion, all at once.

And maybe next time, I’ll stay for three rounds.

© Elke T.B. Stevens 18/07/2025