🌀 This Is Not a Conclusion

A meditation on recursive awareness, misframing, and the courage to live in complexity

May 14, 2025

I’ve been watching the way we talk about ourselves.

About our minds. Our spirals. Our survival strategies.

I watched a video by a creator with influence, where he described metacognition as a subsurface layer of thought. Something separate from presence. Something, he suggested, that leads autistic people into dissociation.

I paused. Felt my body tighten. Not in anger—but in recognition. In the ache of hearing someone speak with certainty about something I know from the inside.

This isn’t about calling someone out. It’s about calling something in.

It’s about the quiet harm that happens when people with platforms narrate neurodivergent experience through the lens of pathology. It’s about how language can flatten, even when the intent is to honor.

And it’s about the difference between certainty and coherence.

Certainty demands resolution. Coherence invites complexity.

We don’t need more certainty. We need more truth-telling that can hold contradiction. We need more bridges—between minds, between bodies, between truths.

Living With Recursive Awareness

For as long as I can remember, I’ve lived in layers.

There’s the moment I’m in—and then there’s the awareness of how I’m in it. The questions that ride shotgun: Am I doing this right? Did I say that the way I meant to? Am I safe right now? Did I factor in how they might take it?
And beneath that: Why am I like this?

This isn’t a detachment. It’s not an escape. It’s a kind of cognitive echo—my mind folding back on itself, again and again, not to flee the moment, but to understand it more completely.

For many of us—especially those who are autistic, gifted, trauma-shaped, or ancestrally attuned—recursive awareness isn’t optional. It’s how we survive.

It’s how we’ve adapted to environments that weren’t built for us. Environments that required us to watch ourselves, because being misread could mean rejection, punishment, or harm.

But recursive awareness is not dissociation.
It’s not a rupture from reality—it’s an overlap.

It’s living in two or more realities at once: the one we’re in, and the one we’re reflecting on. It’s deeply present—just not in the way most people mean when they say “be present.”

🌬️ Pause here. Feel your feet on the ground. Let your shoulders soften. Notice where your body is responding. Let that response be part of the knowing.

Introducing Holographic Perception

What I’m beginning to call holographic perception is the experience of dimensional thinking—the ability to perceive multiple emotional, contextual, and cognitive layers simultaneously.

It’s not fragmented.
It’s not disconnected.

It’s like standing inside a prism and seeing the whole room refracted through overlapping truths. Or holding up a mirror to your mind and realizing the reflection isn’t duplication—it’s depth.

Holographic perception isn’t a symptom. It’s a form of embodied knowing.
And for many of us, it’s ancestral.

It echoes Indigenous and spiritual traditions where seeing the unseen—feeling the interwoven web of context, energy, and meaning—is not pathology. It’s wisdom.

Naming the Harm of Misframing

When someone with reach speaks about inner experience—especially someone framed by algorithmic authority—their words ripple outward. People listen. People internalize. People shape their self-concept around those narratives.

So when someone says, with certainty, that autistic metacognition is a form of dissociation, it doesn’t just reflect their truth.

It risks becoming the truth.

Because metacognition—especially in neurodivergent people—is already misunderstood. It’s already pathologized. It’s already too often mistaken for avoidance, anxiety, or illness by those who can’t comprehend what it feels like to live in a layered, meaning-making mind.

And when we collapse that experience into psychiatric language, we reinforce a system that labels insight as instability. We erase nuance. We overwrite brilliance.

This is why language matters.
This is why positionality matters.
And this is why speaking from your lens as if it’s universal is not just intellectually lazy—it’s a misuse of power.

What Dissociation Really Is

I know what dissociation is.

Not from a textbook.
From the inside.

Dissociation is a rupture. A severing. It’s what happens when presence becomes too painful to bear—when the body or mind steps out, not in reflection, but in retreat. When the only way to survive is to disconnect.

It’s not meta-awareness.
It’s not recursive reflection.
It’s not internal pattern-seeking.

It’s absence.
It’s fog.
It’s watching your life like you’re behind glass and someone else is moving your limbs. It’s terrifying, disorienting, and often involuntary.

To conflate this with metacognition is more than a misunderstanding.
It’s a flattening of human experience.

And for those who do live with dissociation, it makes their truth harder to name too.

Because if everyone who reflects deeply is “dissociating,” then what do we call it when someone truly disconnects?

The Positionality Gap

There’s something else we need to talk about—something that often goes unspoken when certainty takes center stage.

Who is speaking? And from where?

When a white, male creator speaks about neurodivergent experience with broad certainty—and doesn’t name his lens—it matters.

Because platforms amplify not just what’s said, but who says it.

Has he engaged with…

Indigenous thinkers whose perception includes the spiritual?
Black and brown autistic folks navigating trauma-informed cognition?
Femme neurodivergents shaped by social surveillance and emotional labor?
Those of us who live in multiple dimensions at once—not because we choose to, but because we must?

I’m not saying he hasn’t. I’m saying he didn’t say.
And that omission is the erasure.

Speaking about neurodivergence without naming positionality is like mapping a forest from a single treehouse. You might describe what you see in good faith—but you’ll miss the shadows, the terrain, the undergrowth where other lives move differently.

Coherence Over Certainty

Certainty is seductive. It feels safe.
Algorithms reward it. Audiences crave it.

But I’m not here for certainty.
I’m here for coherence.

Coherence is slower. It holds paradox. It doesn’t rush to close the loop.

It says:

Yes, I am self-aware.
Yes, I sometimes feel fragmented.
And no, those things are not the same.

Coherence is relational. It emerges in witness, in shared truth, in complexity held together by care.

A Call to Responsibility

If you have reach, your words matter.

Not to be perfect—but to be accountable.

We are not speaking into a vacuum.
We are speaking into ecosystems of people still trying to find themselves.

So please—speak from your lens, not as if it’s the lens.
Name your limits. Honor contradiction. Make room for the voices algorithms ignore.

Because when you speak with certainty, people listen.
And when you leave no space for nuance, people disappear.

And those of us who live in nuance?

We’ve disappeared enough.