I sat at the window, my chin resting on my folded knees and my forehead pressed against the ice-cold glass that separated me from the outside world. I hated days like this- where my brain insisted on working faster than the rest of me, and the only thing I could do was just sit up against my window and wait for everything to slow back down. It was days like this where I couldn’t think, I couldn’t breathe- where the slightest touch from anyone else would send me into overdrive. Where I needed space- and when no one would give it to me I ended up yelling or screaming because no one understood what I needed and I couldn’t let them know what I wanted because even I couldn’t figure it out, let alone tell them that. And sometimes I’d end up crying, or running away, or something along those lines because I just couldn’t take it.

But that was when I was with other people. When I was alone I didn’t have to worry about all that. I still felt like screaming, like crying, like everything was moving so fast that I couldn’t hold onto anything and I just felt like curling up under my blankets and ignoring the entire world until my brain could start functioning again. When I was alone I could do all that, and no one would give me weird looks, or tell me to knock it off, or laugh at me and think I was being funny when really I was on the verge of a breakdown.

I rocked in place and hummed softly to myself, my forehead knocking slightly against the window. The constant movement put my chaos at bay, the repetitiveness of it all giving me something that was reliable, something that slowed down my racing consciousness as I felt my breath moving my chest up and down…

They didn’t understand; why I needed to just stop sometimes, what made my brain work so much differently than theirs… But then again, I couldn’t understand how they could just keep going, keep talking, keep thinking without feeling like their head was about to explode.

So many thoughts, so much filtering through my brain, so many words and feelings and things I just couldn’t explain to anyone- and so I did what I always did. I went into my room, I locked the door, I sat at my window, and I breathed. And it didn’t make sense- but I didn’t think about it. I just sat. And rocked. And hummed. And breathed.

And somehow, even though they didn’t understand- once my thoughts slowed down, they never really slowed down. They still kept going, but I’d gotten used to it. And what they didn’t get was all I needed was time. Time to myself. Time to think. Time to hum. Time to breathe. And once I did, I was fine.

My breath fogged up the glass, and I had stopped rocking and was back to just resting my head against the windowpane. I closed my eyes, feeling the cold against my cheek and just letting myself breathe.

And I was fine. Or at the very least, I was going to be.