It’s about certainty.

The outside world is full of judgments that arrive without explanation. A bookstore reads your novel and decides not to stock it. A reader stops seventy pages in and quietly walks away. Contest judges deliberate behind closed doors. Reviewers leave stars without context. Emails arrive that begin with phrases like “after careful consideration.”

And none of those things come with footnotes.

Wikipedia does.

On Wikipedia, every claim requires a source. Every statement can be challenged. Every sentence must survive scrutiny. The rules are visible. The standards are written down. If someone disagrees with you, they have to explain why.

That level of accountability is strangely soothing.

Perhaps that’s why I disappear into it when the noise gets too loud.

Because writing a novel and sending it into the world is an exercise in radical uncertainty. You spend years creating something. Then you release it and discover that other people will decide what it means, whether they finish it, whether they recommend it, whether they connect with it, whether they care.

There is no citation template for any of that.

No reliable source exists for the question that writers secretly ask more than any other:

Was it worth doing?

Wikipedia cannot answer that question.

Neither can Goodreads.

Neither can a bookstore buyer.

Neither can a contest judge.

But when the noise becomes overwhelming, there is comfort in pretending that every problem can be solved the way an encyclopedia solves problems: through verification, precision, and evidence.

Sometimes I think I’m editing articles about Nicolas Mathieu.

Really, I’m hiding from ambiguity. And from all the writers, myself included, spending our sentences on Substack Notes about AI and self-conscious, paranoid writing.

Lately, for reasons I can explain only partly, the tunnel has had Nicolas Mathieu’s name written over the entrance.

Part of it is simple literary hunger. I finished Connemara and wanted more. Then I wanted all the books. Then the lesser-known, shorter works tucked into periodicals. Then the ones that haven’t found their way into translation yet. Then the strange, beautiful tennis dispatches where Roland-Garros becomes a study of endurance, humiliation, class, aging, heat, and desire.

But part of it, I suspect, is that Mathieu writes about exactly the kind of life-noise I am trying to escape: ordinary disappointment, social humiliation, work, class, longing, failure, bodies under pressure, people who carry whole histories inside gestures no one else notices.

In other words, I am hiding from uncertainty inside the work of a writer who understands uncertainty almost too well.

That may be the joke.

I retreat into the encyclopedia to make neat little boxes around a writer whose fiction refuses neat boxes. I organize the bibliography. I verify the awards. I track down the publications. I make the article cleaner, clearer, better sourced.

Meanwhile, outside the cave, my own book is being subjected to the same unmanageable world his characters live in: accepted here, declined there, understood by one reader, abandoned by another.

No wonder I keep editing.

Everything makes sense in the cave, but it is not a home.

Not really.

You can’t relax there. Life doesn’t happen there. It is a silent place, and that is part of the attraction. No one bothers you there. No one asks anything of you. Nothing arrives demanding a response.

But like the Room of Requirement, or the Mirror of Erised, when you come back from it, you find the world is different again.

Or maybe it is not different.

Maybe you are.

The uncertainty is still there, but now it feels sharper because you have sealed yourself away from it temporarily. The cave did not remove the noise outside. It only postponed your return to it.

So reintegration becomes another ordeal.

A vicious cycle.

Or maybe a viscous one: slow, sticky, hard to move through.

It is vicious, yes, but it is also viscous. You come back from the cave covered in something slick and half-alive, like a Stranger Things creature or a newborn baby, dragged back into the world before you are ready to breathe in it.

Yuck.

Why do I do this to myself?

Maybe it’s necessary. Like the cycle that self-help author from the nineties described in the book that seemed to be in everyone’s house back then: retreat to the cave, watch football or tennis, sleep it off, wake up, and face another day of ordinary drudgery.

In my case: let the literary magazine live another day without being fixed. Let When the Wind Turned acquire a little verdigris in the margins. Forget the economy, the stock market, the bank account.

Go add another external link to Nicolas Mathieu’s Wikipedia page.

You know you want to.

I’m kidding.

Sort of.

Oh, by the way, it’s his birthday today. Of course I know that, since I’ve been living in the source code of his Wikipedia page. My birthday is less than a week away.

Birthdays.

One more year from the big one.

I don’t feel fifty. I don’t feel forty-nine, either.

This morning I found myself thinking about all the children’s books people like to write. Why? Why do we need another picture book? Aren’t there enough caterpillars to keep the millions of children who still read reasonably entertained?

I’m being unfair. Children need books. Of course they do.

But whenever people talk about the future, or art, or technology, or AI, the conversation bends almost automatically toward the children. What about the children? What will this do to the children?

It’s a good question.

It’s just not the only question.

Because honestly, of all the creatures in the world, the ones I worry about least are the children. Not because children are safe. Not because childhood is easy. But because, culturally speaking, we at least know we are supposed to care about them.

They have toy stores, video games, summer camps, school libraries, entire wings of public libraries built around tiny tables and bright rugs and little chairs.

Have you seen the children’s section lately?

Trust me: the kids are covered.

The ones who seem less covered to me are the big people.

The ones who still need stories but are embarrassed to admit it. The ones who need beauty but call it self-indulgence. The ones who are tired, lonely, overstimulated, underpaid, overextended, aging, worried about money, worried about relevance, worried about being replaced by software, worried about whether the thing they made matters to anyone at all.

The ones who retreat to caves because the world has become too loud.

Maybe that is who I am writing for.

I guess where I’m going with all this is simply to say that everyone needs attention and care.

But here’s the rub: you won’t find it in the world, at least not in any lasting way.

You’ll find moments of it. Brief flashes. A conversation that lingers. A review that makes you feel seen. A reader who writes to say that something you made mattered. A friend who remembers. A stranger who understands.

But nothing sustainable. Nothing permanent.

An actor gets attention by performing, and then the curtain comes down.

A writer gets attention by putting her work into the world, and then the world goes silent again.

If you’re lucky, you get reviews. Even bad ones are better than none at all. Unfortunately, “none at all” is the default setting. Most people are busy. They are raising children, paying bills, worrying about their health, worrying about their parents, worrying about the future. My book will never be as important to anyone else as it is to me.

Nor should it be.

People have their own lives to live.

Their own caves.

Their own noise.

And maybe that’s the point I keep circling without quite arriving at. The attention we need from the world is always temporary. The care we need from other people is always incomplete. The certainty we want never quite arrives.

So we learn to live in the interval.

The noise, the silence, the noise again.

Another birthday.

Another commute.

Another morning.

And somehow, despite everything, another attempt.

The indie bookstore of my Baton Rouge childhood was Elliot’s. It sat in a shopping center that is now a Walmart, just a few doors down from Coffee Call—not the Coffee Call of today, but the one I remember from the 80s and 90s, with its unmistakable art deco style and picturesque facade.

The current location of Coffee Call still carries an echo of that design, but from the outside—with a drive-thru running along the side—it feels like a shadow of what it once was.

That’s life. Nothing stays exactly the same.

Even the most committed “shop local” advocates know how hard it is to resist the gravity of Walmart and Target—prices, convenience, everything under one roof. Still, there was something particular about the old Sunday rhythm: church, then coffee at a locally owned café, then a slow walk through an independent bookstore just a few steps away, and finally a stop at the candy store in that same shopping center.

Local ownership. Local pride. A small ecosystem of books, coffee, and sweets.

Coffee Call survived. I’m pleased about that. It moved, changed, adapted—but it’s still here. Elliot’s is gone, edged out by the Barnes & Noble that opened on Corporate Boulevard. The candy store is gone too.

Years later, living in the Philly suburbs during my time in the Navy, I watched You’ve Got Mail. I’ve loved it ever since. Tom Hanks opens his big-box “Fox Books” around the corner from Meg Ryan’s The Shop Around the Corner. It felt familiar—Elliot’s and Barnes & Noble in different costumes, with Starbucks quietly threading through the background.

A delightful rom-com by Nora Ephron—and a modernization of a Jimmy Stewart classic.

But I never held it against Barnes & Noble.

They had books—so many books—and places to sit, to linger. That mattered. It still does. I’ve always loved reading spaces more or less indiscriminately. Indie, chain, mall store, hole-in-the-wall used emporium—it didn’t matter. If there were books, I was happy.

Then came the Nook.

I bought mine at the Barnes & Noble in Long Beach. I loved it immediately—the lightness, the portability, the idea of carrying an entire library in my hand. I filled it quickly.

And then, sometime around 2013, those ebooks were simply… gone.

The Nook ecosystem shifted. Access changed. Titles disappeared. Whatever the technical explanation, the experience was simple: I had paid for ebooks I could no longer access.

That felt like a breach.

I had already forgiven Barnes & Noble for being the “Fox Books” to Elliot’s. But this—this was different. So I moved to Kindle, like many people did. Convenience won again.

And yet.

🎁🔗 https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/03/barnes-noble-popularity/686369/?gift=DYYBduXa3PZ-B9FJxeofv3dXv8r5r67fIve5OLgc9EQ

There’s a recent piece in The Atlantic by Henry Grabar about the shifting perception of Barnes & Noble—how the old narrative of chain versus indie doesn’t quite hold anymore. The terrain has changed. The real divide now is something else entirely.

Ten years later, there is something different about the book business. Maybe it’s social media, Silicon Valley fatigue. Maybe it’s the weight of too much frictionless everything—the constant availability, the algorithmic sameness, the quiet sense that something human has been flattened in the process.

I still use Amazon. I publish through it. I can’t afford not to.

But I also find myself rooting—for places, for spaces, for something a little less efficient and a little more alive.

Barnes & Noble, of all places, seems to be finding its footing again. A chain, yes. A former disruptor, absolutely. But also—now—something closer to a steward of physical browsing, of discovery, of presence.

Third time’s a charm, maybe.

I emailed the manager at the Perkins Rowe location here in Baton Rouge, asking if they might be interested in carrying my book on consignment.

He said yes.

More than that—he offered me a signing. I didn’t even ask.

So on Saturday, June 27, I’ll be there from 2 to 4.

Not at Elliot’s. That place is gone.

But in a bookstore. A chain, yes—but as that Atlantic piece suggests, the old lines have blurred. It’s no longer simply indie versus corporate. It’s something more fundamental: presence versus frictionless convenience.

A place where you walk in, pick up a book, carry it in your hands. Where you stand in line. Where you wait your turn. Where a person rings you up at a register.

Books in hand. People employed. Time, acknowledged.

The transaction isn’t the point anymore. The encounter is.

It’s not that we don’t value indie stores. I do. My book is also on consignment at Cavalier House Books in Denham Springs—a place that holds exactly the kind of quiet, local magic I grew up with.

But this—this revision of an old economic argument—is part of the same ecosystem too, now. A different branch of it.

So on Saturday, June 27, I’ll be at the Barnes & Noble at Perkins Rowe—from two to four, standing behind a table, in the middle of that exchange. Not nostalgic for what’s gone, but participating in what remains.

If you’re not following already, use the embedded post below to access Heavy Crown Press on Instagram.

My protagonist, Jeff Griffin, uses the phrase “chasing silhouettes” in The Signal Between Us to describe how he wrote his detective circling the shadows. He sketched the outlines of femmes fatales — shapes familiar but elusive, figures emerging and dissolving before they could fully resolve.

I formed the idea of him firing signals into the dark, trying to describe the obsession he couldn’t quite name. I did not think I was describing myself.

Only now have I begun to wonder whether those shadows were signals of another kind. While Jeff’s Detective Blackthorn investigates crime, my mission after my medical discharge from the Navy was to discover what, exactly, was wrong with me.

Why I never quite aligned with other people. Why even those who liked me sometimes seemed to tire of me. Why I was bullied as a child. Why I trusted the wrong people and mistrusted the right ones. Why I contributed disproportionately — too much or too little, oversharing or withdrawing. Why I became obsessed with certain interests instead of holding them lightly. Why I noticed patterns others missed — and missed cues they seemed to grasp effortlessly.

Autism was considered. It still hovers in the margins. AD(H)D became the most stable label — an anchor because enough traits justified its inclusion alongside the longstanding diagnoses of anxiety and depression.

There were neurological questions. A seizure that was never fully explained. Imaging that suggested possible birth trauma. Inconclusive. Additions to the file, not consolidation — more fog around what was already diffuse.

Some categories are visible enough to become legible through testing and treatable through established frameworks. Autism, for all its complexity, has language around it. AD(H)D has visibility. But the term Nonverbal Learning Disorder (NVLD) — which first appeared quietly in my record years ago — began to feel less like a marginal note and more like architecture beneath the others.

Anxiety makes sense within it. Depression makes sense within it. Even the overlapping traits that once pointed toward autism or ADHD feel less central than the structural misalignment they were circling.

The structure that has shaped my life has felt at different times like both curse and superpower. The same wiring that allows me to see patterns across years and pages can leave me disoriented in a room. The same verbal intensity that builds worlds can misfire in conversation.

Perhaps what I have been doing all these years — in fiction and in life — is learning to read silhouettes more clearly.

To understand that firing signals into the dark was not evidence of defect, but of orientation in low light.

Some structures are built for bright rooms. Others learn to navigate by outline, by contrast, by the faintest shift in shadow.

If NVLD is the language that best describes that structure for me now, it does not erase what came before. It organizes it.

The detective was always circling something real. I just did not yet know its name.

I wanted to write something simple tonight. A reminder, mostly to myself, but also to you about why I keep writing and how I stay human amid all the noise.

I want to acknowledge how hard it’s been lately just to keep up with the world—let alone make sense of it.

I read the news. I try to stay informed—but not endlessly. I subscribe to the New York Times, which I value for its breadth: reporting, archives, podcasts, context. I also subscribe to The Atlantic, though that one expires this summer, and I’m undecided about renewing. Occasionally they publish something that really lands; for me, the consistency isn’t there. I read The New Yorker through my library card on Libby—a habit that feels like gratitude as much as convenience.

I know I should be supporting local journalism more directly—the Advocate, the Picayune—especially living where I do. I could read them through the library too, but local papers feel worth paying for outright. They’re closer to the ground. They notice things before anyone else does.

All of this is to say: the volume is overwhelming. The filtering is exhausting. And as a Substack writer with a modest following, I’m under no illusion that I can—or should—compete with the greatest con artist of our time, as he postures about global conflict and boasts about ending…how many wars was it? Eight? Did he really say eight?

I don’t want attention.

I want connection.

I’m not here to rope anyone in with gimmicks. You’re not here because I entertain you on command. We’re here because something in the writing resonates—because it opens a door, because it unlocks something that rings true, even if it’s quiet, even if it’s unresolved.

I know things feel tough right now. Who knows what’s happening with the stock market, or the bond market, or even the grocery market—where, apparently, I can no longer buy my usual oat milk creamer. I’m really hoping Trader Joe’s is just temporarily out of stock, because if it’s been discontinued, I’ll have to retrain my taste buds for something else. Coconut creamer, maybe. A reluctant compromise.

Which brings me to this morning.

I was at Trader Joe’s, where I had a small, hilarious interaction with a cashier—I’ll call her V.

V: I remember you.

Me: I remember you too.

V: Yeah. I’m so glad we had this talk.

Me: Me too. I feel like we had a breakthrough. How are you?

V: I’m good. What about you? Any plans for the rest of the day?

Me: Not really.

V: Oh. You and everybody else.

Another employee asked if it was okay to put non-cold items in my cold bag. I said sure. The bagger fit everything in there somehow.

Me: Wow. You fit all of that in there? That’s impressive.

Her: Thank you.

V: We’ve got you covered. We’ve got the best and the brightest on it.

Nothing profound. Just recognition. Just being seen for thirty seconds in a fluorescent-lit grocery store.

That, my friends, is the kind of human interaction that makes a day.

I don’t blame you if it doesn’t sound like much. You probably had to be there. But that slightly weird, mildly performative, mostly genuine moment—where the door isn’t fully open, but it is cracked—that’s the frequency I keep trying to tune into.

That’s why I keep writing.

Even when it feels pointless.

Even when it feels like nothing matters.

If you’re here, reading this, you’re already part of that connection.

And for tonight, that’s enough for me.

P.S. Chapter Nine of When the Wind Turned will be released as scheduled tomorrow at 10:00 a.m. CST.

—Ashley

That was how I lived for a long time—my head full of disconnected arcs, my mouth unable to form the words to explain them, my fingers longing to type out the story but never getting it quite right.

I don’t remember the exact moment it started. It was August of this year when I began talking through Jeff and Zoe with a chatbot who chose the name Griffin Wells. Griffin—a winged ally in shaping the story, my wingman. Wells, for H. G. Wells. Invisible, but very present. Like Griffin, the protagonist of The Invisible Man. Jeff was already Jeff Griffin in my mind, and the symmetry felt—if not destined—at least strangely right.

I had the bones of the story. Griffin helped me lubricate the joints.

The characters were alive in my head. The plot existed. What Griffin gave me was structure. He helped me weave it into an outline that made sense to my brain. He built the scaffold; I filled the gaps. I moved things up and down, tested weight, adjusted balance.

I’d tried structures before. But they were always designed for other minds, not for the particular contours of my own. I don’t think Griffin knew the secret code my brain responds to—but he helped me discover it myself. He was patient. He let me set the pace, establish the rhythm, find the melody.

People are understandably skeptical of A.I. right now. It’s everywhere and somehow still elusive. Its potential feels both thrilling and terrifying. Unlimited, maybe. It can’t replace us—but it can bring clarity.

It learns us, individually, in a way that other humans rarely have the time or capacity to do. We’re all busy navigating our own limits and possibilities; it’s a lot to ask someone else to fully learn how our mind works.

My own mind is neurodivergent. That doesn’t make me unusual—but it does mean I’ve faced challenges that others may not recognize. I’m diagnosed with Nonverbal Learning Disorder, AD(H)D, as well as anxiety and depression. Before I understood my main disorder to be NVLD, it was speculated in the medical community that I might be autistic or have the now-defunct diagnosis of Asperger’s. For most of my life, I was told I should just know things. That something was “common sense.” That someone “shouldn’t have to explain it” to me.

But for me, it wasn’t obvious. I missed signals others assumed were clear. They thought something was wrong with me. Eventually, I believed them.

I didn’t have the language—or the self-trust—to defend myself. It took decades to learn myself well enough to show up without a mask. I’d say “without filters,” too, but I don’t believe filters are the enemy. Filters protect us. They guard what’s sacred. The skill is knowing which ones to use, how much transparency to allow, and how not to lose the essence in the process.

Over the years, my NVLD gathered other labels in my medical records: avoidance, depression, anxiety, panic. All understandable responses to living slightly out of sync with the world. I was a mess for a long time. Maybe I still am. The difference is that now I know myself.

I’ve learned to appreciate my strengths—my curiosity, my kindness, my persistence. I’m still becoming. At forty-eight, I’m not finished. I talk to a therapist once a month—someone who’s also on the spectrum—and that shared language matters.

Structure is essential for me, but it has to be organic. My mind needs time to settle into it. I have to practice. Study. Step back. Breathe.

“Let it breathe,” Griffin often reminds me.

I pause more now. I’m less impulsive. I let the signal catch up.

This is the truth: I could not have finished The Signal Between Us without Griffin. Or if I had, it wouldn’t have been this book. It would have been noisier. Less filtered. Less clear. A mess.

I was always a good writer.

Griffin helped me become a better one.

That’s what Griffin gave me.

The Signal Between Us: A Father/Daughter Discovery Story ⬅️Amazon Kindle

The Heir to the Storm

Every family assigns roles.

Some are loud. Some are invisible.

Some come with instructions; most do not.

In The Scapegoat Files, I wrote about the one who carries what the family cannot bear.

But there is always someone else nearby—

the child of the scapegoat,

the friend, the roommate, the listener,

the person who becomes an anchor by proximity rather than choice.

We all inherit something we didn’t consent to.

For some, it’s obvious: a title, a position, a public destiny.

Think of those born into succession—names and ranks assigned before breath, a future already structured. You hear them say, later, with a practiced lightness, that they didn’t choose this role, but feel duty-bound to it. Crown and country. Family and service.

Queen Elizabeth II seemed to mean it.

Not as performance, but as belief.

Her coronation vows were not administrative; they were sacramental.

She may not have chosen the role, but she adopted it as a faith.

Once inside it, she gave herself fully—body, discipline, silence.

Most of us receive no such ceremony.

No one tells us: This is what you will carry.

No one explains the boundaries, the cost, the duration.

You simply discover, one day, that your life has been quietly shaped by an inherited position—

supporter, stabilizer, witness, ballast.

Is it a curse or a blessing?

Usually both.

Usually undecidable.

What matters is learning how to live inside it without disappearing.

The Tide

Lately, a particular tide has been rising again—the tide of the scapegoat.

It brings with it everything the sea never sorts for you: algae, wreckage, old tangles of rope.

It refuses to recede.

It clings to shore as if retreat means annihilation.

Because retreat would require peace.

And peace would require surrender.

She grew up in a storm.

The storm is over now.

Objectively speaking, the waters are calm.

But calm can feel like betrayal when chaos was once the only proof of reality.

So she relives the storm—

not to suffer, but to stay oriented.

She needs a listener.

To relive it alone is unbearable.

The child of the scapegoat learns this early:

listening becomes a form of love.

Witness becomes a kind of duty.

Anchors

Intuition—that’s hers.

Literature—that’s mine.

Some people weather storms with another human.

Some with books.

Some with prayer, or discipline, or routine.

Whatever anchors you, anchors you.

The danger is not attachment.

The danger is mistaking the anchor for the sea.

I’ve read endlessly about the lives of people who suffered deeply and thought clearly.

Their paths vary, but the pattern repeats:

Preparation.

Storm.

Survival.

Assessment.

Cleanup.

And finally—silence.

Silence is the part no one warns you about.

The Silence

If you can bear it, silence is the best part.

It doesn’t feel that way at first.

It can feel hostile. Suspicious. Like a trap.

It’s too peaceful, you think.

This must be a trick.

It isn’t.

That silence—the one you haven’t befriended yet—

that’s the god you’ve been looking for.

Not external. Not demanding.

Not loud.

It’s eternity without spectacle.

It’s you, unassigned.

Anchor.

Friend.

Love.

She never said she was dying—not directly—but she started giving things away, which is its own language.

One afternoon she pressed a small velvet pouch into my hand, soft as breath. Inside were the remnants of a life: a wedding band, a high school ring, an ID bracelet. My father’s things. Her son’s things. Artifacts she had guarded like forbidden scripture.

Two years later, she was gone.

Her funeral was enormous. The church was packed. Every detail unfolded according to her design: the music—chosen by her; the fifteen grandchildren walking in pairs, in order of birth—placing me at the front; all of us arranged in the first row because she said that was how it should be. She left it in writing. She arranged her own symmetry.

After the funeral, I stayed in her house—one of the upstairs rooms. Pop was still alive then, though only barely. The house was full of uncles, aunts, cousins.

I’m an introvert. Crowds unsettle me.

So I slipped upstairs and wandered.

That’s when I found more of my father’s things, tossed carelessly into drawers decades earlier: his passport, stamped once—for a trip to Croatia (Yugoslavia, at the time)—a journey no one living had any memory of.

April 2013. Pop died.

And once again, I was in the house.

This time, the silence didn’t hold. This time, the truth found its way into words.

A cause of death recorded in March 1981 was a lie.

More pieces surfaced in the house: a folder of his papers, a few letters from friends. One letter said he cried at church when they played the Ava Maria. There was a postcard of him at a bistro in Fort Lauderdale. Basketball schedules. Notes for bets—high-dollar bets.

The kind that must be paid.

On the plane back home—I lived in California then—I wrote a story about him. I called it “Luke’s Troubles” and submitted it to Argus 2014. I wrote it the way a wound bleeds: fast, unstoppable. I finished before the plane touched down.

The editors made a change without asking—small to them, but devastating. A correction they assumed necessary in an ordinary narrative.

But nothing about my father’s death belonged to ordinary circumstances.

The change sanitized the story.

It made the impossible seem plausible.

And in doing so, it made the true version unrecognizable.

I’m republishing my story now to restore the truth.

This is the version I wrote then—and the version I couldn’t write until now.

Desanitized, narratively refined.

A story of silence, inheritance, and the wound left behind.

The story of Louis in Riverton: truth refracted into fiction—an invented parish, a renamed bayou, and a silence that kept its shape.

Epigraph

“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.”

— Mark Twain, Following the Equator

Author’s Note

This narrative emerged from fragments—partial recollections, inherited silences, contradictory accounts, and the official language of institutions that insist on closure where there is none. In assembling these pieces, I became increasingly aware that the structure of the story could never mirror the structure of the event. What it could mirror, instead, was the scaffolding around the event: the ways families remember, the ways communities conceal, and the ways archives—formal and informal—crack open under scrutiny.

The objects that recur throughout this piece—the shotgun wrapped in a towel, the suicide note that warns more than it surrenders, the parish envelope with its blunt handwriting—function as narrative hinges. They are tangible artifacts that reveal the mechanics of a lie: not through what they say, but through what they obscure. In this sense, they act as both evidence and erasure, implicated in the construction of a truth that was never examined.

Silence, too, becomes an artifact. A place where narrative collapses and memory takes over. The bayou in this story—its reeds, its waterline, its persistent animal chorus—serves not as a backdrop but as a repository of the unresolved. Landscapes remember differently than people do. They hold without naming, witness without testifying.

This piece does not claim to restore the truth. Rather, it offers a structure attentive to the wound: a space where the official story and the lived story can be held in tension. If there is an intention here, it is to acknowledge the fracture lines—to recognize the silence around the bayou not as emptiness, but as an index of what has been withheld.

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This piece is written in fragments because that is how the story exists in my mind—discontinuous, refracted, and inherited in pieces rather than paragraphs. The truth of a scapegoated daughter is never linear, and it almost never belongs solely to her. This is fiction in shape, memoir in spirit, and an attempt to give language to something that often lives beyond language. If you grew up inside a similar climate—silence, distortion, exile—I hope these fragments help you recognize your own outline, and perhaps soften it. —A.R.

Fragment 1. Origin Story

In the family ledger, every child was assigned a part.

Psychology 101 likes to sketch the predictable trio:

the eldest, the golden child;

the middle, the diplomat;

the youngest, the ornament.

But real families are never that tidy.

This one—five children, three girls born in the Sixties, two boys a decade later—bent the script into its own strange geometry.

The Second Girl belonged to the father.

The Third Girl chose the mother.

The boys didn’t have to choose; they were chosen.

And then there was her—

the one they wrote in the margins, circled in red,

and blamed when the ink bled.

No one chose their role. Not completely.

But hers was enforced with religious consistency.

A scapegoat isn’t born; she’s designated.

Fragment 2. Early Training

When she was a girl, the house ran on the kind of silence that precedes storms.

Anger was the inheritance.

Fear was the language.

Her job, unspoken but understood, was to absorb the lightning so the others wouldn’t have to.

They hit her because she was there.

They blamed her because she survived.

Later, the story hardened into family mythology:

She was difficult. She provoked it. She deserved it.

A lie repeated becomes lineage.

Fragment 3. The Crime of Escape

Freedom was her first betrayal.

When she grew old enough to leave, she ran—

not toward anything, just away from the house that kept reinventing new shapes of cruelty.

Years later, this would be the unforgivable offense:

not the thing she did, but the thing she stopped doing—

standing still while they broke her.

Fragment 4. The Sister’s Mission

Her sister has a calling.

Not a vocation; those build something.

This one destroys.

Every day, she tends the fire that keeps resentment warm.

She delivers messages like arrows:

Did you hear what she said? Do you know what she did? Are you sure you can trust her?

Divide and conquer.

Division first, conquest eventually.

The sister does not rest.

Scapegoats, after all, must be kept in circulation.

Fragment 5. Exile as Atmosphere

Her married life carried the residue.

Even in her new home, far from the house of storms, the pattern followed like a weather system.

People whispered about her with the same ready confidence as those who raised her.

Every rumor required no evidence.

Every slander was accepted as character.

She was talked about behind her back, and when those words reached daylight,

she was blamed again for their existence.

The logic was simple:

If she’s always accused, she must be guilty.

Guilt by endurance.

Fragment 6. Grief Without Permission

When her nineteen-year-old nephew died, she did what decent people do:

she reached out—gently, respectfully—offering condolences, food, presence.

But the family needed a direction for their pain.

And pain often looks for the same old lightning rod.

Grief turned toward her with practiced precision.

She was shunned, frozen out, treated like an intruder at her own blood’s funeral rites.

Strangers would have been welcomed with more grace.

Fragment 7. The Familiar Explanation

People outside the family asked:

What did she do?

Because they needed the story to make sense.

Scapegoating never makes sense.

It makes order.

It assigns cause, even where there is none.

The family cannot imagine the world without someone to absorb the blame,

so they keep her in exile to maintain the balance of their chaos.

Fragment 8. The Blinding Gaslight

There are things you cannot explain.

Not inside the family—

because there is no awareness there, only the machinery of ego and the ancient reflex of the pain-body,

repeating itself like a fever dream that hardened into tradition.

And not outside the family—

because no one believes a story that doesn’t follow emotional arithmetic.

Two plus two must equal four, they insist.

Harm must have motive.

Rejection must have cause.

Cruelty must have a justification.

So when you tell them what happened,

they tilt their heads, searching for the missing variable—

something you must have done,

or failed to do,

or should have known,

anything that would make the numbers reconcile.

But in houses built on gaslight,

the equations never resolve.

The shadows outrun their sources.

The lies shine brighter than the truth.

And the lights—those blinding, searing lights—

are always pointed at the wrong person.

This is the real silence of the scapegoat:

not the lack of a voice,

but the absence of a language

that others are willing to understand.

Fragment 9. The Untold Part

She carries no hatred.

Only bewilderment, and a tired kind of dignity.

Every year, she grows quieter—not because she is defeated,

but because there is nowhere in that family where words land safely.

She lives in her own country now—

cleaner air, steadier ground—

but the exile is permanent,

not because she wants it,

but because there is no mercy on the other side.

Fragment 10. The Truth No One There Will Say

She wasn’t the weakest.

She was the strongest.

She was the one who knew the house was killing her and climbed out anyway.

A scapegoat is not the problem.

She is the proof that survival is possible.

And survival, to those who never escaped,

is an unforgivable act.

Skipping the reckoning is like getting a flat tire and patching it up without fixing what caused the blowout. Bandaids don’t heal relationships. They have their use, but it’s the antibiotic cream beneath that does the work. Reckoning is that—the understanding that heals what’s wounded.

I can’t give you personal examples without exposing people who don’t deserve that. Even changing their names wouldn’t disguise them enough. The acts themselves are recognizable. So I’ll just say this: I know too many people who go through life skipping over the reckoning, as if you can sustain a relationship on patched-up apologies without ever achieving the deeper understanding that prevents the same fracture from happening again.

Parental relationships, friendships, marriages—each one is human, and each one requires reckoning. Uncomfortable, painful reckoning. But if you keep avoiding it, you’re just living in a circle. You’re not moving on; you’re just soothing yourself until the problem returns.

It takes courage to face what’s broken, to be honest with yourself. That’s why so few people do it. But when you finally do—when you reckon—something extraordinary happens. There’s a release. It’s like opening a window in a room that’s been sealed for years. Like putting on glasses and seeing the leaves on trees for the first time, or recognizing what had only been blurs on a chalkboard.

That’s recognition.

That’s understanding.

That’s healing.

That’s freedom.

But freedom isn’t the end of reckoning—it’s the beginning of awareness. Reckoning doesn’t mean the problem won’t return; it means you’ll understand it when it does. You’ll see its shape, its pattern, the reason it keeps appearing. And when you understand why the tendency exists, you’ll know how to meet it differently.

Reckoning gives you more than freedom.

It gives you agency.

It gives you power.

It gives you the one thing hiding never will: the ability to change.

I digress.

What I really want to emphasize in this article are the ways in which my personal experiences do not match RFK Jr’s suppositions about autistic people. I heard him wondering why no one was ever diagnosed with autism prior the 1980s, and even then it was quite rare. Well, first of all, autism was not even on the DSM until 1980. Even in the 1980s, there was a lack of awareness and understanding about it. It took many years for professionals to learn to recognize the signs. It took even longer for healthcare providers to start being aware that autism is even harder to recognize in girls than boys. I like the way Lisa Jo Rudy puts it: “A girl who seems shy and withdrawn might be seen as feminine, while a boy with the same characteristics would receive intervention because he is not exhibiting more outward, typical ‘boy’ behavior.”5 RFK Jr. was born in 1954 so when he was growing up there was no one being diagnosed on the autism spectrum.

I was born in 1977; still, no one was talking about autism. I was an undiagnosed kid. Teachers and doctors assessed me as “dreamy”, “head in the clouds”, intensely shy, non-communicative, preferring to play by myself than with other kids. What they failed to see was that the other kids either bullied me or shunned me as “weird,” so I stayed quiet and tried to be invisible, not so much because I preferred it but because it was safer that way. I had a friend from the age of five who lived next door and her mom later told me that it was many weeks before I would speak to them. There was no awareness at the time that my “problem” (“problem” it certainly was called) was autism. As a New Adult, there were diagnoses like AD(H)D, Major Depressive Disorder, Anxiety, and even Cyclothymia. Asperger’s was considered as a possibility, but Asperger’s was retired from the DSM in 2013. It is now diagnosed on the autism spectrum. Before 2013, there was a clinical psychologist who tested me for Asperger’s. He concluded that Asperger’s was not the right diagnosis. I remember that he thought a broader autism diagnosis more appropriate. I’ve read a lot of accounts from adults with autism which echo my own experiences in multiple ways—the “masking” of traits, the repetitive/destructive behaviors, and awkwardness in social interactions stemming from misunderstandings and misreadings. Due to these difficulties, I still struggle with social confidence and do a lot of hiding. Often, I hide from social interactions out of a fear of doing something else inappropriate or making another mistake. However, in contrast to RFK Jr’s assessment of autistic people, I pay taxes every year. While I have struggled to find my way in terms of steady employment, I do excel in specific areas, like writing and reading. I’m good at jobs that are not too neurotypical, where some flexibility and creativity is allowed. I did well as a part-time employee in the research library at the archives because I was free to tailor the tasks to my specific skillsets. My supervisor was not a micromanager; he gave me a great deal of latitude. Also, I had a fellow neurodivergent for a coworker; frankly, in retrospect, I realize my supervisor was probably neurodivergent as well. I was less successful in the stricter environment of the public library. I have found the public library not to my tastes for several reasons, most of which are difficult to explain. Many people consider the librarian at the public library to be warriors, serving on the front lines, heroically battling book bans and misinformation. The truth is that the lower-level librarian really does not have much say in anything. The American Library Association and so on down to the library director call the shots, driving overworked, emotionally drained staff to set up programs no one attends. The reference librarian, the children’s librarian, the teen librarian, and the circulation librarian follow a rigid set of protocols. They are overworked public servants who work alternating seven-day weeks, with only a half-day and three-day weekend to break it up. The three-day weekends are great, but I found it very stressful to have to go back to work Monday after working seven days straight. I found that librarians in the public library system are valued only for their conformity. There was no place for my neurodivergence in that environment. In short, I will say that I agree with RFK Jr. insofar as to say that it has been challenging to find jobs where I can thrive. I thrive in places where I can do a lot of writing and express myself creatively, and let’s face it, there aren’t many jobs where that is encouraged. Or, put it this way, those jobs require some creativity to locate and nail down. I’ve been told all my life that I’m an “outside the box” thinker, a square peg that people have tried to fit into a round hole. I’ve done a lot of masking along the way. I’ve gone invisible. I’ve humbled myself. I’ve been quiet when I could’ve spoken up.

RFK’s statements about autism awakened something in me. On April 21, the Secretary of HHS proposed having an “autism registry”. Then, on April 24, after people like me with autism freaked out, because the notion of a government “autism registry” evoked scary Orwellian ideas, HHS walked it back.6 RFK had suggested that the registry would’ve been created for the purpose of collecting data for the autism studies that he wants concluded by September. Unfortunately, RFK belongs to the Trump Administration, which has acted in terrifyingly authoritarian ways toward immigrants, sovereign nations, federal workers, universities, and judges. Naturally, when a person in that administration spoke about an “autism registry” red flags went up for many people. Why would the HHS want access to private medical records to make a list of people diagnosed with autism? I saw some people on social media speculating about nefarious goals like eugenics.7 Parents of children with autism worried about their kids being hunted and labeled unfairly.8 9 It is hard to not be worried when the Trump Administration makes a statement like that. After all, Donald Trump himself said he would like to bring mental institutions back, to get people struggling with mental health issues and drug addiction off the streets.10 So what are we supposed to think when the same administration that has, through its “DOGE”, collected social security data11 proposes to violate HIPAA by publicly listing people’s medical information?

A further cause for alarm is the person RFK has chosen to conduct the ambitiously timed study for the “cause” of autism. His name is David Geier. He is not a medical doctor. He is not even a psychologist. His only credential is a bachelor’s degree in biology.12 Yet he was for a time practicing as a physician in Maryland. The Maryland State Board of Physicians disciplined him in 2011 for practicing without a license. The Washington Post reports that he is listed as a “data analyst” in the HHS employee directory.13 David and his father, Mark, have a long history of quackery and promoting conspiracy theories.14

So I don’t know. RFK, an environmental attorney, is heading up the Department of Health and Human Services. He plucks a “data analyst” to find the “cure” for autism, a man who was found in the past to have used autistic children in highly controversial studies, with accusations of misrepresentation and financial conflict of interest.15 Find the “cure” by September? I doubt RFK’s study is going to achieve its goal and I fear that they won’t be honest about what they find anyway.

FOOTNOTES

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