I Don't Need A Label - But I Do Need The Language
Part 4 in the The Space Between Selves series: Coming Home Through Science, Spirit, and the Nervous System
📍 Inside this post:
Making peace with diagnosis as framework—not identity
What it changes to finally speak a system’s language
When “performative” becomes “high-masking”—and why that matters
Reclaiming self-trust by giving grief better vocabulary
How naming doesn’t limit—it liberates
I’ve never needed a label to know who I am.
But as I’ve been deep in the work of re-understanding both myself and my child…
I’ve realized something quietly seismic:
I don’t need a label to define me.
But I do need the language to defend me.
Not just in the spiritual sense.
In the IEP meetings.
The public school hallway hand-offs.
The clinical evaluations.
The words I was using before—intuitive, somatic, energetic, performative—were deeply true.
But they weren’t the ones that systems respond to.
And I realized:
For my son to get what he needs, I have to speak in terms the system can’t deny.
The same has become true for me.
When I learned the language around high-masking autism—to describe someone who appears regulated, high-achieving, even high-functioning…
but is internally collapsing under the pressure of hiding who they really are—
something in me dropped into place with both clarity and grief.
All the fatigue I’d spiritualized. (Hello, gaslighting myself!)
All the overstimulation I’d overridden.
All the betrayal I felt when people praised my "calmness" while I was in full internal chaos—
made sudden, sharp sense.
And here’s what dismantled me gently:
That same praise was what my son was receiving, too.
Spiritual frameworks saved me in young adulthood and early motherhood.
Astrology gave me words when Emotional Regulation and Auditory Processing Disorder were still nowhere on my radar.
Human Design showed me sensitivity as purpose, not problem, and how my energy flowed naturally.
Meditation gave me a nervous system pattern to return to, before I knew the science of why it worked.
But frameworks have limits.
Especially when your child—or your inner child—needs material, not metaphor.
What I’ve come to see is that diagnosis isn’t destiny.
But it can open doors.
It doesn’t tell you who you are.
But it often tells you how to communicate with systems that would otherwise render you invisible.
For the record, I don’t care about a label. Truly.
What I care about is validation, resourcing, and the ability to interpret behaviors through a lens of comprehension, not blame.
What I care about is that my son is understood in real time, not decades later.
What I care about is that the grief I feel for how long it’s taken—for both of us—is met with tools, not shame.
Diagnosis is one kind of tool.
It sits in the same toolkit as prayer, embodiment, snap recollections of ancestral pain, and child-led clarity.
It’s not the whole picture—but it finally let me frame something I’d been feeling all my life.
Now, I understand that my child’s needs aren’t “quirks”—they’re architecture.
His structure needs specific inputs in order to function.
So do mine.
And when those inputs aren’t met—
We don’t “get dysregulated.”
We get lost.
Naming isn’t a box.
It’s a map.
And I fought for too long with no coordinates.
For every person out there who’s found bizarre comfort in a midlife diagnosis…
Or felt guilt for even wondering if you, too, are part of this spectrum of difference…
You don’t need a label to legitimize your self-understanding.
But don’t starve yourself of language that could build a bridge—
to others, sure.
But more importantly, back to you.
✴ Next post: A return to voice—not in theory, but in tone.
What it means to rebuild rhythms of communication after unmasking.
For literal family systems and for your platform voice, too.
✴ This post is part of my series: The Space Between Selves
✴︎ TRICIA, TODAY
I’m a mother, space-holder, emotionally gifted human and recovering over-functioner. I’ve spent my whole life reading people, gathering tools, intuiting truths—and only more recently realizing that what I called “spiritual” was also wildly, exquisitely neurobiological. I write to remember. And to give language to what lives between conditioning and clarity.
Ways we can work together:
If you’re in the midst of naming, integrating, or shifting frameworks faster than the system around you can comprehend—
You’re not broken. You’re recalibrating human.
🧭 1:1 Becoming Sessions → name what's real, soften what's not yours. Book here.
🌱 Attuned Circle (Fall 2025) → parent from presence, rewire your own. Email me to join.
🌿 Home As Healing: A Nervous System for the Soul
A live 6-week circle starting this Fall (currently enrolling—space limited)
→ For those unmasking in body, identity, and voice—while tending kids, careers, and the quiet grief that comes with all of it. Email me to join.
DM or reply to this post to ask questions or be put on my radar to let you know when All The Info about these upcoming circles comes out. No commitment or pressure.
You’re not the only one feeling it.
And now, you don’t have to walk it alone.
Reply to this post “I’m curious” if you want a space to land.
Or just shoot me a message at triciamartinowen@gmail.com (they all go to the same place, my direct inbox :). Quiet questions are sacred, too.