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When The Kid was four and in pre-K in a special needs class in Atlanta, I was speaking with a couple of the other moms of kids in his class. One of them mentioned their family’s future plans in some generalised way and then added about her daughter, “that is, if she snaps out of this by then.”

The statement jarred me even as it revealed a tendency of my own: to plan for the future according to several possibilities at once, all depending on how independent TK would be, all my anxiety brought to a point and diverted into a load that he would unwittingly bear.

In some ways it was the wake-up call I needed. In some ways, that was when I snapped out of it: out of the denial I’d been mired in since his diagnosis, out of my hiding from terms like autism and spectrum, out of a purely fearful posture that was informed by misplaced shame.

Now we talk about autism most days in our house. TK has proclaimed it “a blessing and a curse,” but to be clear, at this point, for him, it’s all blessing: it’s his “cool brain” that works like an Apple computer. His self-awareness growing daily, he’ll often stare into the distance with a smile playing on his lips and remind me of how, last year (all the way back in year 3), the other boys in his class would look out for him while they played tip together.

I know it’s more complicated than that, and that as he gets older he, and all of us, will see the nuance and shades of grey that are right now supplanted by a black-and-white view of the world. But we’re starting early with rejecting shame around here, and if this is what that looks like right now, then I’m good with it.

Anytime those kind of “snap out of it” thoughts try to intrude on our present moments–and they still try–I have to remember what’s true: that, in my life, the way home has always been the scenic and winding one, the one with hills and mismatched terrain, the one that I didn’t choose but that chose me. I was bounced from the straight, flat path awhile ago, from Plan A and predictable outcomes, from certainty suffusing all our choices. I didn’t pack for much of this journey but somehow I’ve always had what I needed when I needed it: views to take my breath away, people to share them with.

Alternate time lines are not just the playground of Marvel screenwriters; our anxious selves toy with them constantly. Right now, in Sydney, the case numbers rise exponentially and we all readjust our expectations for a return to school (and, more importantly, departure from homeschooling), a “normal” Christmas. The future flutters beyond our reach but we try to define it anyway. It must be a mistake, an aberration, this darkest timeline in which we are currently tangled, right? We have to just get out of it.

It’s impossible for me, though, given my story, not to hear shades of “snap out of it” in that. Not to hear a wishing away of what’s real, and a missing of its beauty in the process. There have to be gifts here. I know it because, for me, this is where the best gifts have always been.

In her weekly trove of wisdom, Maria Popova writes, “Great storytelling, then, deals in the illumination of complexity — sometimes surprising, sometimes disquieting, always enlarging our understanding and self-understanding as we come to see the opaque parts of ourselves from a new angle, in a new light.” To me this contains echoes of what Lamar Hardwick, an autistic American pastor, has written: “…there is no need for a second edition of me…autism and all the struggles that come with it may at times keep me from loud rooms and long meetings, but it won’t keep me from my best because I am exactly who I am supposed to be” [emphasis mine].

Who I am supposed to be, where we are supposed to be. No Plan B waiting in the wings, no alternate timeline to jump into. Because, for some currently unknown and endlessly annoying reason, we wouldn’t be who we were made to be without this one, and we won’t be allowed through it without all the gifts it has waiting for us.