Marian Schembari > Quotes

“My feelings didn't have enough space inside my body.”
― Marian Schembari, A Little Less Broken: How an Autism Diagnosis Finally Made Me Whole

“I hate being interrupted. Whether I'm focusing on work or watching a show or giving a monologue about my vegetable garden, an interruption feels like I've been happily gliding across a frozen lake when all at once the ice cracks & I'm plunged into the frigid water.”
― Marian Schembari, A Little Less Broken: How an Autism Diagnosis Finally Made Me Whole

“Getting dressed meant juggling two opposing forces: the need to select an outfit that would help me fit in while simultaneously avoiding the desire to rip my skin off.”
― Marian Schembari, A Little Less Broken: How an Autism Diagnosis Finally Made Me Whole

“Stop being so difficult!' is the soundtrack to our childhoods, the refrain worming its way into our psyches until we silence ourselves before anyone else can, pushing through the unpleasantness until we snap.”
― Marian Schembari, A Little Less Broken: How an Autism Diagnosis Finally Made Me Whole

“I never fully relaxed around them either, as if I were playing the part of their friend and never truly connecting with my own needs.”
― Marian Schembari, A Little Less Broken: How an Autism Diagnosis Finally Made Me Whole

“My only wish in the whole world was to read a book alone in a quiet house and never once be interrupted.”
― Marian Schembari, A Little Less Broken: How an Autism Diagnosis Finally Made Me Whole

“I had internalized the names I was called - sensitive, moody, irritable, difficult - but they never felt accurate to my experience. What I felt was pain.”
― Marian Schembari, A Little Less Broken: How an Autism Diagnosis Finally Made Me Whole

“I worried I was trying to align myself with the oppressed to feel special & excuse myself a lifetime of shitty behavior.”
― Marian Schembari, A Little Less Broken: How an Autism Diagnosis Finally Made Me Whole

“Labels dull the ache of dismissal.”
― Marian Schembari, A Little Less Broken: How an Autism Diagnosis Finally Made Me Whole

“She couldn't have been the mother she wanted to be because she didn't know either. I'm sure all she saw was this awkward, antisocial girl who sucked her hair & read books & refused to play with her brothers. I felt sad for her and her inability to know me until now.”
― Marian Schembari, A Little Less Broken: How an Autism Diagnosis Finally Made Me Whole

“Parts of me feel so intertwined with you it's scary.”
― Marian Schembari, A Little Less Broken: How an Autism Diagnosis Finally Made Me Whole

“Self-care felt ludicrous, like putting a Band-Aid on a severed limb.”
― Marian Schembari, A Little Less Broken: How an Autism Diagnosis Finally Made Me Whole

“Something inside me was capable enough, scared enough, motivated enough, to do exactly the bare minimum to appear not like the witch in a hovel I truly was.”
― Marian Schembari, A Little Less Broken: How an Autism Diagnosis Finally Made Me Whole

“A swirling miasma of anger overtook me. I couldn't have told you that I was overstimulated, or that the world around me had become too much to bear. Nor did I know that an hour in [the] quiet house might have revived me enough to dip back into my family.”
― Marian Schembari, A Little Less Broken: How an Autism Diagnosis Finally Made Me Whole

“It was a level of exhaustion I didn't understand. Why was I the only one feeling like this?”
― Marian Schembari, A Little Less Broken: How an Autism Diagnosis Finally Made Me Whole

“Without a way to meaningfully contribute I often sat silently, looking uptight & dour while I scanned my mental files to pull up a conversation - any conversation - I'd heard in my twenty-three years to parrot back to them.”
― Marian Schembari, A Little Less Broken: How an Autism Diagnosis Finally Made Me Whole

“I learned that autistic girls are a group most likely to mask, simply by nature of the way we're raised. From birth we're enrolled in an intensive, lifelong training of putting others first. Sit still. Be quiet. Be helpful. Be agreeable. Keep tidy. Be pretty. Be friendly, but not too friendly - that's flirting, don't be a slut.
We can't walk down the street without strangers ordering us to smile. So on top of suppressing any unladylike behaviors, autistic girls double down on the mask by suppressing our stims, our sensory needs, our interests. We force eye contact and conversation and grit our teeth through the noise and the light and the itchy tags and sock seams and underwires digging into our rib cages. Because why the hell not? We're shoving it all down anyway. What's a little eye twitching when you're already caked in layers of makeup, Spanx, and exhaustion?”
― Marian Schembari, A Little Less Broken: How an Autism Diagnosis Finally Made Me Whole

“I felt like I was having to defend a thesis, not have an intelligent adult conversation with a doctor I'd known & liked for two years.”
― Marian Schembari, A Little Less Broken: How an Autism Diagnosis Finally Made Me Whole

“I was broken. Something inside me was inherently flawed & unloveable. The unspoken dynamics of my teachers and my family and my peers would never click into place. I would have to fake it.”
― Marian Schembari, A Little Less Broken: How an Autism Diagnosis Finally Made Me Whole

“My diagnosis gave me permission to honor what my brain needed.”
― Marian Schembari, A Little Less Broken: How an Autism Diagnosis Finally Made Me Whole

“Once they learned the name for how they showed up in the world, there was space to think, change their environment, & forgive themselves for all the ways they had thought they were broken.”
― Marian Schembari, A Little Less Broken: How an Autism Diagnosis Finally Made Me Whole

“I wasn't particularly pretty or silly or talented, though looking back on it now, neither were they.”
― Marian Schembari, A Little Less Broken: How an Autism Diagnosis Finally Made Me Whole

“My tics were a sign hung around my neck in shaky red script that read OUT OF ORDER. They were a visible indicator of something defective inside myself, a physical manifestation of faulty wiring, a clear differentiator between me & humans.”
― Marian Schembari, A Little Less Broken: How an Autism Diagnosis Finally Made Me Whole

“Laziness was my secret shame. It attached itself to my skin during childhood, and I lugged it with me.”
― Marian Schembari, A Little Less Broken: How an Autism Diagnosis Finally Made Me Whole

“Everything I owned made me feel frumpy. In photos from that time, I look one step behind everyone else.”
― Marian Schembari, A Little Less Broken: How an Autism Diagnosis Finally Made Me Whole

“We don't live in a perfect world, & it's cruel to decide that someone who's struggling should continue to struggle because a label makes you uncomfortable.”
― Marian Schembari, A Little Less Broken: How an Autism Diagnosis Finally Made Me Whole

“For a long, painful minute I stuttered through my update while also trying to read everyone's facial expressions while also worrying about my own while also getting philosophical about eye contact.”
― Marian Schembari, A Little Less Broken: How an Autism Diagnosis Finally Made Me Whole

“I wanted to want to join them. To be the kind of carefree person who played easily with her friends. But their laughter made me twitch.”
― Marian Schembari, A Little Less Broken: How an Autism Diagnosis Finally Made Me Whole

“I ached to hold the 9 and 22 and 31 year old versions of me who ran sobbing out of bars and flung her possessions into walls, feeling like the loneliest, angriest person in the world.”
― Marian Schembari, A Little Less Broken: How an Autism Diagnosis Finally Made Me Whole

“The worst part was that I knew what was expected of me on a theoretical level, but I couldn't force my body into doing the movements. Like when your foot goes numb and you know you need to stand & shake it out, but your body won't cooperate.”
― Marian Schembari, A Little Less Broken: How an Autism Diagnosis Finally Made Me Whole