Someone Who Could Finally Take Care of Me

On being hard to care for, unmasking in mutual design, and what people see when it finally works

The first time my sister met Wyatt, she looked at me and said it like something had unclenched in her chest: “I’m so glad you found someone who can finally take care of you.” It wasn’t unkind. It was warmth, and history, and something like grief. What she said was true. Just not complete.

She saw me softer and less braced for impact. She saw someone standing beside me who was grounded, kind, and direct. Someone who met the jagged rhythm of my interior life with clarity, not as an act of patience but as native fluency. She reached for the language she had to describe the relief of watching someone she loved who had been long misunderstood be met with ease: finally, someone who can take care of her.

I am not difficult to love, but I have always been difficult to care for in a way that endures. Not because I push care away, but because I’ve trained my body to look like someone who doesn’t need it.

My care signals don’t arrive with enough urgency. My fluency masks the rupture. I preempt intervention. I am a system that outruns its own distress. By the time most people notice I’m struggling, I’ve already metabolized the event. Wyatt didn’t try to slow me down or interrupt that pattern. He just saw it, named it, and began building a life around it.

We’re getting him into his grilled cheese trailer now - a nervous system redesign. He’s masked longer and more convincingly than I ever could. The trailer is his no-autistic-masking zone. He gets to move, cook, and regulate through repetition and fire. He gets to exist without translating. What we’ve built isn’t just a home; it’s a system where neither of us has to perform stability to receive care.

So yes, he does “take care of me.” Just not in the way people usually mean. What he does is more radical than that. He recognizes the logic of my interior, and he responds to it. He doesn’t pathologize my complexity or mistake my competence for self-sufficiency. He doesn’t offer help as a prelude to control.

He tracks the fawn in me before I notice it. I read the fight in him before it peaks. We trade off. We return. We both cry when dogs do something unexpectedly kind.

What my sister saw was the shift in my nervous system - the drop from vigilance to safety. She was relieved not because I’d been hard to love, but because I’d been performing for so long. For the first time, she saw someone enter my field and respond with easy joy.

It’s easy to misname that. But here’s what’s truer:

I didn’t find someone who could take care of me.

I found someone who could co-design a life where care doesn’t have to be earned through translation.

In that system, I became easier to care for.

Not because I changed, but because the fire of my logic finally had a hearth.