My wish came true:

Claire
3 min readFeb 19, 2024

To get to say “I love you too”

Photo by Tatiana Syrikova: https://www.pexels.com/photo/young-mother-with-toddler-child-in-rural-interior-house-3932763/

One of my oldest, clearest memories is laying in bed at night, my mum or dad on their way out of my room having said “goodnight”. The memory is clear enough that I know I was in the second house I lived in so I was over five, but other than that I have no idea what age I could be. It was an age where I’d started to pick up ‘norms’ from my peers and the world around me. One of those norms, was that people say “I love you” to each other and that the other person has the opportunity to say “I love you too”.

I don’t know how I learned about this, nor really what sort of concept I had about ‘love’ and the declarations of, but I had obviously cottoned on that it was important and it made me feel nice.

Present day

I’ve been going through some tough stuff recently when it comes to ‘The Work’ and inner child healing.

My particular inner child did not feel loved, worthy or important. I don’t have many memories to piece together to explain this, I just know this is how I understand my past and I have been working really hard in recent years to soothe my pain, grow my social network and learn how to give and receive love.

One memory that did surface however, was me lying in bed watching the highlighted shape of my parent making their way to the door, willing…

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Claire

Observations of people and life through an autistic lens.