Hi Everyone 👋 A few years back I sat with a mother who told me she'd stopped taking her son to the supermarket. Not because of the meltdowns—she'd learned to ride those out. Because of the looks. The sighs. The woman who said, loud enough to be heard, "he'd behave if you were firmer." She wasn't complaining about her son. She was complaining about the world's insistence that he be somebody else. That's the thing nobody warns you about. The exhaustion isn't only the child. It's the constant, grinding work of explaining, defending, advocating, absorbing judgment, and holding your child steady while you're being knocked off balance yourself. Add a job, a course, a calling, and you've got a nervous system running on fumes and guilt. There's a very old story that speaks to this. Zhuangzi, the other great Daoist, the more mischievous one, tells of a carpenter called Shi who walks past an enormous oak tree growing at a shrine. It's vast, ancient, branches spreading out over hundreds of oxen. Everyone else is gawping at it. Shi doesn't even look. His apprentice asks why. Shi says: it's useless. Bad wood. You couldn't build a boat, a coffin, a door out of it. Good for nothing, which is why it's lived so long. That night the oak appears to him in a dream and gives him a bit of a telling off. What are you comparing me to? You're comparing me to the useful trees—the pear, the orange, the apple. They bear fruit, and then they're picked at, torn at, broken. They don't live out their years. I've spent a very long time learning to be useless. If I'd been useful, I'd have been cut down long ago. Zhuangzi's point isn't that uselessness is noble in some sentimental way. It's that the world has a very narrow idea of what a thing is for, and anything that doesn't fit gets hacked about until it does—or gets discarded. Your child doesn't fit the world's idea. Neither, probably, do you. The world looks at an autistic child and sees a set of deficits to be corrected. The world looks at a burnt-out mother and sees someone not coping. Neither is the truth. Both are the world's narrowness wearing the mask of common sense.