My kids have been home for the summer. Which means, most days around noon, I’m in the kitchen making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches while they orbit the house like tiny comets. They crash into each other. Bounce off furniture. Shout updates I barely catch. “Look what I built!” “He took my slime!” “Can we go outside?”

I smile, nod and just spread. Peanut butter, then jelly, and closed with bread.

And as I smooth the peanut butter across the bread, I realize something.

This! this moment is exactly what my thoughts feel like most days, s ticky and overlapping. Slippery in the wrong places, and far too thick in others. Peanut butter on the roof of my mouth? Try peanut butter on the roof of my brain.

I don’t mean that metaphor lightly. This isn’t a cutesy quip about a distracted mind. This is about the lived experience of internalized echolalia which is a hidden, looping, sensory-rich phenomenon often seen in autism. A phenomenon I experience not just with sound, but with texture.

For me, words have texture and shapes and my thoughts have weight. A sentence doesn’t just pass through me, it settles, sinks, stretches out. If it lands wrong, it clings. If it lands just right, it carves a groove and echoes there and not because I’m thinking about it, but because my brain refuses to let go.

I can be making sandwiches, folding laundry, or even sitting in a meeting and a single phrase I heard earlier will start to replay. Not out loud. Just…there in my head, pressed up against the inside of my skull. Sticky like peanut butter behind my molars.

Sometimes it’s a word that felt off. Sometimes it’s the rhythm of someone’s sentence. Sometimes it’s something I said that I wish I could rewind and revise. But it always comes with this texture. As if it coats and muffles and lingers.

And here’s the part no one talks about, it’s not just the word itself that echoes. It’s the feeling of it, the tension it carried, the shame I attached and the tone I imagined. It’s like licking the knife after making sandwiches and realizing there’s still peanut butter stuck between your teeth. You don’t see it, but you sure as well feel it and taste it.

Internalized echolalia is rarely discussed unless it shows up externally like in verbal repetition, scripting, and vocal tics. But inside the neurodivergent mind? It’s often invasive and Invisible. And we learn to live with it like background noise. Or worse, we gaslight ourselves into believing it’s normal to still be repeating something someone said yesterday while trying to focus on what’s in front of us now and apologizing for not being able to be present and perform.

It’s like trying to write a new sentence on a whiteboard you never got to erase. The old words are still faintly visible, bleeding through every attempt to stay present.

And just like peanut butter, it doesn’t move unless you scrape. There’s no rinsing. No soft “let it go.” You have to work at it, process it, and translate it. You need to figure out why that sentence stuck. Why that moment echoes. Why that thought has the consistency of grit and won’t slide clean.

That’s why I say thoughts have texture. Because they do, at least for me. They aren’t all light and fleeting. Some are dense, some are gritty and some are smooth like jelly sweet and quick to pass. But the ones that repeat? Those are the peanut butter ones. With a texture that is thick and slow. They are lodged behind everything else I’m trying to say.

And it’s exhausting!!!

Because the world doesn’t pause just because your brain is mid-chew on a thought you didn’t choose. People expect presence, performance, and clairty. And all while I’m still mentally scraping the spoon, trying to get free of something no one else can see or hear.

There were times I thought I was broken. That I just couldn’t focus, or that I was too sensitive, too obsessive, and too “in my head.” But now I know that my brain is doing something that it was wired to do. It holds onto patterns. It loops to make sense of things. It processes emotion not just in feelings, but in sound. And it does all of that through texture…a language few people talk about, but many of us feel.

That’s another reason why coaching became such a turning point for me. Not because it stopped the loops but because it made space for them. It let me speak the peanut butter thoughts out loud. Naming them and softening often them. Sometimes just acknowledge them without shame. And in that space, something shifted.

Coaching didn’t make the peanut butter disappear. But it helped me recognize the flavor, the source, and the why behind the stickiness. And slowly, gently, it gave me a way to move through it with compassion.

If your thoughts feel sticky too or if words echo longer than they should, if conversations replay long after everyone else has moved on, if you feel like you’re trying to function through a layer of unseen residue then I see you. You’re not failing! You’re not too much! You’re not broken!

You’re just living with a kind of neuro-texture that the world doesn’t yet have language for.

But we do.

And I’d be honored to help you explore it.

Because buried inside that stickiness isn’t just noise. It’s a signal, insight, and meaning. When you finally learn how to translate the peanut butter thoughts, you’ll see that there’s something beautiful in the mess. Something worth keeping and something that makes you make sense.

​And I promise that once you find your way through it, you’ll never look at a sandwich the same way again.