There’s a drawer in my kitchen, and I assume you likely you have one too. The “junk drawer.” That mysterious catch-all where old receipts, rubber bands, broken pens, keychains, batteries, loose change, a screwdriver, and our half-finished thoughts go to retire. It’s not neat or intentional, but it exists because every other system failed to hold what didn’t fit.

That drawer, I’ve come to realize, is the perfect metaphor for how my brain, as a neurodivergent person, learned to cope with trauma. Not through loud breakdowns or dramatic meltdowns, but through organization. Through over-labeling and intellectualization.

When the world made me feel wrong for how I moved, thought, spoke, and reacted, I didn’t cry out loud. I categorized, I made folders in my brain and I took every rejection and turned it into a research project. I tried to make sense of the nonsensical by overthinking, overexplaining, and overanalyzing everything around me.

Because that felt safer than feeling!!

In a society that punishes difference and rewards performance, intellectualization becomes the junk drawer of emotional survival. It’s the place where I stuff the feelings I don’t have time or even permissions to feel. It’s where I stash the confusion when someone says I’m “too intense” or “too much.” I label the experience, define it and dissect it. Then I write papers in my head about it instead of letting myself grieve.

You see, for many neurodivergent folks, the trauma isn’t always one big event. The trauma is the accumulation of a thousand small dismissals, like a 1,000 papercuts. It’s being told you’re too loud, too literal, too slow, too smart, or too sensitive. It’s growing up in classrooms that call your learning style “lazy.” It’s being passed over for promotions because you don’t socialize the “right” way. It’s watching others bond over small talk while you script your sentences like you’re preparing for a court case.

When the trauma happens over and over again, the body learns to protect itself in the only way it knows how. For me that was building walls made of logic. If I can understand it, maybe it won’t hurt me. If I can label it, maybe I can contain it. If I can explain it away, maybe I don’t have to feel the sting of being left out…again.

So I become a master of abstraction. I speak in frameworks. I organize my emotions into bulleted lists. I use words like “executive dysfunction” or “justice sensitivity” instead of saying “I’m scared I’ll never belong.”

And when someone says, “You’re so smart, you must be fine,” I nod. Because to them, my junk drawer looks like control. They don’t see the rubber bands snapping inside. They don’t notice how many feelings are taped shut, waiting for safety.

Here’s the cost, intellectualizing trauma doesn’t make it disappear. It just delays its explosion. It turns our inner world into a museum of well-labeled artifacts, never touched. Over time, it makes it harder to recognize what we actually feel, because we’ve spent so long narrating our feelings from a safe distance.

And we get misread. Constantly.

We get called cold. Condescending. Know-it-alls. Emotionally unavailable. When in reality, we’re flooded, terrified, and exhausted. And just trying to hold it together in a world that asks us to prove our pain in neurotypical language.

It’s not that we don’t feel. It’s that feeling in a world that doesn’t allow us to be ourselves is dangerous. So we think instead. We turn our trauma into theories. Our sadness into strategy. Our overwhelm into output. Until we can’t anymore.

And I want to name this, because I see it in my clients. I see it in myself. I see it in neurodivergent professionals, especially those who’ve learned that intelligence is the only acceptable mask. If you can’t be liked, be useful. If you can’t fit in, outperform. If you can’t cry, diagnose.

Your feelings are not too much! You don’t have to earn rest! You don’t have to intellectualize your pain to justify its existence! You don’t have to explain your differences to be allowed to exist as you are!

It’s okay to open the drawer. It’s okay if it’s messy. It’s okay if you don’t have a name for what you feel, just the ache that something’s off. The real healing doesn’t come from labeling the trauma. It comes from letting yourself feel it. Slowly and safely. In spaces that don’t ask you to be anything but real.

If you’ve spent your life being praised for your brain, I know this is terrifying. You’ve built safety in logic, survived through cleverness, and learned to protect yourself with precision. Letting go of that feels like unraveling. But it’s also the beginning of coming home to yourself.

So if you’re reading this and recognizing yourself. If your inner junk drawer is overflowing and you don’t know where to begin…I see you. And I want to offer this, you don’t have to sort it alone. That’s where coaching can help. Not to fix you or to label you. Rather, it is to sit beside you as you sort. To help you trust your feelings again. To help you feel safe in your body, not just smart in your mind.

We don’t heal by knowing more. We heal by being held in our knowing. Gently and fiercely with compassion.

​And that… is what you deserve.