by Charlotte Valeur, Founder of ION, the Institute of Neurodiversity.

A number of people have asked me what it was like for me as an autistic undiagnosed child and why I always mention climbing in trees. This article is a small look into my world as an autistic child. I hope it can teach parents of autistic children a little about what might go on inside their autistic children’s minds.

As a child, I didn’t feel comfortable speaking. The world didn’t seem like a safe place to share my thoughts, and I struggled to find words. Whenever I did speak, the reactions I received were often surprising or confusing. People would misunderstand what I said, and that made me more hesitant to speak. It didn’t feel like there was space for me to express myself without something going wrong.

So, I chose silence. I stayed quiet, observing more than engaging, finding comfort in the stillness of my own thoughts. The silence became a shield, protecting me from the unpredictability of people’s reactions. There was no pressure, no fear of saying the wrong thing, no confusion when people didn’t respond to how I expected.

It wasn’t until I was around twelve years old that I began to speak more. By then, the world felt a little less overwhelming, and I had grown more confident in navigating it. But for years, silence was my refuge, a place where I felt safer than in the unpredictable world of words.

Since then, I seem to talk a lot, and people who didn’t know me as a quiet, shy child find it hard to believe that I was ever like that.

As a child, I always found my way into nature when the world became too much. I didn’t have the words for it then, but I knew that the noise, the demands, the smells, and the confusion of life were sometimes unbearable. When it got too overwhelming, I would disappear. I didn’t go far, at least not by the world’s standards, but to me, my escapes took me far away, deep into the quiet of trees, tall grass, and the natural world where nothing demanded anything from me, and no one would speak to me.

The trees were my greatest refuge. I would climb high into the branches, feeling the bark beneath my fingers and the wind in my hair. Up there, nestled in the embrace of sturdy limbs, I felt something I couldn’t find anywhere else: safety. The air seemed cleaner, crisper, and it smelled of pine, earth, and life itself. I could sit in a tree for hours, hidden from the world below, completely alone and entirely free. There were no people in the trees with me, no one telling me what to do, what to say, how to act or bullying me. I could just be.

My family never understood this need. “Oh, she’s gone again,” they would say whenever they noticed me sitting alone, staring off into space. It wasn’t something they talked about much, just an odd little quirk of mine, one of many that I now know were signs of my autism. But at the time, all I knew was that they didn’t understand. The solitude I craved wasn’t always because I was sad or upset, it was mostly because being alone was the only way I could hear myself think and have the peace to do so. It was the only way I could “feel” without being overwhelmed by everything else.

I loved the tall grass fields too. I would wander out when the sun was high, the sky a bright blue expanse above me, and sink down into the grass until it swallowed me whole. Completely hidden, I would lie back and close my eyes, taking in the smells of the earth, the flowers, the faint traces of dew still lingering from the morning mist. The air itself seemed alive to me. I could see it, or at least I thought I could—tiny, shining particles floating in the breeze, dancing in the light. The world slowed down in those moments. I could hear the hum of insects, the rustle of grass, the distant call of birds, and it was as if time lost its meaning. Those were precious moments for me throughout my childhood.

Even as an adult, long before I understood why I felt the way I did; nature remained my refuge. When work became too much, when social events drained me until I felt hollow, I would find my way back to the trees, the fields, the quiet places. I never felt alone there, the trees were steady companions, and the grass welcomed me. Nature never judged, never expected. It simply “was,” and in its presence, so was I.

It wasn’t until I was diagnosed as autistic much later in life that I began to piece together why I had always been different to my siblings and to most of the children in school. Why the world had seemed louder, more confusing, and more demanding to me than it seemed to be to those around me? The diagnosis didn’t change anything, but it explained everything. It gave me a framework for understanding myself in a way I never had before. I looked at my entire life with a new lens, which was a long process since I was 50 years old before realising, I was autistic.

I realised that my need for solitude wasn’t a flaw. It wasn’t me retreating into myself or shutting down. It was survival. It was my way of finding calm in a world that was always on the edge of chaos to me. The neurotypical world, with its constant noise and expectations, was a storm I could not weather easily without the calm that nature offered me. Climbing trees, hiding in the grass, those moments were my way of resetting, of finding the peace I needed to function. Later in life practicing meditation and keeping my home calm, quiet and near nature became essential parts of my life.

Nature had always nurtured me, it gave me the space to process, to feel, to just exist without the pressures of everyday life. And when I was up in the trees, high above the ground, I didn’t feel like I had to be anyone but myself. There, I could breathe deeply, feel the world as I needed to feel it, and prepare myself to step back into the demands of society.

Even now, as a late diagnosed woman with a name for what makes me different, I still escape to nature. I still wander into tall grass fields, still sit, and watch the world from my own quiet corner of it. Because it’s there, in those hidden places, that I remember who I am—a woman who finds peace in the earth, the air, and the silence of the natural world.

As such nature was the one place where I felt I truly belonged. It accepted me as I were – quiet, observant, needing space and time to feel things deeply. In that acceptance I found strength. Nature reminded me that it was okay to be different, that there was beauty in solitude and peace in simply existing as myself.

Nature gave me a home when the rest of the world felt like a foreign land, and it remains my refuge, my sanctuary, and my salvation.