Solitude as Sanctuary: Insights from a Neurodivergent Reader

Writer: Thuy-vy Nguyen

Someone wrote to me recently, a stream-of-consciousness reflection that has given me a lot of thoughts. They didn’t ask for advice or feedback. They simply shared. And what they shared enriched my understanding of solitude. I have got this person's permission to share their lived experience in this blog post.

This person lives with ADHD. But they are also an artist, a pilot, a parent, and someone who has spent a lifetime observing, building, noticing, and creating. They were determined and strived to achieve whatever they put their mind to. Yet, they were regularly misunderstood and not taken seriously.

They grew up in the 1960s, long before ADHD was a recognized diagnosis. School was a struggle. Teachers misread their restlessness, and their report cards painted a picture of someone who was often distracted or disobedient. But they weren’t disengaged, they were simply flooded. “We’re not stupid,” they wrote. “We’re simply receiving all the data at 100% volume.” What they needed wasn’t more pressure to conform. They needed space, a space to move, to think, to breathe. As I read their words, I started to see solitude not as a break from life, but as a kind of clarity, something necessary and personally sustaining.

That space often came through physical solitude. They found calmness while riding their bike alone to school. They found focus working with their hands in trade school. Later, they found it in the cockpit, learning to fly. Flying wasn’t just a skill; for them, it was a way of tuning into subtle shifts in weather, in light, in instinct. That same attentiveness shaped how they moved through the world on the ground.

A drawing shared by the reader in this post. About the drawing, they said: "You start out to draw for five minutes, look up at the clock, and three hours have passed. Total solitude - flow - quiet - atonement." The artist owns the copyright to this drawing.

They also found solitude in art. As a metalworker and sculptor, they built a mobile studio, performing live pewter casting demonstrations at festivals. It was tactile, focused work, done in public, but anchored deeply in their internal rhythm. They shared a story about one of those festivals. While setting up, they noticed the sky darkening. Years of flight training had taught them how to read clouds, how to feel the warning signs of a squall line. Quietly, they packed up their tools and left. Other vendors mocked them. But an hour later, 70-mile-an-hour winds tore through the street, lifting the tents into the air. What looked like paranoia to others was simply paying attention. Such focus and attention to subtle cues around the world were what they gained through solitude; the internal calmness that space provided allowed them to notice and see things that others did not.

They wrote about parenting too. Their own childhood had been full of misunderstandings, but when their son began to struggle in school, they recognized the signs. He was diagnosed with ADHD and given the support they never received. Watching him thrive was both a joy and a grief, a glimpse of what could have been.

It’s clear in their writing that solitude has helped them survive, sometimes literally. But it’s also helped them heal and create. They don’t romanticize it. They acknowledge that it can be painful, that it’s often misread by others. But they also defend it fiercely. Solitude is where their mind sharpens, where ideas come fast, where unnecessary noise is cancelled out.

They’ve never been someone who thrives in brainstorming sessions or groupthink. To them, the world is dominated by extroverts - one that tends to pedestalize talking and doing over thinking when it comes to problem solving. To succeed, you need to be a team player and know how to play the politics. That’s not the world that this person has ever felt that they fit in.  Not because they can’t work with others, but because the structure of most group settings doesn’t allow for the way their mind works best. They wrote about being dismissed, having their work taken or minimized, being called difficult or aloof. What’s actually happening, they explained, is this: “In the quiet, we find those solutions and answers. Quickly too. But it’s perceived as lazy by the extroverted crowd.”

What they’re asking for isn’t pity. It’s recognition. The solitude they’ve built into their life, through flying, through walking, through setting up shop early and working methodically, isn’t a retreat. It’s a space of survival, of creativity, of care.

Reading their reflections, I kept returning to that first feeling I had: that solitude is not absence, but presence of a different kind. It’s not always peaceful. It doesn’t solve everything. But for this reader with a neurodivergent mind, it offers space to think, to return to themselves, to work through the overload without being asked to explain or perform.

They never asked to be a spokesperson for neurodivergence. But in sharing their story, they gave me a clearer, fuller picture of what it means to need solitude, not as a luxury, but simply as a way to live.