06/09/2026
'Before there were words, there was a vast, uncharted quiet.
As an autistic child, the world around me often felt like a television with the volume turned up too high, yet I had no way to change the channel.
I was entirely nonverbal—a traveler locked inside the citadel of my own mind. While others traded spoken words like common coins, my pockets were empty.
The bridge between my internal universe and the outside world simply hadn't been built yet.
But where human voices failed to reach, the spirits found a way in.
I found my home in the pages of ancient myths, ghost stories, folklore, and fantasy. Where the real world felt sharp, unpredictable, and overwhelmingly loud, the realm of magic made perfect sense.
The spirits didn’t demand eye contact.
The fae spoke in intricate riddles that respected my need for patterns.
The monsters and heroes understood what it was like to exist on the fringes of society.
In the tapestry of folklore, being "different" wasn't a diagnosis or a deficit—it was the marking of a protagonist, a sign that you belonged to a deeper, more mysterious world.
Then came the beautiful paradox that redefined my existence: I learned to read and write before I could ever speak (this condition is known as Hyperlexia).
Long before my tongue could shape the clumsy contours of human speech, my eyes decoded the elegant geometry of letters. Ink became my first true breath. The written word was a bridge built out of the silence, a way to map the sprawling cosmos inside my head without the terrifying friction of vocal cords.
I could write a galaxy before I could say "hello."
Stories did not just entertain me; they anchored me to existence. Quite literally, they saved my life.
When the weight of a world not built for me grew too heavy to bear, fantasy gave me armor. It gave me a sanctuary when the sensory storm grew too violent, and a vocabulary to understand my own soul.
That solitary sanctuary eventually bloomed into a lifelong calling. Over the course of many decades, I turned my quiet devotion outward, transforming into a keeper of the forgotten and the unseen.
I have spent a lifetime wandering the sun-bleached, historic streets of El Paso, listening to the whispers embedded in its ancient bricks and desert winds.
For decades, I have painstakingly collected the mystical, the fantastic, and the ghostly chronicles of this vibrant Borderland.
Every spirit haunting an old adobe wall, every phantom lingering in a historic district, and every whispered legend passed down through generations became a treasure I felt fiercely compelled to protect.
What began as a personal lifeline became an archive of our collective, haunted heritage.
Today, I don't look back at my nonverbal years as a time of emptiness, but as a time of deep listening.
I was gathering the embers. The spirits, the myths, and the magic that kept me alive are no longer just my private refuge—they are my offering to the world.
I weave these tales now because I know what it is like to sit in the dark, waiting for a glimmer of light.
I share them with you all to remind us that everyone, no matter how quiet, has a story waiting to be told.'
~Heather Shade ✍
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