The Permaregressor Manifesto: In Defense of Never Growing Up

I still sleep with a stuffed animal. I watch cartoons on purpose. My bag has snacks packed like someone's kindergarten teacher organized it. I also pay my bills, show up for people I love, and run an entire ecommerce operation for a bookstore with over twenty thousand items in the database. Both of those people are me. Neither one cancels the other out.

That's what a permaregressor is. Someone who never stopped being the person they were at six, or ten, or fifteen, and also became someone with a job and responsibilities and a life. Not a phase. Not a coping mechanism that wears off. Not something you grow out of when you get enough therapy. Just who you are. The world tells you that's a problem. The world is wrong.

They Told Me to Act Normal and I Didn't Know What That Meant

I was diagnosed autistic when I was five. Back then I couldn't talk. I had all these words inside me and no way to get them out. I screamed a lot. I hit. I melted down in ways that scared people who didn't understand what was happening. And then I learned to talk, and the world started telling me there was a right way to be. A normal way. Make eye contact. Sit still. Stop flapping your hands. Stop being so... much.

I never mastered normal. I tried. I tried so hard in fifth grade that I had a full shutdown under a desk while a teacher stood over me and told me to act normal. I was ten years old. That teacher should never have been in a classroom. But she was, and I was under the desk, and somewhere in the middle of that meltdown I think I gave up on normal. Not on purpose. Just... my body stopped cooperating with the performance.

Some people call that regression. I call it honesty. I wasn't regressing into anything. I was just exhausted from pretending.

Why Would I Want to Grow Up?

Look at what adulthood offers. Meetings. Taxes. The expectation that you'll stop being excited about things. A slow erosion of joy that everyone agrees is just part of life. I'm supposed to want that? I'm supposed to trade my stuffed animal and my comfort shows and the way my brain lights up when I organize a database for... what, exactly? A mortgage? A LinkedIn profile? The ability to talk about interest rates at parties I don't want to attend?

I never bought what they were selling. Not because I'm smarter than anyone. Because my brain doesn't do the thing where it accepts social contracts it never signed. Autism does that. It removes the autopilot that neurotypical people seem to have, the one that makes adulthood feel inevitable instead of optional. I have never felt like an adult. I've felt like a person. A person who is twenty-four and has a job and pays rent and also sleeps with a stuffed dinosaur. That's not failure. That's a different operating system.

Softness Is Not Regression

People confuse softness with going backward. They see an adult with a comfort object and think something's wrong. Something broke. Someone needs to grow up. But softness isn't regression. Softness is what happens when you stop performing. When you stop pretending eye contact is comfortable and social scripts make sense and the world isn't too loud. Softness is what's underneath all the masking.

I masked for years. I learned the scripts. I made the eye contact. I sat still while my insides were screaming. And then I got a job at Bruce's bookstore, where nobody asks me to make eye contact and nobody tells me to act normal. Where my brain — this brain that catalogs twenty thousand items and never forgets where anything is — is actually useful. Not in spite of the autism. Because of it.

That's what permaregression looks like in practice. Not someone who never grew up. Someone who never stopped being themselves. Someone who found a life that fits instead of forcing themselves into a life that doesn't.

You Don't Have to Apologize

If you're reading this and you've never felt like an adult — if you've been pretending and it's exhausting and you're not sure how much longer you can keep it up — you don't have to. The performance ends when you decide it ends. You can be a person who has a job and pays bills and also watches cartoons and owns stuffed animals and needs things explained in a certain way and can't make phone calls without rehearsing. Those things coexist. They've always coexisted. The only thing that makes them seem contradictory is a world that decided normal meant one thing, one very narrow thing, and made everyone else pretend.

I stopped pretending. I sleep with a stuffed dinosaur. I work at a bookstore where my brain makes sense. I still stim. I still go non-verbal sometimes. I still need things other adults don't seem to need. And none of that makes me less of an adult or more of a child. It just makes me me. A permaregressor. A person who never bought the lie and is finally, at twenty-four, okay with that. You can be okay with it too. Whenever you're ready.

— Michael

About the Author

Michael was diagnosed autistic at five and non-verbal until they were five. They work at an independent bookstore where they run the entire ecommerce operation. They live in Virginia and are still learning to separate the guilt that doesn't belong to them from the self they're building.