My protagonist, Jeff Griffin, uses the phrase “chasing silhouettes” in The Signal Between Us to describe how he wrote his detective circling the shadows. He sketched the outlines of femmes fatales — shapes familiar but elusive, figures emerging and dissolving before they could fully resolve.
I formed the idea of him firing signals into the dark, trying to describe the obsession he couldn’t quite name. I did not think I was describing myself.
Only now have I begun to wonder whether those shadows were signals of another kind. While Jeff’s Detective Blackthorn investigates crime, my mission after my medical discharge from the Navy was to discover what, exactly, was wrong with me.
Why I never quite aligned with other people. Why even those who liked me sometimes seemed to tire of me. Why I was bullied as a child. Why I trusted the wrong people and mistrusted the right ones. Why I contributed disproportionately — too much or too little, oversharing or withdrawing. Why I became obsessed with certain interests instead of holding them lightly. Why I noticed patterns others missed — and missed cues they seemed to grasp effortlessly.
Autism was considered. It still hovers in the margins. AD(H)D became the most stable label — an anchor because enough traits justified its inclusion alongside the longstanding diagnoses of anxiety and depression.
There were neurological questions. A seizure that was never fully explained. Imaging that suggested possible birth trauma. Inconclusive. Additions to the file, not consolidation — more fog around what was already diffuse.
Some categories are visible enough to become legible through testing and treatable through established frameworks. Autism, for all its complexity, has language around it. AD(H)D has visibility. But the term Nonverbal Learning Disorder (NVLD) — which first appeared quietly in my record years ago — began to feel less like a marginal note and more like architecture beneath the others.
Anxiety makes sense within it. Depression makes sense within it. Even the overlapping traits that once pointed toward autism or ADHD feel less central than the structural misalignment they were circling.
The structure that has shaped my life has felt at different times like both curse and superpower. The same wiring that allows me to see patterns across years and pages can leave me disoriented in a room. The same verbal intensity that builds worlds can misfire in conversation.
Perhaps what I have been doing all these years — in fiction and in life — is learning to read silhouettes more clearly.
To understand that firing signals into the dark was not evidence of defect, but of orientation in low light.
Some structures are built for bright rooms. Others learn to navigate by outline, by contrast, by the faintest shift in shadow.
If NVLD is the language that best describes that structure for me now, it does not erase what came before. It organizes it.
The detective was always circling something real. I just did not yet know its name.