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On Tuesday, I went to the boys’ school for my annual presentation to The Kid’s class about…well, him. About him, and his story, and his autism.

This visit is always preceded by the application of copious amounts of deodorant–because kids are brutally honest, and I am a sweater–that inevitably don’t do their job. This year, I invited Little Brother to join me, because he needs to feel special too, and he took the role of my “helper” beyond what I imagined, transforming it into a cocktail of “Emcee/Warm-Up Act-Narrator-Comedian.”

I tweaked the talk a bit, as I do every year because kids have a way of getting older and understanding more, so I threw in bigger words that they can now handle: words like neurotypical and neurodiverse and concepts like working memory and emotional aura. Some of these I added because I’ve only recently become aware of them myself. Guess I’m growing, too.

But what didn’t change were the things that keep bringing me back to this moment each year despite the pit-sweat and pre-show jitters: the look on TK’s face, a mixture of pride and excitement and joy. The look on his classmates’ faces, of realisation and relating and appreciation. The raising of hands in answer to questions that reveal they understand a bit of what he goes through, may even experience it themselves, sometimes. The way those who have heard it before remember that it took TK twenty minutes to learn to walk with his halo on rather than the doctors’ prediction of weeks.

And the aftermath: the thank-you from the kids. The back-pats for TK from them. The teacher’s appreciation and comments about how far TK has come. The coffee and conversations in the days afterward with moms of other neurodiverse kids, and the plans underway this year for a whole day at school to celebrate the different.

I am tired. This year we”ve had Covid, travelled across the world and back, endured constant rain and floods, and the world is angry and at war, no matter where you live. Either my low iron is back or things are just hard. But like patches of light through the clouds, stories keep showing up to save us. To remind us that there is deep, endurable beauty underneath it all.

“The kids really connect to the story part,” TK’s teacher told me after the talk, referring in particular to the first slides I’d shown back from his early days. I said as much to my friend over herbal tea this morning as we made big plans: let’s connect these kids to a bigger story. So they know who they are. So they know they belong.

After a bread factory in his country was bombed, Ukraine’s president asked, “Who could you be to do that?” What a stunning question–the moral bankruptcy it reveals of the people who inflict death and chaos on innocents.

But also: who could you be to do that? To do whatever your particular that is? To walk into a classroom each year and tell a story? The first year I did it in response to a mean kid; advocacy born of anger. (Hey, we all start somewhere.) Since then, I’ve pushed through the sweat to get to what’s on the other side: on the other side of my fear, on the other side of my anxiety, of my tiredness and impatience and myriad mistakes. In the midst of them. Because of them. Who could I be to do that? I could be a part of the story, a part of this grace that walks alongside me, carries me, to a beauty on the other side of the clouds.