How meaning slowly moves inward
As children grow, something subtle begins to shift.
At first, meaning remains outside the child’s self. Later, children begin to notice resemblance. They start to say things like, “That’s what happens at school,” or “That reminds me of someone.” This is the beginning of metaphor. The story has moved closer, but it has not yet become personal.
Metaphor is a gentle bridge. It allows a young person to recognise patterns in life without having to declare that those patterns belong to them.
Only later again — often during adolescence — does the most demanding step appear. The young person begins to tell their own story. They connect past, present and future. They try to make sense of contradictions. They ask questions such as “Who am I?”and “Where do I belong?”
This is self-narration. It is the moment when meaning moves through the self rather than simply around it.
But this stage is fragile. It depends on something many adolescents do not easily receive: safety.
A young person needs enough trust in the world — and enough trust in themselves — to hold an unfinished story. Without that protection, identity can collapse into something much smaller. Examples include a defensive label, a fundamentalist explanation, or a story written by others.
When stories are allowed to remain stories
When a story is allowed to remain open, something different occurs.
Children think more freely. They explore moral questions without fear of being examined. They notice tensions and ambiguities. They return to the same stories again and again, sometimes discovering new meanings. They are developing the capacity to think and to hold sometimes contradictory truths.
Stories are not mirrors that children look into. They are landscapes through which they walk as they explore their own being and knowing.
The place of autistic thought
This is where autism enters the picture.
This is where autism enters the picture. Many autistic adults describe a different timeline to the average (or neuromodal) timeline. One difference often appears in the relationship with story.
Many autistic children — and adults — remain deeply connected to allegory and myth long after others have moved on. Stories may not be simply childhood entertainment. They become places of reflection, stability, and moral clarity. For some autistic readers, allegory is more for meditation than interpretation. It can simply be inhabited.
Where others might rush to extract “the lesson”, an autistic reader may be comfortable holding several meanings at once. The story can remain unresolved, and that is not experienced as a problem. In fact, that openness may be a strength because it reframes something often labelled as rigidity of thought into a capacity to dwell with symbolic worlds.
Holding meaning without closure
Autistic thought is sometimes described as literal.
Yet many autistic people demonstrate a powerful sensitivity to patterns and symbolic structure. They may recognise moral tensions in stories very clearly, even if they are less comfortable with socially negotiated metaphors such as sarcasm or implied meaning in conversation.
Stories therefore serve a different role.
Rather than rushing toward interpretation, an autistic reader may remain with the story itself. The allegory does not need to be closed and can remain alive.
This ability to tolerate unresolved meaning may explain why many autistic people develop deep relationships with myth, fantasy, science fiction, and philosophical literature. These narrative worlds allow moral and existential questions to be explored without requiring immediate personal explanation or ownership.
In a social environment that can sometimes feel confusing or inconsistent, stories provide coherence.
A space where becoming can happen
For parents and others, this observation invites a simple form of restraint.
Not every story needs to be explained.
Not every symbol needs to be decoded.
Not every child needs to relate a story back to themselves.
Sometimes the most respectful thing we can do is allow stories to remain stories.
When we do that, children retain a protected space where meaning can grow gradually. They can explore ideas of justice, belonging, difference and courage without being placed under a spotlight.
They can choose the same bedtime stories over and over again.
Over time — and only when it feels safe — those meanings will move inward. The young person will begin to tell their own story, but that moment cannot be forced.
Modern society’s deconstruction of myth
In recent decades our culture has become very skilled at analysing stories.
We often ask what they mean, what they teach, what values they promote, or what identities they represent. We also tend to ask whether the myth is factual, historical or scientifically verifiable. This is the modern tendency to confuse facts with truths.
Facts are indeed subject to factual, historical and scientific analysis.
But truths belong to the realms of metaphor and relationship. Truths lead to both personal and collective understanding around meaning, inspiration, aspiration, vision, awe and wonder. They inform ethics and morality, not with rules and regulations, but with stories and myths to sit with and ponder. So the individual is challenged to look inward and create their own personal meaning and then, perhaps, find others to share it with.
The current challenge is to allow stories to remain slightly mysterious. In doing so we preserve a developmental space where children and adults — both neuromodal and neurodivergent — can explore meaning without being captured by it.
The autistic child or adult who remains absorbed in stories may not be avoiding life.
They may be protecting the conditions under which the meaning in their own life story can eventually emerge.
And that is something worth protecting.
Because meaning ripens slowly.
And so do people.