The Girl in the Glass Bubble - autistic fairytales

Fairy tales for late-diagnosed/identified autistic adults — finding truth, tenderness, and self-recognition in the glass between worlds.

I’ve finished my series on the ten pillars of autistic culture and really enjoyed the approach of writing a series. And so with that in mind here’s my new series - five (it may turn into ten, who knows!…) autistic fairy tales - because I love children’s stories! I’m not sure yet how many stories I’m going to write, as sometimes (or often) my autistic brain wanders off into other territories when I’m least expecting it!

Once upon a time, in a village where everyone walked on cobblestones with bare feet, there lived a girl who dwelt inside a glass bubble.

No one knew when the bubble had first appeared. Some said she was born with it, translucent and shimmering around her like a soap bubble that refused to pop. Others claimed it had grown slowly, ring by ring, like the layers of a strange rainbow, until one day it was simply there, separating her from the world by the thickness of a sigh.

The girl could see out perfectly well. Indeed, she saw more than most—every crack in the cobblestones, every tremor in a leaf, every shadow that passed across a face. But sounds came to her muffled and strange, as if travelling through water. Touches that others barely noticed—a pat on the shoulder, an unsolicited hug, the brush of rough wool—landed upon her bubble like stones against a drum, reverberating through her whole being.

“Why do you flinch so?” the other children asked.

“Why do you hide when we play our games?” the villagers wondered.

“You are too sensitive,” they told her, kindly at first, then with growing impatience. “You must try harder. Break through. Be like us.”

And so the girl tried. She pressed her hands against the inside of her bubble until her palms were white. She threw herself against its walls. She wept and apologised for its existence. Sometimes, in the town where builders shouted and people jostled and a thousand conversations happened at once, she would become so tired from the noise battering her bubble that she would sink to the ground, and people would step around her with tutting tongues.

“Poor thing,” they said. “If only she weren’t so fragile.”

The girl learned to smile on days when her bubble felt thick and the world seemed very far away. She learned to pretend she understood conversations that came through garbled and incomplete. She learned to hide when the reverberations became too much, stealing away to quiet corners where she could press her forehead against the cool glass and breathe.

She learned to apologise for her bubble constantly.

Years passed. The girl became a woman. She worked very hard, twice as hard as others, because everything required translation—the world’s actions passing through the glass before reaching her, her own efforts passing through the glass before reaching the world. Some days she managed beautifully. Other days she shattered into pieces that no one else could see, then carefully assembled herself again before morning.

“You’re so peculiar,” people said, sometimes with dismissal, sometimes with affection. “So particular. So weird.”

And she agreed, because what else could she say?

More years passed. The woman grew old. Her hair silvered, and her hands became spotted with age like the wings of moths. She had learned to live with her bubble, this companion of isolation, though she had never learned to love it.

Albrecht Durer, 1506

One winter evening, as snow fell soft as thought, an old traveller came to the village. She was a peculiar woman with eyes like mirrors, and she walked slowly through the streets, looking, looking, always looking. When she came upon the old woman in the bubble, she stopped.

“Ah,” said the traveller. “There you are.”

“Do you see it?” whispered the woman in the bubble, for no one had ever acknowledged it so directly.

“Of course I see it,” said the traveller. She reached out one finger and tapped the glass. It rang with a clear, pure note. “I have one too. Look.”

And there, shimmering in the lamplight, was another bubble around the traveller.

The old woman stared. “But... I thought I was alone. I thought I was wrong.”

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“Wrong?” The traveller laughed, and it sounded like bells heard from far away. “Child, you were never wrong. You were simply different. Your bubble was not a weakness to be cured. It was the shape of your soul.”

“But it made everything so hard,” the old woman whispered.

“Yes,” said the traveller. “Because you spent your whole life trying to live as though you had no bubble at all. You tried to walk where others walked, speak as others spoke, feel as others felt. You had to apologise for taking up space in the world.”

The old woman felt something crack inside her chest—not her bubble, but something deeper. “What was I supposed to do?”

“You were supposed to know,” said the traveller gently. “That is all. To know that the bubble was real. To know that others had bubbles too, though perhaps you could not see them. To understand the particular architecture of your own soul, and build a life within it, rather than spending all your days pressing against its walls.”

“But no one told me,” said the old woman, and tears ran down her weathered cheeks.

“No,” agreed the traveller. “They did not. That is the greatest sorrow.”

The old woman closed her eyes. She thought of all the years. All the times she had tried to shatter what could not be shattered, and should not have needed to be.

“I am too old now,” she said. “Too old for the knowing to matter.”

“Perhaps,” said the traveller. “But perhaps not. Perhaps there is peace in finally understanding. Perhaps there is power in naming what was always there. Perhaps, in whatever days remain, you can stop pressing against your bubble and simply live inside it—not as a prison, but as your home.”

The old woman looked at her bubble. Really looked at it, for the first time without shame or anger. In the lamplight, it glowed with strange iridescent colours. It had protected her, in its way, even as it isolated her. It had filtered a world too bright, too loud, too much, into something she could bear.

“Will you tell me the words?” she asked. “The names for what I am?”

And the traveller did. They sat together in the snow, two bubbles close but not touching, and the old woman learned at last that she had never been broken. Only unnamed. Only misunderstood. Only, like so many others, asked to be something she was not.

When the traveller left with the morning sun, the old woman remained in her bubble. But now she moved differently. She no longer apologised when she needed quiet. She no longer pretended the reverberations didn’t hurt. She no longer exhausted herself trying to press through the glass.

She had a number of years left, and these would be years of knowing. Years of recognition. Years of finally, finally understanding that her sensitivity had not been the flaw in her story.

The flaw had been a world that could not see her bubble, and a girl who learned to believe it was her fault that she lived inside it.

And if she had learned this sooner, when her hair was still dark and her hands were still smooth? Well. That is a different story. A happier one, perhaps. But this is the story we have, and like all true fairytales, it holds both sorrow and wisdom in equal measure.

For understanding, whenever it comes, is still understanding.

THE END

🫧I would like to pay tribute to my client who inspired me to write this story🫧