I REMEMBER NICOLE 💟

I Remember Nicole Brown Simpson: DV Awareness

1 week ago

FIRST, Read the Room. Timing is everything, so are manners💜💞On my birthday a few years ago, my wife dumped a whole bowl of cake batter into the trash because I asked her if she had seen my phone charger.

That was the entire question. She was standing at the counter with a measuring cup in her hand, and she spun around and snapped at me so hard I took a step back.

"No. I don't know. I have no idea where your charger is."

Then she looked down at the bowl, closed her eyes, and tipped the whole thing into the trash.

I stood in the kitchen doorway feeling like I had been bitten by my own dog. On my birthday. Over a charger. So I said what almost any man would have said.

"Wow. It was a yes or no question."

Then I said the one I still think about.

"Why are you always so snappy?"

She did not answer. She got the flour back out and started over, and we did not say much the rest of the night. The cake was good. I barely tasted it.

That night in bed, she said very quietly, "I'm sorry I ruined your birthday." A minute later she said, "I'm not a mean person. I don't know why I'm like this."

I did not say anything back. I am ashamed of that now. At the time, I was not sure she was right.

If you have ever been the woman at that counter, you already know what I could not see.

She had been counting.

The recipe called for 3 cups of flour. She was holding the second one when I walked in. My question knocked the number right out of her head, and she could not tell if 1 cup or 2 was already in the bowl. There is no way to fish flour back out of batter. So she threw away everything she had done and started my birthday cake over from nothing, while the man she was making it for stood behind her and called her snappy.

It took me most of a year to see it, and once I did, I saw it everywhere. She snapped when I asked something in the middle of a text she was writing. In the middle of a page she was reading. In the middle of a sentence she was still building in her head. I went back through every time I could remember, and I could not find one where she snapped at me while she was doing nothing. Every time, I had walked into the middle of something.

For a lot of neurodivergent women, focus works like carrying a pot filled to the brim across the kitchen. She walks it slow, eyes on the surface, every muscle on it. Bump her elbow and the size of the bump stops mattering. The water goes everywhere either way. The snap is the sound of the spill. I just happened to be the elbow.

A researcher at UC Irvine named Gloria Mark spent days following office workers and timing what happened after they got interrupted. On average, it took them 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back to the work they had been doing. Those were grown professionals at desks, paid to focus.

My question took 4 seconds. It cost her the whole cake.

She told me later that she has been called snappy since grade school. Moody. Hard to approach. Every adult who interrupted her saw the spill and never once saw the bump, so she grew up believing the spill was her personality. On my birthday, I signed my name to that list too.

The next year, she got the flour out again.

I did not ask her a single thing. I stood in the kitchen doorway with my phone on silent, like a bouncer. When her phone rang, I answered it and said she would call back. When the dog started barking, I took him outside. She never asked me to do any of it.

She leveled off the third cup, set it down, and turned around the way she always did, already bracing for whatever I needed.

"Okay. What do you need?"

"Nothing. I don't need anything. Keep going."

She stood there holding that empty measuring cup for a long time. Then she set it on the counter and cried, because in her whole life nobody had ever stood next to her while she was in the middle of something and needed nothing from her.

If you are the woman who snaps and then hates herself for it, show him this part.

When she is in the middle of something, wait until she looks up. It costs you a minute. If it cannot wait, text it, even from the next room, so she can answer once the pot is set down. Never ask "Why are you so snappy?" She is already asking herself that, and she has been since she was a little girl. When she does snap, let it pass without a word and ask again later in the same calm voice. She will usually apologize before you finish the sentence. Then do the thing nobody has ever done for her. Stand guard. Take the phone call. Handle the dog. Keep the whole house off her for the 20 minutes it takes to finish one thing all the way through. You will meet a version of her you did not know was in there. She has been inside that woman the whole time, getting bumped.

I think about how close I came to believing what everybody else believed. She could have turned 50 still apologizing to a man for a spill he caused.

She is the gentlest person in our house. She needed somebody to stop bumping the pot.

What is the last thing you got to finish without anybody needing something from you?

Some of you read that and felt something give way in your chest. That is 30 years of being called snappy for spills other people caused. I wrote The Neurodivergent's Guide to Submission for the woman who has never once been allowed to finish.

It shows you what changes in a brain like yours when the man you trust stands in the doorway and takes the noise, so the pot in your hands finally makes it across the room. You have been bracing for the next question your whole life. You are allowed to set it down.

Kanecross.com/neurosub ... See MoreSee Less

I Remember Nicole Brown Simpson: DV Awareness

2 weeks ago

More than three decades after O.J. was acquitted of murdering ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman, questions are being raised about whether the former NFL star had help covering up the 1994 killings. ktla.com/news/local-news/oj-simpson-murder-case-accomplice-theory-lapd-detective/ ... See MoreSee Less