Emily Dickinson's Reclusivity: This Week in Neurodivergent History

To the standard world, Emily Dickinson is a ghost. She is the "Lady in White," the mythical recluse of Amherst who hid behind curtains and lowered baskets of gingerbread from her window to neighborhood children.

We look at the poems she left behind, and we assume they came from a place of sorrowful isolation. We assume she locked herself away because she was broken, heartbroken, or simply too fragile for the world.

In reality, Dickinson was a force. And like many neurodivergent minds, she wasn't hiding from the world because she feared it; she was curating her world because she felt it so deeply.

Remember, this is the woman who, as a teenager, was a social butterfly. She was brilliant, connected, and outwardly engaged. The myth that she was born a hermit is just that, a myth.

So, why the shift? Why does a vibrant young woman retreat into a single room for the majority of her adult life?

In this week’s episode of This Week in Neurodivergent History, we look past the romanticized rumors of unrequited love to find a much more practical, and powerful, explanation: Agency through self-regulation and environmental management.

The theories that don't fit

Historians love to speculate. Some say she was heartbroken, crushed by the loss of mentors or a forbidden love. Others claim she sacrificed her life solely for her art.

But neither of these holds up to scrutiny. She didn't pursue publication with the hunger of someone sacrificing everything for fame. In fact, she left instructions to burn her papers (instructions, thankfully, her sister Lavinia largely ignored).

The more likely reality, and the one that resonates deeply with the neurodivergent experience, is that Emily was managing a physical and neurological reality that the 19th century didn't fully understand.

The Sanctuary of Control

There is strong evidence that Dickinson may have suffered from epilepsy (the "falling sickness") or simply processed sensory input at a frequency that made public life unbearable. In a time when such conditions were stigmatized, shrinking her world wasn't an act of surrender. It was a strategic move.

By controlling her environment, by limiting her social interactions to those she could manage (often through a door or via letter), she wasn't trapping herself. Dickinson used her solitude to regulate herself and find her voice.

1. Controlled Sensory Input: By staying in her room, she eliminated the unpredictable noise and chaos of social expectation.

2. High Cognitive Freedom: Free from the demands of Victorian social performance, her mind was free to explore the deepest corners of existence.

3. Unapologetic Independence: This wasn't a woman afraid to be seen. At Mount Holyoke, when the school divided students into those who "had hope" of finding God and those who didn't, Emily fearlessly stood in the "No Hope" section. She wasn't afraid to stand out; she just refused to play a game that didn't fit her biology.