To be an autistic person is to be a person with something valuable inside you but to rarely find the right environment where your value is recognized as valuable by people around you.
This is me, speaking from the heart of an autistic person.
Month: July 2025
i, advocate
If you’ve been following my neurodiversity journey–as I articulate the experience of a person with autism, ADHD, aphantasia, and proprioception hyposensitivity from the inside, along with the other ways i share myself–and you’ve found that the insights I’ve shared connect with your experience, or contextualize something you suspected, realize that sharing these insights is one of the ways I care for my community.
And realize that, as a person with no degrees or qualifications as an advocate other than my lived experience and my inborn gifts, what I share makes no sense in the context of capitalism.
If you find that a person like me is a valuable part of the community, and worthy of support, realize that, within the context of 21st century American capitalism, there’s not much support for people like me, or for the people I advocate for, who often don’t have the gift for articulation that I share with my community.
I could institutionalize myself: pursue an advanced degree that legitimizes my advocacy in the context of capitalism, and in doing so, would need to unplug myself from the community that I move through, and in doing so, become another victim of capitalism – saddled with huge debt, and most likely unable to find an official advocacy position that would pay off that debt in my lifetime.
the care economy
The care economy is an emerging model for supporting people, things, and processes we’d like to see more of in the world. It is about recognizing the things in our experience that bring us joy, that give us a [wow] or a [yes], and responding to these moments in a supportive way. It’s actually just, well, practicing care, and that’s not new at all. But the language of commerce is transactional, rather than responsive.
The care economy is an emerging model for supporting people, things, and processes we’d like to see more of in the world. It is about recognizing the things in our experience that bring us joy, that give us a [wow] or a [yes], and responding to these moments in a supportive way. It’s actually just, well, practicing care, and that’s not new at all. But the language of commerce is transactional, rather than responsive.
I recognize that I love the work that I do with people so much that I would offer it for free if I was supported–if all of my needs were met. But traditional models don’t allow for that type of responsiveness. I would like to try to move toward a more responsive system, built on trust. Why not?
People who know me can decide if they trust the work I do, and they can choose to support me so that I can do that work, or not. In doing so, they are allowing me to be more myself, and guiding me toward their own needs. I’m the product, in a sense, but since our relationship is based on trust, I’m allowed to do the work I believe, adjusting to the needs that arise, as they align with those who trust me.
connection/attraction/hyperfocus/community
I’ve been thinking for some time about certain dynamics and patterns in the spaces I move through, and having a difficult time finding the right framing to bring these ideas up in conversations with colleagues. I decided to see what the pattern-recognition community had to say. The result was quite helpful, and gave me some…
resolution
>”I like the feeling of being able to confront an experience and resolve it as art.”
- Eudora Welty
This person has a nervous system like mine.
Emotional processing
A recent conversation about emotional processing with my neurodiverse community got me thinking about putting language to my experience of my emotional ecosystem. I have realized for a long time that my emotions work differently from many people that I interact with, and it’s only recently that I have had language to describe what’s going…
same difference
In a society where differences are recognized and celebrated, our experience of community is an experience of collective difference.
In a society where samenesses are recognized and celebrated, our experience of community is an experience of collective sameness.
In a society that celebrates differences, everyone being different is a given. No one pops out. All are included.
In a society that celebrates sameness, everyone being the same is a given. The differences pop out. Some are centered. Some are different.
framing is everything
Neurodiversity is the new (different! better!) cognitive frame. Astrology, Enneagram, Meyers-Briggs, Chinese medicine, naturopathy, homeopathy: having passed through these modalities, none of them made me feel seen in the ways that they were implemented by the particular practitioners who applied them to me. To be fair, I may have met with unskilled practitioners. Your mileage…
🗽
The first response of the conservative is
‘actually…’
The first response of the progressive is
‘consider…’
The first response of the ones who actually consider is
‘resolve,’
and we recognize that
‘solver’
and
‘lovers’
are both represented, and we’re trying to figure out how to include the extra
‘e.’
The struggle is real.
e pluribus unum.
PSA: SAD+CD & BSA
“Social situations” is not one category. People with selective attention disorder [SAD] may have difficulty conceptualizing this, but people with broad spectrum awareness [BSA] will understand it intuitively. There are social situations that drain us, and there are social situations that activate us. There are endless gradations and variations of how social situations can drain…