Psychiatry defined us, but is failing us. I was reminded this past week about the reason we have psychiatry as a discipline that takes up a lot of resources. A lot of that apparatus, beyond just the human curiosity to understand how things work, is to prevent suicide. All the trappings of psychiatry really boil …
This last month has been a journey for me, and forced me to reflect deeply on my own experience in this world as a late-diagnosed autistic person. As I work on unmasking autism(i.e. stop trying to fit into neurotypical norms), I’m finding both incredible joy, but also tremendous pain as I seek to find a …
What I wanted to write about today was the top three things I do for my autistic son that I do for myself as well as self-care and a way to manage big emotions. Except the truth is I failed at that this week myself. So let me change the task a bit and give …
As an autistic person, it is exceptionally hard to live authentically in the world. Most of the world is not particularly friendly to those who develop in their own time and space. We prize conformity and a certain pacing for development that is just impossible to meet. I wrote about this to some degree in …
Finding Balance Between Masking and Living Authentically Read More »
Tell me you are biased by the way you set up a test. I was listening to NPR this week on my drive to and from work and while I ate lunch in the car. There was a lovely interview with a man from Cambridge who studies the brain, empathy, and oddly autism. I found …
Where does the stereotype of the unemotional, cold autistic person come from? I had a minor meltdown today as I come face to face with returning to a job, public-facing for the first time since I started to live a more authentically autistic lifestyle. I am terrified because I am not sure whether I can …
Stop with the Gate Keeping. Yesterday on Twitter, there was quite a bit of chatter about the validity of a self diagnosis for autism. This is a subject that might take several posts, but it’s worth exploring because there a lot of people for whom encountering autistic people is like looking in the mirror, but …
I love noses. I always have, but it wasn’t until I started reevaluating my life through the lens of my newly diagnosed autism that it began to make sense. Autistic people have long been known to avoid eye contact. In fact, that is one of the most prominent and partially true stereotype about autists. We …
