Autism in My Life

I’ve spent a lot of the last three years learning about autism and figuring out what it might represent in my lived experience.

When I started telling people about my diagnosis, I learned pretty quickly that most people don’t have years of learning and reflection to pull from in understanding this. In fact, most people have a pretty shaky grasp on what autism is at all. I certainly did, prior to 2023.

So, I decided to put together a series of blog posts covering some of what it’s like, for me, from the inside. (It’s kind of what I do here.) For the next couple of months, I’ll be posting weekly about different aspects of the subject. Mostly about the criteria for diagnosis, but with a couple of other topics.

I may not be a subject matter expert on autism (yet), but I am definitely an expert on my life, and that’s what I’ll be sharing about. Every autistic person’s brain is different. EVERY brain is different. So don’t take any of this as remotely universal. But do take it as an honest attempt to convey one person’s experience to an audience that may or may not know what it feels like not to be neurotypical.¹

My primary intended audience for this series is not people who have existing autism diagnoses or a lot of knowledge about ASD, but instead people who are more or less unfamiliar with it.² That said, it’s also not going to be a comprehensive primer on what autism is, just a single, solitary example of what it can look like.

In other news, I’ve updated the website and added a subscribe field to the end of blog posts, so if you’d like to follow along (and you didn’t sign up on the old version of the blog), you can sign up now to get each new post emailed to you.

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¹ Neurotypical: sharing a neurotype with the majority of the human population, as opposed to being neurodivergent (e.g. being autistic, ADHD, bipolar, schizophrenic, dyslexic, or a number of other diverse differences in neurotype).

² My intended audience definitely includes people that know me and want a little insight into why I sometimes act (or react) in ways they don’t expect.