Quotes
ActuallyAutistic
After all this time, I can finally be free to be openly autistic.
Autism
blogs
Is Chicago, Is Not Chicago
I'm in Chicago to celebrate New Year's before New Year's. Every year for nearly 20 years, a group of my college friends have gathered, even as we've grown and spread across the country. Most of us started in the Midwest, and Chicago
Autism
A Diagnosis
Something that I was a little surprised by when I started looking into getting a diagnosis was the antagonism directed towards the self-diagnosed. In the online communities, I've run into several people who haven't pursued a clinical diagnosis but still call themselves autistic, and then there
blogs
Short Circuits and Stumbling Blocks
I hit a stumbling block with the piece I was trying to write about the first year of living with my diagnosis. While for the most part, the experience has been positive, I started pushing back at myself when it felt like, to me, that I was focusing on the
Writing
A Warm Place in the Sun
Last weekend, my mother came to Des Moines to visit us, and on Sunday, we decided to go to the Greater Des Moines Botanical Garden to wander around a bit, and then have lunch at Trellis, the cafe in the Garden that overlooks the river. Every winter, Kate tries to
microblog
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This bears a little unpicking because encoded in this authoritative language are some problematic assumptions. We should not be surprised to find words such as ‘disorder’, ‘deficit’ and ‘impairment’ in the DSM; it exists to pin down the exactitudes of problems brought to psychologists by patients. What’s striking, though,
Autism
No Regrets Coyote
I'm sitting in my living room, sitting in the chair in the corner. It's late. The room is only lit by the little white lights on the little plastic Christmas tree perched on the end table next to me. I was exhausted earlier today, and I
Autism
Anxiety
Nothing bad is going to happen. You seriously need to relax. I was sort of thinking that this anxiety thing was just an excuse for slacking, for getting drunk, but it's real, I stress about things a lot, I just bury it, try to forget about it, try
Autism
Shadow Boxing
One of my goals for this year has been to write more on my blog. While I'm a longtime blogger with an archive of thousands of posts stretching back to the turn of the millennium, I've always had problems with voice and with audience when writing
Quotes
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sometimes it feels like people only love your mask because you only show them your mask, but trust that they know its a mask, that they care about its author, and that they are perceptive enough to see you behind it -- Jonny Sun
Autism
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The Mask coming off is exactly what happens during the Autistic Burnout period, your Autistic traits become more obvious as your brain goes into Safe Mode. You may become more inflexible, your ability to 'mock' making eye contact may disappear completely, your ability to socialise may be drastically
Autism
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Archaeologists and historians have puzzled about where ancient people got the mathematical skills to construct and run their calendars. After all, they were not even known to have written language. So how could they have higher math? The answer is simple. The math was in the autistics. It was inborn,