All The Bad Parts of Autism How does a diagnosis of autism damage self-esteem? Well, I suddenly had to take a really good, hard look at all the things that had been niggling at me for years and that I’d tried to ignore or tell myself they didn’t matter or…

Autism and Friendships When I was a kid, I remember thinking that friendship was a very exhausting and time-consuming thing and that this was why I either had 0 friends or only 1 friend and I was fine with that because I was using my time for other, more important…

Autism and Clumsiness I have always been incredibly clumsy. Some of the most obvious signs of this are the stains on my clothing. The first time I wear anything, I am sure to get a stain on it for the simple reason that I get stains on everything I wear…

Why Autists Don’t Get Jokes Many neurotypical people assume that autists lack a sense of humor. This is not usually the case. What is actually the problem is that context is necessary to understand the joke and autists often do not have the socially grounding to gather context to make…

Pain and Autism One of the weird realities of autism is hypersensitivity COMBINED with hyposensitivity. I suppose what this really means is that autistic brains don’t work the way neurotypical brains work and that isn’t particularly novel. But the specifics of the difference continue to be interesting to me. I…

Autism and Asking For Help When I was diagnosed with autism, one of the tests was being given an incomplete set of puzzle pieces and seeing how long it would take me to ask for the missing pieces to complete the puzzle. The diagnostician admitted that this was generally a…

Hannah Gadsby’s All Happy Show (All the way through) I was nervous about going to this event because so MANY people all in the same place. Noise, lights, not being able to get out easily, etc. But I love Hannah Gadsby so much. The show was a slow start, but…

Autistic Grieving When my daughter died seventeen years ago, I hadn’t yet had an autism diagnosis, but my grief was so different from what most other seemed to experience that it was one of the signals of my neurodivergence. I was mostly numb to my sadness, surprised when people around…