Shutdowns and Emotional Dysregulation My whole life I’ve thought of myself as unemotional like Mr. Spock, but when I look back at my life, I realize I’ve had frequent emotional breakdowns. The problem has been that my body doesn’t always show emotions in the same way as other people, so…

I think curiosity looks very different in an autist than in other people. I am curious, but because I’m also cautious, I tend to wait and observe things before I jump in. If I ask a question, I want to know more than an initial answer to it. I tend…

When trying to explain how my autism manifests and why it’s real even if I can mask it, I find myself fielding a set of variations on the question above. Why don’t you just take classes on how to read faces? Why don’t you just learn how to make/understand jokes? …

Most of my childhood, I had one friend or zero friends at school. I had lots of siblings, but honestly tended to prefer reading books, often in the furnace room or up in a tree, to avoid being interrupted by other kids or by my parents wanting to offer me…

The stereotypical autist is supposed to be (male) lacking in empathy, and therefore, struggling with intimate relationships such as partnership, friendship, and, of course, parenting. Yet for me, the picture is far more complicated. In many ways, I have an over-abundance of empathy, something which can get in the way…

When I was in high school, I remember multiple people accusing me of purposely misunderstanding instructions to simple tasks. One said I “had no common sense.” And it was, indeed, frustrating to them that I seemed so intelligent in a wide range of areas, but also so very stupid in…

One of the earliest lessons of my childhood was that I wasn’t a desirable or good friend. I didn’t understand why that was, but I knew that I didn’t do things other friends did and I didn’t like things that most other people did. I was always picking the wrong…

I recently listened to a podcast where a well-intentioned person insisted that humans have largely forgotten their innate emotional intelligence and that only 7% of information is communicated through words. The other 93% is communicated in non-verbal ways and if people would simply pay attention to body language and facial…

As an adult, I’m aware that compliments aren’t always compliments, but as a kid, this was baffling to me and I was quickly confused by taunting and bullying kids who pretended they were saying nice things to me when they were actually mocking me, about my hair (your hair looks…