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Allyship is a verb. Not a badge.
Allyship is something you do. It is not something you are.
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On being newly identified as Autistic.
You have not become Autistic. You have always been Autistic. What has changed is that you now have a word for it, and a community, and a way of reading your own life.
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The numbers are not the story.
Autism prevalence is often quoted as one in a hundred, one in seventy, one in forty four, depending on who you ask and where they are counting. The numbers vary. They are not the story.
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Medicine has not been kind.
If you are Autistic and you have had a bad experience in a medical setting, you are not unusual. You are in the majority.
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Autism in later life.
The late diagnosis cohort is moving into its fifties, sixties, seventies, and the public conversation about autism has not caught up.
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Autism Went Mainstream. The Systems Did Not.
We’ve run Think Autism four times now and I still can’t predict how the day will go.
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Autism and school. The first system to fail us.
Most Autistic adults carry some version of school trauma. The setting failed us early, and it failed us consistently, and many of us did not recover the relationship with learning that we might otherwise have had.
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Autistic Pride Day is no longer one day.
Originally created on 18 June 2005 by autistic led advocacy group Aspies for Freedom, Autistic Pride Day was built as a day for autistic people to define themselves on their own terms.
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Parenting an Autistic child. First, believe them.
Most advice about parenting an Autistic child is written for the parent’s anxiety, not the child’s life. The advice tends to be procedural. What to do when they melt down. How to get them to eat.
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Autistic parents.
There are a lot of books written about parenting an Autistic child. There are very few books written about being a parent who is Autistic. The two are different topics.
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Autistic children do not lack social skills. They have different ones.
When an Autistic child plays alone, someone usually writes it down as a concern. The same child, absorbed and happy, alone by choice, looking for something specific in a toy no one else noticed. That is not a deficit.
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Non speaking is not non thinking.
Some of us do not speak. Some of us spoke once and do not anymore. Some of us speak on good days and not on bad ones. Some of us speak in some contexts and not in others.
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Autism and sleep. Why the night is loud.
A large proportion of Autistic people do not sleep well. The figure is sometimes quoted at sixty to eighty percent.
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Autism and the internet.
The internet was built by people with our brain. That is not a romantic claim. It is a demographic observation about who has spent the last sixty years designing computer systems, networks, protocols, and interfaces.
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Autistic relationships. Love on our own terms.
Autistic relationships do not look like what the magazines describe. The magazines are describing non Autistic relationships. We have been reading them our whole lives and wondering why the formula has never applied.
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Autistic culture.
Autistic culture exists. It does not have a national flag or an anthem, though it has a symbol. It has an aesthetic. It has humour. It has shared references, shared rituals, shared hospitality rules.
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Autistic special interests. The thing we are told to apologise for.
A SPIN is a specific intense interest. It is not a hobby. It is not a distraction. It is not a phase.
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Autistic joy.
Most public writing about autism is heavy. It has to be. The systems are failing us and the record needs to stay visible. But a campaign that only speaks in the register of harm has not understood what it is defending.
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Why pride.
People ask us why we use the word pride. Why not awareness. Why not acceptance. Why the language of the gay rights movement in a disability context. The question is fair and the answer is specific.
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AuDHD. The double rainbow.
Many of us are both Autistic and ADHD. The word we use is AuDHD. The overlap is large enough that clinicians once argued about whether the conditions could co occur.
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Autism is a disability. We are not afraid of that word.
A lot of campaigns about autism avoid the word disability. Neurodiversity, difference, divergence, variant, are used instead. The reasoning is usually kind.
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How we think. And why it matters.
Autistic thinking is often described, by non Autistic people, in the negative. Difficulty with generalisation. Difficulty with abstraction. Difficulty with executive function.
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On identity first language.
We say Autistic person. Not person with autism. The preference is not cosmetic. It is political, and it is specific, and the community has been clear about it for a long time.
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We are not a disorder. We are a way of being human.
The clinical world still calls it Autism Spectrum Disorder. We do not use that term here. The word disorder is a claim about us, made without us, and it follows us into every room our lives pass through. Schools.
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The diagnosis story.
Autism as a clinical category is younger than most people assume. The word entered the medical literature in the 1940s.
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Autistic burnout is not a personal failing.
The week I went into burnout, I cancelled three meetings I had been looking forward to and then sat on the floor for an hour because I could not work out what to eat. I had been managing fine the week before.
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Augie. The AI Seat
Every advisory board has a chair, a secretary, and a quorum. Ours has something else.
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Celebrate Autistic Pride Day with our Toolkit & Digital event
18 June 2024, Sydney, Australia, Today, we celebrate Autistic Pride Day, a day dedicated to honouring and recognising the unique talents, perspectives, and contributions of Autistic individuals around the world.
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Save the date: Autistic Pride Symposium 2024 in Sydney!
19 January 2024
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Think Autism Conference and Community Workshops, Sydney
This isn’t just an event. It’s how we invest in the future of autistic entrepreneurship. At Just Gold, we don’t just talk about inclusion, we design for it.
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How to unmask, and where.
Unmasking is not a single act. It is a series of choices made across years, in specific rooms, with specific people, about which parts of ourselves we are going to stop hiding.
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On masking. What it is, and what it costs.
Masking is the word we use for the work of pretending to be a non Autistic person.
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Join us for Autistic Pride Day Melbourne Symposium on 18 June '23
I13 June 2023
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What I wish I had known.
I wish I had known that the exhaustion was not moral. That the way I fell apart after social events was not a character flaw, not introversion gone wrong, not a failure of willpower, but a nervous system paying its bill.
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Autism and women. What the diagnostic tools missed.
For most of the history of Autism diagnosis, the clinical tools were built on observations of boys.
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The Autistic Pride Day Symposium 2024 comes to Melbourne & Sydney
Following the groundbreaking success of last year’s inaugural event, the Autistic Pride Day Symposium is set to return in 2024 with an expanded vision, reaching both Melbourne and Sydney.
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On sensory experience.
The world arrives at us differently. Not more, not less, differently. The fluorescent light that nobody else registers is a fluorescent light I have been counting for an hour.
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Take Off The Mask This Autistic Pride Day
For too long, Autistic individuals have felt pressure to camouflage their authentic Autistic traits and behaviours, suppressing natural stimming, masking special interests, and altering communication styles.
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On shutdowns. The quieter crisis.
Shutdowns look like nothing is happening. That is why they are the version of distress the system most reliably ignores.
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Your meltdown is not a tantrum.
A meltdown is your nervous system in an emergency. A tantrum is a negotiation tactic. They look similar to an outsider. They are not the same thing, and the insistence that they are has done enormous damage.