Your Calm Is Saving Someone Money
Maturity, as institutions reward it, is noticing something is wrong and not forcing repair.
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Autism essays
Writing on autistic life, accommodation, masking, fragility, and what design under constraint costs the person it constrains. 23 essays in this theme.
Writing on autistic life, accommodation, masking, fragility, and what design under constraint costs the person it constrains.
23 essays · the pattern that runs through most of them is Infrastructural power
Start with Your Calm Is Saving Someone Money
'Unreasonable' Means the System Wasn't Built for You
Systems are built for someone with steady income, a fixed address and time to answer every letter.
Procedure Turns Difference Into Deviance
Grief gets called disruptive and calm gets called professional.
Pretending Everything Is Fine Is Half the Job
Organizations reward whoever softens the bad news, and the job falls to people already trained to self-filter: women, people of color, autistic and first-generation staff.
Autistic People Who Vanish Aren't Giving Up
The scholar who quits, the writer who falls silent: departure is a skill masked minds learn early.
ABA Is a Capitalist's Wet Dream
When do "Standards of Care" tell us more about entrenchment than about efficacy?
Digital Stims That Adjust to Your Nervous System
A silicone popper gives the same feedback all day.
A Hard Trip Can Show a Masked Mind What It Hid
Psychedelics are sold as a way to loosen control.
Do I Have the Energy to Start Over in Therapy?
Before my autism diagnosis, therapy, as it turned out, was reinforcing my masked self
Neurodiversity Washing
Selling the look of inclusion while keeping the barriers
Masking Numbs Pleasure Along With Pain
To pass in an open-plan office, a masked person learns to stop feeling what their body reports.
Self-Help Wasn't Written for Neurodivergent Minds
Habit books like Atomic Habits backfire on people with ADHD or autism, and every missed streak becomes proof of being lazy.
What Is Autistic Hazing?
Masked autistic people sometimes turn on openly autistic ones.
Masking Is a Property of the Room, Not the Person
The same person masks lightly at home and to exhaustion in a two o'clock meeting.
Writing for People Born Without Autism
On the page, nobody can hear you joking. A joke built from the argument's own logic needs no tone to land.
Autistic People Are Owed Reparations
It's not about dimmer light fixtures in prison cells, but a hell of a lot more
Performing an Inner Life Until It Replaces Yours
Performing a self in public changes how you see yourself.
What If Courts Assumed Anyone Might Be Autistic?
Courts read coping mechanisms, trauma responses and neurological difference as deviance, and masked autistic people pay for it in prison time.
An Autistic's Guide to Vaping Less
Nicotine, CBD and THC each do sensory and emotional work. Cut back by replacing the work, not by willpower.
How Indian American Careerism Hid My Autism
Caste, immigration law and family expectations taught me to hide my neurodivergence, and the masking cost years of mental health.
Who Was I That Whole Time?
Years in the underground dance scene, straining to find a place everyone else seemed to move through easily, before autism explained it.
Medical 'Normal' Was Built Around What Employers Need
In the exam room, whatever matches the form is health and the rest is disorder.
Autistic Self-Worth Is Bad for Business
Diagnosed at 33, after three decades of reading every sensory friction as a failure of character.
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