NeurobeautifulThe most common tips I hear for living your best autistic life are to protect your senses, explore your interests, accept your differences, and ask for what you need.
But there are other, less common tips that also help support autistic wellness. Here are three:
People who experience anxiety often find it helpful to tune into their senses. A common strategy is to notice and name things you can see, hear, feel, and smell.
When my anxiety is brought on by sensory overload, though, that strategy is the exact opposite of helpful. I’m already overly aware of all the things, …
Lying awake at night, knowing nothing about neurodiversity, I sometimes got a strong urge to rub my feet together like a cricket. So I did.
But partway through, I always paused, just to prove I could. Then I continued.
For some reason, I thought the behavior was acceptable if I could stop it, and not …
Why does autism create such a wide spectrum of traits?
Because autistic brains are hyper-connected. You can see it on a brain scan. We have neural pathways that others don’t, like secret passages all over our brains.
This results in a torrent of information to process, including physical sensations and pattern recognition. By default, everything …
There’s autism, a neurotype with a cluster of predispositions. From birth, it makes some things enjoyable and other things hard.
Then there’s autistic distress, which is the way that neurotype interacts with stressors. It varies over time, based on the environment and any co-occurring conditions.
The first thing is what most advocates call “autism.” The …
Yesterday, I reshared my post about the concept of “overreacting.” I believe it’s rarely done by autistic people – or maybe anyone, but autistics get accused of it more often, so that’s what I focused on.
Some autistic people commented that they do overreact sometimes. So, I want to explore the concept a …
I’ve seen quite a few memes about the neurodivergent tendency to get nothing done for half a day before an appointment or event.
The tone is always playfully self-deprecating – like, “Haha, who else here gives in to the illusion that an item on the calendar casts a spell of uselessness on the preceding hours?” …