May 19, 2022

The 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:

    Strengthen your joints. You may not be hypermobile enough to

May 15, 2022

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, …

April 23, 2022

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 …

April 1, 2022

April Fools’ Day is designed for telling lies where people expect truth. But my idea of fun is to tell truth where people expect lies.

In high school, one April 1st, I wrote the word “gullible” on a small piece of paper and taped it to the classroom ceiling.

I was hoping that someone would …

February 6, 2022

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 …

February 3, 2022

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 …

February 2, 2022

Can you be the calm in the storm, when someone you love is having a big reaction to a seemingly small trigger? Can your emotions be an anchor for them to flail around, until they’re finally able to collapse into your peace?

If not, that’s okay. They have the right to express their feelings, but …

February 2, 2022

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 …

January 30, 2022

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?” …

January 21, 2022

Do you relate to the song Surface Pressure, from Encanto? One part makes me tear up nearly every time: “Give it to your sister – it doesn’t hurt her.”

I can count a few specific memories of being told something wouldn’t hurt, when it actually did. But only a few. So, why does that line …