January 11, 2022

“Why did I have a meltdown?”

A guide for soul-searching autistics!

Have you ever found yourself crying, yelling, breaking things, or hurting yourself for reasons that seemed miniscule or mysterious?

Mid-meltdown is no time for sleuthing, but a later review can help identify causes and avoid them in the future.

I prefer to call these …

January 9, 2022

Do you get hangry? That is, do you feel hunger less in your stomach, and more in the mind-absorbing, headache-inducing frustration of trying to think straight and not drop anything?

That probably means the sugar in your bloodstream is low. It can happen to anyone who goes a long time without eating, but some of …

January 4, 2022

Diet culture may be harmful to individual dieters, if it leads to comparison and self-loathing. But society also suffers, because a hungry body can’t be as creative.

Likewise, I think it’s wrong to limit yourself to popular and “developmentally appropriate” hobbies, when your real passions might become a great souce of inner strength and a …

January 2, 2022

My last post talked about the vital role of movement to prevent and heal from trauma. Now let’s address the elephant in the room.

Stimming is movement. Movement reduces trauma. Stimming can help reduce the impact of trauma.

Rocking, humming, flapping, and bouncing are excellent ways to release the stress of an intense moment. I …

January 1, 2022

It’s probably wrong, in a technical sense, to think of trauma as energy stored in the body. The human body is made of cells, after all, not electricity.

But, as the saying goes, “All models are wrong – but some are useful.”

By thinking of trauma as stored energy, I can make sense of several …

December 29, 2021

Everyone who knows me can tell you that there’s no way I would give up my autism, if that were ever an option.

But my boyfriend was recently surprised to learn that I also wouldn’t change my sensory sensitivity, one of the many challenges I face as an autistic.

I know autistic people who would, …

December 28, 2021

Nothing about the neurodiversity movement will make sense until you can recognize and rescue yourself from the Neurotypical Fallacy.

It’s actually called the Typical Mind Fallacy, but I prefer the other name because it seems more common among neurotypicals.

Not that neurodivergent folks are immune – cognitive biases are human, and we are not divine. …

December 28, 2021

This hasn’t happened recently, but it’s happened a lot over the course of my life: A person tries to predict my taste in gifts or music or memes, and they get it right on the surface but wrong at the root.

My first memory of this was in about 4th grade, when a friend saw …

December 27, 2021

I used to love the phrase “can’t see the forest for the trees,” because it gave me a way to explain why I often miss the big picture… I focus too much on the details!

But “can’t see” is inaccurate. It would be better to say it takes me longer to see the forest, because …

December 19, 2021

If you self-identify as autistic, people will doubt it because you don’t look autistic.

If you self-identify as autistic, and you write hundreds of posts explaining why, people will doubt it because you don’t have the medical establishment’s seal of approval.

If you get officially diagnosed, and it happens easily, people will doubt it because …