“Pegg, cowering in her bedroom, asked her housekeeper to check on the ailing Varick. Then, willing herself in to a frenzy, she tore at her hair and clothes, weeping, her sobs accelerating in volume.”
Source: Defiant Brides: The Untold Story of Two Revolutionary-Era Women and the Radical Men They Married
“The great majority of us are required to live a life of constant, systematic duplicity. Your health is bound to be affected if, day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel, if you grovel before what you dislike and rejoice at what brings you nothing but misfortune.”
“Ought one to surrender to authority even if one believed that that authority was wrong? If the answer was yes, then I knew that I would always be wrong, because I could never do it. Then how could one live in a world in which one's mind and perceptions meant nothing and authority and tradition meant everything? There were no answers.”
Source: Black Boy
“The normal pipeline for an adult autistic is being overwhelmed, tired, then reaching burnout, depression, and guilt. But change is possible. These are systemic problems that we encounter, and the solutions we bring are going to be individual. Autistic people are wildly diverse, and what strengths you have won’t look like someone else’s.”
Source: The Autistic's Guide to Self-Discovery: Flourishing as a Neurodivergent Adult
“In these days, doctors know little about autism. They blame it on distant parents who don't communicate enough with their children”
Source: Brazen: Rebel Ladies Who Rocked the World
“Despite the fact that the world didn’t cater to its style, I saw advantages in my thinking.”
Source: The Autistic's Guide to Self-Discovery: Flourishing as a Neurodivergent Adult
“Maybe the most surprising thing is that the proficiency of so many autism experts ends at diagnosis. Once that diagnosis is made, especially for adults, the expert’s job is over, and they have no idea how to guide you in handling that information.”
Source: The Autistic's Guide to Self-Discovery: Flourishing as a Neurodivergent Adult
“If coming out as autistic as an adult is hard, it’s only because of the resistance of those around you. It doesn’t change the actual challenges you have in your job, your relationships, or your perception. Which is just such a perfect fact because the challenges you’ve always faced haven’t been due to the autism either — not really. They’ve been due to the way the world has been structured based on neurotypical thinking and socialization. In most cases, autism is a social disability, not a medical one.”
Source: The Autistic's Guide to Self-Discovery: Flourishing as a Neurodivergent Adult
“We did our best to fit in, be typical, or control the narrative, and kept this ruse up for years and then decades, usually developing some really unhealthy coping skills to deal with the resulting anxiety. Expectations were always high, and we worked harder and harder to meet them, exhausting ourselves and deteriorating our quality of life.”
Source: The Autistic's Guide to Self-Discovery: Flourishing as a Neurodivergent Adult
“They’ll explain why you can’t be autistic by producing the very evidence you would use to prove that you are — how smart you are, how social you are, your expert and intense eye contact, your terrific grades and amazing knowledge about niche subjects, your charm during social events. All things that were hard-fought parts of your masked identity.”
Source: The Autistic's Guide to Self-Discovery: Flourishing as a Neurodivergent Adult