“autism is a description of who I am and who other autistics are and not at all an affliction that haunts us.”
Source: The Autistic's Guide to Self-Discovery: Flourishing as a Neurodivergent Adult
“Again, you’re most likely to be diagnosed if you’re a white male, as your opinion of yourself will be taken more seriously by doctors. I wish I were joking.”
Source: The Autistic's Guide to Self-Discovery: Flourishing as a Neurodivergent Adult
“One of the most maddening things you’re going to hear is “Well, we’re all on the spectrum.” Usually, this will be someone close to you, and you’ll have just disclosed to them that you are autistic. Their reply takes this disclosure and — seemingly — integrates it into their worldview while actually dump- ing it in the garbage.”
Source: The Autistic's Guide to Self-Discovery: Flourishing as a Neurodivergent Adult
“When you walk to the edge of all the light you have and take that first step into the darkness of the unknown, you must believe that one of two things will happen:
There will be something solid for you to stand upon, or, you will be taught to fly.”
Source: The Leaning Tree
“As we move forward into different thinking styles, it’ll become more and more apparent why being understood and listened to is especially enticing to autistic people who are coming to an awareness of themselves.”
Source: The Autistic's Guide to Self-Discovery: Flourishing as a Neurodivergent Adult
“These other people have diverged from our expectations of neurological development, and from this we get the term neurodivergent. But this is a broad label that is not synonymous with autistic, the way that rectangle is descriptive of but not synonymous with square.”
Source: The Autistic's Guide to Self-Discovery: Flourishing as a Neurodivergent Adult
“People used to think the brain’s primary function was to take in the world around us and perceive stimuli. While that’s something it does, the brain spends a lot more energy filtering stimuli out, allowing us to discern the important ones from the unimportant ones.”
Source: The Autistic's Guide to Self-Discovery: Flourishing as a Neurodivergent Adult
“It’s a common quality of autistic thinking that we aren’t sure which details are considered necessary by others when making a point or telling a story. What’s funny about that — and we will dig into this later — is the certainty that the reader or listener has a better idea of what these details are than the person doing the explaining and that it just so happens that the correlation between the included details and the patience of the listener is one to one. This raises no red flags at all. It just “is what it is.” This makes sense because their attention has to be engaged — but it also seems unfair.”
Source: The Autistic's Guide to Self-Discovery: Flourishing as a Neurodivergent Adult
“Autistic children don’t need fixing—they need understanding. Their minds aren’t broken, just beautifully different”
“Everyone is not a little autistic. A wide range of individuals experience common aspects of the phenomena autistics endure, but this makes them autistic in the same way wearing makeup makes someone a Van Gogh painting.”
Source: Dandelion Ch;ld: An Autistic Life Shattered and Reforged