“Whatever advantages I might have as a verbal human being with a handy batch of coping and masking mechanisms in place, I am no better than anyone else on the spectrum. We are equals. When I say that autistic lives have value, I'm speaking for every single one of them.”
Source: I Overcame My Autism and All I Got Was This Lousy Anxiety Disorder: A Memoir
“It's mild to you and every other heartless soul in this village, Nina; It's not mild to me. (...) It's mild you because we made it so, at great personal cost!”
Source: A Kind of Spark
“Sonnet on The Spectrum
(Diary of An Autistic Neuroscientist)
We, on the spectrum, are often
misconstrued as rude or audacious.
Problem is not that we feel too little,
but that we feel too crippling much.
Sensory overload is our biggest struggle,
an eternal battle against daily situations.
Storms that the normals experience only in
tragedy, are our life's everyday occurrence.
Sidelining the stormy torment of the spectrum,
the world romanticizes with autistic savants.
I never could communicate with my parents,
and they never knew what my struggle was.
We autistics have difficulty communicating,
till we speak on a matter of interest.
Then we can jabber like any neurotypical,
bursting with joy in our nerves and veins.”
Source: The Humanitarian Dictator
“Sensory overload is our biggest struggle.”
Source: The Humanitarian Dictator
“We, on the spectrum, are often
misconstrued as rude or audacious.
Problem is not that we feel too little,
but that we feel too crippling much.
Sensory overload is our biggest struggle,
an eternal battle against daily situations.
Storms that the normals experience only in
tragedy, are our life’s everyday occurrence.”
Source: The Humanitarian Dictator
“That curtain never came. The end credits should have run, but the days kept on happening, my alarm kept going off, and new challenges kept popping up. Furthermore, I had a sense that this “I finally did all the things, give me my American Dream award” moment wasn’t the final, dramatic crescendo of an orchestrated symphony. I knew this because I was a fake.”
Source: The Autistic's Guide to Self-Discovery: Flourishing as a Neurodivergent Adult
“We know from daily life that we exist for other people first of all, for whose smiles and well-being our own happiness depends.”
“It’s OKAY to be scared. Being scared means you’re about to do something really, really brave.”
Source: The Single Woman–Life, Love, and a Dash of Sass: Embracing Singleness with Confidence
“Now in my forties, often I look around a room of adults and wonder how many others are faking it. If so, who are we playacting for? Who would be offended if we didn’t wear the right clothes? Which person sees themselves as an actual grown-up, would judge our handshake, comment sincerely on a wine, and expect a sense of achievement and pride to blossom within them for proving their adulthood? Who is motivated by power, believes that money is real, and insists the social structure is a meritocracy that
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The Autistic’s Guide to Self-Discovery
sprouted from the ground when George Washington chopped down a cherry tree to ratify the New Deal at Gettysburg, accom- panied by his Rough Riders? Which people are we trying to fit in for? In any given room, it could be everyone but me, or it could be no one.”
Source: The Autistic's Guide to Self-Discovery: Flourishing as a Neurodivergent Adult
“I think in many ways that we autistic are the normal ones and the rest of the people are pretty strange. They keep saying that climate change is an existential threat and the most important issue of all. And yet they just carry on like before. If the emissions have to stop, then we must stop the emissions. To me that is black or white. There are no grey areas when it comes to survival. Either we go on as a civilization or we don’t.”
Source: No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference