Hi! I'm Autistic.

Here's what that means--for my creative work, and otherwise

Thanks for being here! I’m on a mission to serve others through writing & mentorship, and I’m doing this work as a self-employed, neurodivergent human. Your support has a bigger impact on my life than you likely know. Please know it! When you can, thank you for reading closely, sharing widely, and upgrading to a paid subscription.

---

---

Hello friends, readers, creative peers, humans.

Are we new to each other? Let me tell you a few things: I am a writer and poet (since the age of 3), a self-employed creative mentor, a very skilled reader / editor / coach, and an only child. I have lots of tattoos, seasonal allergies, C-PTSD, an affinity for underdogs, and something inside me that feels voluptuous and which I call “radical empathy.” I have a rock collection, a seashell collection, and a sticker collection. I am a double Taurus (sun + moon) and Libra rising.

I am also, as it turns out, Autistic. Which makes everything I previously said still true, but bigger.

“As it turns out” is a modest way of saying, fuck, I didn’t know. For a long, long time, I didn’t know. I didn’t know! Now I do.

Or maybe I knew? When my therapist (my generous, neurodivergent, trauma-informed therapist) first uttered the word, Autism, not with authority but with curiosity, I felt something burst inside my body, and it lined up with something that was also bursting inside my brain. If “bursting” sounds bad to you, then I’m using the wrong word. These two parts of me were lighting up and talking to each other, sharing the same immense clarity. They don’t do this often; usually, it’s only mild clarity, and only in one place.

Yet here they were, my body and brain in agreement. What were they agreeing about? It was mostly a sensation, but if I had to put it into words, it sounded something like this: oh thank god, somebody finally noticed.

---

Below is a personal essay about what it means for me to be Autistic. Please know that “it means” is a phrase I chose very thoughtfully, that the sentences below are crafted from a definitive place, but for strictly personal reasons. The way personhood can be both definitive and, well, hyper-personal. Learning about my Autism diagnosis has involved learning about the true scope and diversity of the spectrum, a forever kind of learning. I’m sharing my truths not to claim, diagnose, or define anything for anyone else, but to illuminate and contribute, to be inside something that feels incredibly hard to describe and to try to describe it anyway.

It’s a thing I want to speak to, and it’s a thing I want to speak from. Aren’t we always doing both?

Please remember that all writing is crafted, and that craft is always personal.

---

---

I think I’d like to start here, somewhere familiar, somewhere above water, in a place where the two of us may likely meet: Being Autistic means that when you’re served by my unwavering attention to detail, my tendency to pick up on subtle threads of connection, my ability to reflect something back to you in that just right way, or the deep well of enthusiasm—nearly obsessive—that I carry for creativity + words + anything that touches them, you are being served by my Autism.

---

It means I feel rushed by “normal” time, because my innate sense of time is slow and brothy. It means I forget to eat, get lost in the shower, and don’t know what I’m saying when I say to my partner, “I’ll be ready in five minutes.” (I love you M)

---

It means I struggle—yes, “struggle” is the right word here—with small talk. Because I’ve spent nearly 37 years masking (i.e. self-censoring at all costs), you may or may not be surprised to hear this.

Let me try, then, pushing it further into language: Small talk makes me feel like I’m from another planet, like I’m on another wavelength, like I don’t understand why or how anything becomes normal or common. I don’t understand talking about trivial things. Everything feels serious in my brain. Everything is serious. “Don’t take things so personal, Sarah.” I have never understood why I am such an uptight person in a world full of people hangin’ loose 24/7.

Well, it turns out I am not uptight. My brain works the way it works. When I take something in, I am taking 100% of it in. I take in all of the information in front of me. In a conversation with a dear friend or a beloved client, these are superpowers (if you’ve seen it, you know).

But at the grocery store / on instagram / in crowded, agenda-less spaces without context / or during that time & space commonly known as day-to-day living? Being a person in front of other people gets hard, fast. It’s a trying feeling, pressed up against a flattening one. How are you doing? is a question that will never, ever make sense to me, and yes, I mean that existentially, because Palestine and slaughterhouses and homelessness, but I also mean it in my bones and guts and marrow, because there is only all of me, not part of me, and if you’re asking about me, that’s what you’re asking about. I am never well or fine or okay or hanging in there, I am 100 things, at minimum, in every moment, and I feel weird not telling you about all of them.

When I am not telling you about all of them, it is because I have learned not to tell you about all of them. Sometimes that’s the first, or the loudest, or even the only thing between us: how I’ve learned how to be.

This is one of the saddest parts of learning I am Autistic at 36.

---

I’d like to say a tiny bit more about this thing called, attention. I am often saying that our creativity lives not just in us or just in the external thing—the product going out, or the inspiration coming in—but in the relational space between us and it. In the attentional space.

This is true for all of us. Who we interact with, what we consume, and how we orient to our surroundings = what kind of world we live in. A noisy, competitive, cynical one? A joyful, slow, peace-filled one? A white-washed one? A reciprocal one? One where it’s normal to be different? Or not?

Consumption gives us our adjectives. In my brain, the effects of this are dramatic and constant. To say that I am impressionable is to describe a tornado as windy.

Like you, I can build habits around where my attention is going. Like you, I can do the internal / creative work of getting clearer on my values, and then try to make my attention collaborate with them.

Unlike you¹, I cannot turn the dial down. It is always already set on high.

There are many choices I can make. Thinning my attention is not one of them. I’ve never met a surface. Everything feels like interiority to me.

---

It means I will never, ever, ever be bored—it. is. not. possible.—by the things I love. Creativity, animals, rocks, words & languaging, bugs, shells, cows, chickens, helping other people feel stronger inside themselves and their creative channel, did I mention animals?

I have interests and enthusiasms, these few but sturdy lifeboats that have carried me through long stretches of time when I felt held by almost nothing else. They will never not be a part of my life. They are steeped in loyalty, their edges shimmering with gold when I look at them.

Am I loyal to them, or are they loyal to me?

I think both are both.

This is the kind of relationship I want everyone to have with their creativity.

---

It means I’m hyper-sensitive to temperature. If you and I are hanging out outside together and it isn’t summer, I am probably too cold and don’t know how to tell you. I don’t know why! I hope this doesn’t make you sad.

---

It means I could not bear eating animals as a child and stopped when I was only 13 and with nobody else’s influence, a rare and miraculous example of meeting one of my own Autistic needs as a young person. I cannot tell you how much I cherish this fact.

---

It means I process things slowly. It means the majority of my questions will not arrive in real time.

I can’t help it. (It doesn’t need help.)

I will have questions for you, but they will come later, and they will be better for it. Stay tuned.

---

It means I like childish things, perhaps more than the average bear. Hello Kitty, Peewee’s Playhouse, Lisa Frank; anything available in pastel cheetah print. The inside of my heart is the inside of a locker: stickers & posters & animals & cute things, their only purpose to create a feeling in me that I get to feel whenever I look at them.

I remember, many years ago, wearing a Shopkins necklace to some hoity-toity writing event held at a professor’s friend’s house. I’d been briefly enrolled in yet another graduate program, seeking a validation I would not find before doubling my student debt and then dropping out. Gathered in the corner of a room with a few other poets, a woman with short hair and elegant glasses commented on my necklace. Oh, I think my niece is really into that, she said, before giving me a look that I am desperate to describe, but not sure I can. It wasn’t quite suspicion, and it wasn’t quite ridicule, and she didn’t quite laugh, but she also didn’t not laugh, and I understood, from the long silence that followed, that there was something wrong about my sincerity, that I had crossed a line. The line of composure? Of adulthood?

When no one was looking, I took the necklace off and threw it in the garbage.

Another memory: I had just started in a new work position, as a case manager and housing advocate for adults with severe mental illnesses. My cat, Maika, passed away two days before the job began, quite unexpectedly. Is there a worse combination than grief + trying to impress other people you’ve just met? Mask on mask on mask. During those first few weeks, from the minute I got home from work to the moment my partner walked through the front door, I soothed my solitary self by watching old episodes of Pepper Ann on YouTube.²

---

It means I keep processing things after the fact. Keep thinking about you. Keep valuing and mulling over what we talked about. If you are part of my inner circle—family, friend, client, creative peer—you are present with me in a big, long-lasting way.

Do you hear the gravity of what I’m saying? I am a good person to have on your team.

This is one of the happiest parts of learning I am Autistic at 36, the way it offers context, which offers understanding, which offers self-worth. In my experience, you can’t skip ahead; that’s the order they come in.

---

It means I really, really benefit from there being some kind of agenda or structure. For me, agenda = authenticity. I’m not talking about wedding ourselves to pre-scripted things. I’m talking about having a primary reason for coming together or a designated topic of focus, the opposite of small talk.

Moments are places for me. I need to be able to locate myself inside of them.

An emotional room, so that we know something clear about where we are, so that we have shared walls to bounce around inside of and push away from.

An emotional room, so that we know where to ground ourselves before and after going on tangents or down rabbit holes.

Spontaneity and discovery and experiment are served, not restricted, by structure. I think this is true for everyone, but the effect of its absence is much harder on me.

Without an agenda, I will just sit there. I won’t know what to say because I won’t have anything to say because I don’t understand saying spontaneously and without context. And it will look like there’s nothing going on inside of me, even though there always is.

---

Because here’s the other thing: Being Autistic means that the gulf between the reality in my head and the shared reality you and I both move through is often a wide, formidable gulf. Wide enough to fit two or three lives in there.

Said differently: There are things I can put into language—many things, obviously. And then, there are all the things that I can’t.

The intensity of my imagination, since childhood, has been both my healthiest coping mechanism and the background noise that makes being in the social world constantly hard.

Years ago, my partner gifted me with a new verb: Scarlet Witching. It’s a thing I do sometimes, a thing he’s watched me do consistently for the past 10 years. I am the most powerful superhero in the Marvel universe! I am also capable of losing track of reality, of going somewhere so detailed and convincing and internal that I experience a nearly physical pain when I remember that other people can’t go there, too. A remembering that happens almost daily.

This past winter, I learned that my Scarlet Witching episodes share some vital threads with the “meltdowns” that are a common part of the Autistic experience. If I had not lived with one other person for a solid decade, I’m not sure I would have been able to make this connection on my own, having internalized so many misunderstandings about what disability is supposed to look like that I was ready to assume my internal experiences did not count.

When we talk about disability, we need to talk about both sides of it: the external presentations, and the internal experiences. Through masking, trauma, and good old-fashioned gender troubles, much of my Autism, starting around the age of 12, has remained invisible.

Which makes this a great place to set a loving boundary: I welcome your kind, supportive messages, celebratory comments, and congratulatory words.

I also invite you to keep anything that falls within the bounds of shock or surprise to yourself. This includes things like gasping, saying really with a question mark attached, or telling me you wouldn’t have pegged me for Autistic. Your surprise at my diagnosis feels terrible to me—who wants their newfound liberating truth to be met with disbelief? More importantly, it has nothing to do with me. It has to do with internalized stereotypes, which are the result of a systemic understanding of mental health that’s more interested in symbolism than lived experience; we’re comfortable calling it a spectrum, but not comfortable when it looks different than what we’ve seen before. What do we think that word even means?

---

---

Being Autistic means that my brain is not only monotropic, but rhizomatic. My partner and I sometimes joke about the way I talk, which is 92% unmasked with him, and therefore goes like this: “Can I tell you something? There are three things I’d like to tell you, and the first two things each have two sub-parts. Here’s the first thing, sub-part number one:...”

No wonder I’m a writer. The page beckons my way of thinking, invites me to map out all these threads that comprise my singular focus. On the page, I can see my personhood in a way that is almost impossible to see anywhere else.

There will be a lot more to say about this unbelievable connection between writing & neurodivergence, what the page uniquely offers some of us. What it makes possible that isn’t always possible through other means.

My therapist is also neurodivergent, and working with her is one of the first times I’ve been able to communicate with someone in my windy, unfiltered, zig-zaggy way and watch their brain do a similar thing. Do you know what happens? We. don’t. get. lost. We can retrace our steps back to two sub-points ago and know exactly where we are in the conversation. We can shift around as if talking were a three-dimensional game. I think maybe it is for some of us.

My partner, brilliant and kind, has had 10+ years of learning how to communicate with me. He does a very good job of keeping up, but there’s a lot more flailing / laughing involved.

---

Seriously though, these rhizomes? They’re part of my ability to go deep with you, deep with your creativity too.

Any you: friend, peer, client, reader.

They’re why I can promise that my creative guidance is sustainable and long-lasting, whether we work together for a month or a year.

---

It means I like (love / cherish / am grounded by / totally obsessed with) repetition. On the page, in the body, all of it. Everywhere. The same thing, and then the same thing again. Poof: it’s different! Even though it’s the same. Isn’t that great? It’s basically what a day is.

---

It means I don’t understand gossip and I really, really hate it. Outside comedy, I don’t understand saying things insincerely. I don’t understand having a problem with someone and not telling them about it and continuing to interact as if the problem isn’t there. Don’t you care about that person? Don’t you want to bridge the gulf between your body and theirs with something close to honesty?

---

It means I rely heavily on certain things:

- Reciprocity. Whether verbally or in writing, I rely on the other person nodding along or otherwise letting me know where they’re at in the conversation with me. It’s something I’ve cultivated very, very consciously in my own behavior; maybe you’ve noticed. I smile. I nod. I react with my body. I show you, with movement, that I am engaging with you, to make sure you know. And I need these things in return, otherwise it’s hard for me to know what’s going on.

- Lots and lots of spaciousness, and lots and lots of time alone. When I was very little, I asked my mom to help me spell the words, “keep out,” which I wrote on a sign that I taped to the front of my bedroom door. This is one keep out story of many.

- Other people’s mannerisms, which I’ve been picking up and copying throughout my adult life, both consciously and not. There’s a rolodex in my mind full of behaviors—some I admire, some I feel obligated to enact—that I’ve never not carried. Sometimes it feels like a loss of self; other times, like self-construction. Once, I was standing next to two women with brown hair and nice clothing—this was, haha, also during that terrible second attempt at grad school. They were facing each other, and I was maybe two feet away, facing them both. “Have you ever noticed that thing some people do,” one said to the other, her voice inflecting upward, “where they copy how other people talk?” I froze. “Yeah, it’s so fucking weird.” Their eyes went big, like they might start laughing any second now. Oh my god, I thought. People can see what I’m doing? They were both so conventionally beautiful. Oh my god, can everyone see how bad I am? I was probably 28.

- Being told explicitly what you explicitly need me to know. It isn’t a lack of empathy—despite the stereotype, neurodivergent humans tend to be highly emotionally attuned, both to their surroundings and to other people—but a lack of assumptions. When I try to make an assumption, it doesn’t go well, and everything inside me feels bad.

See how Autism and neurodivergence can point us toward good, relationship-forward ways of moving through the world? More honesty. More tender engagement. Less assumption and more invitation; curiosity, not conclusion.

---

It means I have a lot of questions, an excess of questions. How will other people experience me as I begin to unmask? Will I seem fickle? Mean? Less articulate? What if I liked parts of my mask? What if parts of my mask are what other people liked about me?

Which of my fears are just Autistic needs I learned to see as wrong?

Yes feminist marketing and ethical marketing, but what about neurodivergent marketing? Am I allowed to offer my gifts & services to other humans when I struggle this much with eye contact and being physically seen? (If one more person talks to me about putting myself out there I swear to gawd my head will fall right off my body, out of spite. It will be so fucking far out there. It will be worth it; I don’t like being looked at anyway, and I can probably still write.) Is it OK to love people and have a hard time being around them? Is it OK to love people and have a hard time being around them and then offer to help some of them with their creativity & make money from doing so?

By the way, when I say I have a hard time being around people, or I talk about doing the work of unmasking myself, I feel like I’m trying to describe what a cake is—the texture, the taste, the comfort—by handing you a cold spoonful of flour.

It is so enormously far from the truth, so laughably singular, to sum it up as “hard.”

It is so much more complex than that word, mask, implies, or the notion of simply taking something off.

I’m not wearing a discrete thing on my face. There’s a discrete thing wearing me. It feels like I am part of the part that needs to be taken off.

---

It means I read widely, and think widely, and watch movies widely, and listen to the same songs over and over and over again, sometimes only their beginnings.

A JOKE:

Me: “I made a new playlist!”

My partner: “Oh!”

The joke is that it’s never a new playlist, it’s the same 10 or 12 songs in slightly rearranged order. When I hear a song I’ve never heard before, is there always a weird feeling in my chest? Yes, like I’m wearing clothes that aren’t mine.

But let me tell you this: when “Tear in Your Hand” comes on, it’s not just that I know every lyric. I know when Tori breathes and for how long. I know where every guttural ooh happens. I know when she’s going to make a sound before saying an actual word. I know when she’s about to hold the note still and when she’s about to play, when her voice will become a slinky working its way down from the top of the piano to the keys to the bench to the floor. Gawd she’s weird; I love her so.

---

It means I am never not noticing things. It means I notice people around me noticing things, and I’m often noticing in such a way that you might not notice my noticing, which I notice, too. I don’t mean to sound like a creep! There is a porousness in my brain that means everything rushes in like data. Everything rushes in like poetry, too.

---

Of course, being Autistic sometimes means I don’t notice things.

But “don’t” really isn’t the right word here, the way it suggests a not-happening when in fact there is so much happening. Too much, and then too much more.

To misquote Anne Sexton: noticing is scooped from noticing and noticing remains.

Sometimes everything around me overflows, but the overflowing happens on the inside. “Internal glitching,” I’ve been calling it. Too much data, not enough free space. It’s the result of me taking so, so, so much information in from all around me, which is always on top of the internal data that my body is never not producing. (There are entire fucking worlds in here and YES it can be very good for multiple reasons including creatively speaking and YES it can be tremendously difficult to be the kind of person who I am. Yes, I am always tired. I just thought this was what being a person felt like!)

From the outside, I might look distracted. You might think I’m not paying attention, or that I’ve gone Elsewhere (a very real place).

But from the inside? Attention is all that I am. My bones are attention. My ligaments are attention. My heart is attention. My guts and tissue and blood and kidneys are attention.

How I seem is not who I am. Feel free to carry this truth about yourself, too.

---

It means I have a hard time being looked at physically.

This is a painful one to talk about, so shockingly real and bright that I almost have to shut my own eyes.

I don’t like being looked at.

The words clang & echo as I drop them on the page.

I don’t like being looked at. What does it mean?! What are the ramifications?

I know very little so far, but I’ll say what I know:

It does not mean I can’t have relationships with other people, or show up on Zoom to host workshops & client sessions, or have lunch in person with a friend.

It means that some of these fears and failures I’ve been carrying around and trying to work past are not fears or failures, but needs.

A need is not a thing to work past. A need is a thing to work with. It’s just a truth.

It means at my graduate thesis reading in 2014, I took one of those tri-fold boards that children use for presenting their science projects at school assemblies, and I painted the outside of it black. Then, I took white paper and cut out four letters, B, O, D, Y, and taped them to the middle panel. No serif. I placed the tri-fold board on the podium wrong side out, the word “body” greeting the audience. Setting heavy bookends on the inside edges to hold it securely in place, I stood behind the cardboard and read my poems into the microphone.

Nobody could see me.

What could I see?

The inside of my tri-fold board, which I’d decorated like a teenage girl’s dream locker. Pink stars & candy hearts & pictures of Tori and Gaga and everything bubblegum, pastel, and reaffirming.

Lifeboats.

---

Oh by the way, my thesis manuscript was called…

[…wait for it…]

…Notes on the post-body.

These little obviousnesses, these right-there-all-along truths. With diagnosis coming so late in life, these are the memories that now feel like treasure to me. Look, there I was! Trying to be the way I needed to be, even before I knew why.

---

It means I am overwhelmed, daily, by most things.

I am learning to hear the neutrality in this statement. I am learning to grieve it, but not resent it.

There’s a cataclysmic difference between the two.

---

It means I have never quite been the same since my soulmate kitty, Boots, passed away one year ago today. It means when I joked about him being my service animal, it was probably not a joke. It means I credit both his life and his death with giving me a tremendous, unparalleled gift:

The gift of feeling, for 17 and a half years, unconditionally seen (I’m serious: you have never seen a cat love a single human so much). Seen amidst paralyzing invisibility.

And the gift of feeling, as a result of his passing, something hard unlock inside my chest + brain, I don’t know how to describe it: I see in my mind a bison, a feeling of unwavering strength, a palette of earth tones, and the sense that something is here now that can never be erased, something that made itself present the moment he started shifting to another plane, the moment the second injection went in and I said out loud (because I had never felt stronger), “it’s okay, you can go where you need to go.”

Any self-clarity I have now—anything and everything that has led, finally, to this diagnosis—is a result of him living and dying.

---

It means “what if nothing’s wrong?” is no longer a philosophical question I keep circling around, some hat I only wear on occasion.

It has become a real statement.

That nothing’s wrong. That nothing’s wrong with me.

---

---

Some wonderful + inclusive resources

• Here’s Dr. Nick Walker’s renowned definition of Autism.

• Here’s an absolutely incredible list of Autistic traits in “afab (assigned female at birth) and high-masking individuals,” compiled by Janne.

• Here’s social psychologist Devon Price talking about the severe hurdles of current diagnostic practices and criteria, which leave women and people of color under-diagnosed at alarming rates.

• By the way, you should probably read Devon Price’s book, Unmasking Autism.

• This episode of The Neurodivergent Woman podcast, all about “Autistic Burnout,” is mandatory listening for any brain.

• And finally: Masking, stimming, and a poetic-political examination of the word, “disabled.”

1. unless you are like me

2. oh my gawd: was Pepper Ann an early Autistic hero?