Why I Don't Use Social Media
Privacy, comparison, LinkedIn, and what I mean when I call someone a friend. There are eight reasons I stay away from social media, but the last is the one I care about most.
Continue readingEssays
Thoughts, opinions, and research on topics I've come across in conversation with the ND community that had no ready answers; topics that didn't fit in a book on their own, but matter nevertheless; and, sometimes, opinions strong enough that they don't belong in a book at all - too personal to my own experience to risk generalising.
Translating Me
Autism is defined largely by differences in how we communicate. Add ADHD, dyslexia and words that won't come when I need them, and there's a big gap between what I know and what I can get onto a page. AI helps me...
Continue readingTake Me As I Am
An open letter, written to everybody who ever decided what I was. About what it actually means to think differently - and, it turns out, to feel differently - what it cost to hide both - and why "I'm only protecting them" is almost never true.
Continue readingRights You Have to Ask For: Autistic Adults and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
In 2017 Simon Baron-Cohen told the United Nations that autistic people were still falling outside their human rights. He was right, and he was mostly talking about children. These pages do the same job for adults and reach a different conclusion: the...
Continue readingThe Loneliness Snowball: How Autistic Isolation Feeds Itself
Autistic loneliness is usually explained as a preference, and it is rarely about the empty room. It is about the full one - being present and still outside. It is also a loop: you are excluded before you have done anything, you...
Continue readingUnmasked at Midlife: Making Sense of a Late Autism Diagnosis
The written version of a talk I gave at the Sydney Disability Expo in August 2026. Adults are being diagnosed autistic in their forties, fifties and sixties - not because autism is spreading, but because the lens that could see them was...
Continue readingEveryone Masks: What Makes the Autistic Version Different
"Everyone masks" is usually said to end the conversation. It should start it. The claim is true - impression management is universal, and the research now confirms that neurotypical adults mask at work for the same reasons autistic adults do. What differs...
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