Talking Without Words: Communication, Culture, Autism and How I Needed Someone to Tell Me that it Was Okay to Be Me

When I was young, I used to drag a chair from my bedroom all the way across the landing, and stand on it, looking out of the window onto the street below.

The house I lived in was on a row of houses called a crescent. But it was more like a giant oval roundabout. With houses on the inside and houses on the outside. It was a safe place to play like a mini estate with only the people who lived there driving around the one-way system.

So, as you can probably imagine, there were lots of kids playing on it. There were bikes and skateboards strewn everywhere; cricket, tennis, football matches, giant games of tag and hopscotch and skipping ropes. A car would enter the crescent, and a rally cry of ‘car’ would go out, carried like a beacon of danger down the street. Everything got picked up and dumped on the verge and then brought straight back into the road once the car had passed.

All weathers these kids were out there, jumping in the giant puddles in the spring rains, running around bare backed and in shorts when the sun blazed. And all weathers I watched them from my window. I would stand on my chair studying the ebbs and flows of groups of children that endlessly ran and ran, looking like a murmur of starlings or a school of fish. Synchronised unspoken and unanimous movement as they gathered their things out of the path of an oncoming car and then flooded back out onto the road when it rolled on by.

The Ache Inside Of Me

I ached for them to knock for me, to lure me into this bedazzling world of movement and noise I witnessed unfolding before me every day.

And they often did.

I would watch them walk onto our drive and my heart would start to pound and hammer in my chest. My hands would involuntarily curl into tight fists, my fingertips with nails bitten to the quick pressed hard into my sweating palms. They came to my door, and I would sink onto the chair, knees up as small as possible.

The knock would come.

The noise would reverberate and echo around inside my head. My thoughts would freeze in that cavernous space between my ears, so usually filled with grumbling gears and constant considerations and memory.

And the knock would bounce around inside there, getting louder and louder until it matched the thumping of my heart.

Bang! Bang!! Bang!!!

My mum would answer the door. There’d be a muttering that I’d be unable to understand and make sense of over the continuing noise of the drumming in my skull. Then she’d appear at the foot of the stairs, looking up at me huddled tight on this chair rocking ever so slightly.

The same line every time rote and repetition:

“Do you want to go out and play?”

Inside crying: “Yes! Yes!! Yes!!!” with the roar of a crowd inside my skull.

Outwardly, I’d give a barely perceptible shake of my head.

Mum would look at me with disappointment and vanish.

More mutterings and the door would close. The child would return to its dance through the streets. And I would uncurl slowly, slide from the chair and disappear into my room, shell-shocked, exhausted, and broken-hearted.

This describes me at the age of 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 onwards and onwards. That window was my watch tower, my observatory. I wanted to play with them. I was desperate to play with them.

But doing so hurt.

I tried to join in the games at school and got lost amidst unspoken rules, or rules that made no sense that were illogical and mindless. That changed minute by minute. And everyone seemed to know how and why.

There was I, lost in a sea of explosive noise and blurring movement. My brain, usually charging a hundred miles an hour, slowed to a crawl, with no ability to react. 

The only thing that got me through was my ability to run.  I was fast.  

The Injustice and Unfairness (of the Playground)

Tag made sense, Tag I could deal with. 

You ran and ran and ran and raced and raced and raced, you chased and caught or were caught. 

But then there was always the one kid who didn’t want to be caught, who claimed repeatedly that you missed them, vehemently and adamantly. 

The injustice…

But I didn’t miss, I touched them, I felt it!

I tried to explain, but they took his side.

The unfairness…

Football made sense.  You run with the ball, kick it and score. 

But then the ball didn’t cross the line according to the other team, or I was fouled because I was too fast to tackle, but nobody else saw it. Or at least pretended not to see it.

The injustice…

The unfairness…

So it was easier to stay apart, to watch and idle, to shut out the noise and focus on those patterns in the leaves as they move in the breeze, or find a ‘quiet’ corner and lose myself in my own head, a world of softness and warmth, where it’s safe and I can do what I want.

Where I felt safe.

This was Primary School.  Then there was Senior School…

The Horror of Senior School

A huge hulking mass of a building, with a thousand rooms and tight corridors, where every 55 minutes two thousand pupils exploded out into the corridors; an eruption of screams and shouts, a cacophony of pulling and pushing, barging and touching.

A place where if you weren’t part of one group, or another, if you didn’t quite fit, you were ostracised, called out, cornered and picked on.

A place full of colour and noise, of so many smells: Bunsen burners and chemicals in the labs, burning wood and drying paint in the technology block, sweat and body odour in the PE department, fatty food in the cafeteria; the staleness of aged wooden desks blending with carpet cleaner, blue-tac, chalk and white board markers. 

A place where people talk at a thousand miles an hour, where you’re expected to keep up and learn and understand; except there is nobody teaching you, nobody explains, so all you can do is watch and try to copy.  You get it wrong, you pay for it, you go back and watch again.

Learning (and ‘Failing’) to be ‘Normal’

This is how you learn to be ‘normal’ and also learn you never can be.

“Observe. Mimic. Fail. Punishment. Repeat.” A constant, unspoken, subconscious mantra in your mind, protecting itself at all costs and forcing this transition.

Autistic Masking (Yes, even in children)

And all while you are in free fall, screaming inside, lost and confused and overwhelmed and hurting.

And this act. This projection of acceptability, this constant seeking of safety that never really comes. This constant feeling of uncertainty, of wrongness, of abnormality.

Of pain.

I stood on the edge of the playground, watching, analysing, and every so often attempting to join in.

But every time it led to my confusion, my heartache. So the patterns in clouds or leaves became more important, the world inside my head beckoned because those things were safe and manageable and understandable.

Interacting with the ‘real world’ became a lesson in poor attempts at contextless mimicry. It became darkness and ate up my soul. A daily retinue of saying yes, apologising, paralysed with fear, my future an unknowing shadow, a knowledge of unsustainability but no agency to change things.

I grew into a teenager, and I stood on the edge of the playground still. This time in bars and nightclubs, drinking furiously, a flurry of amphetamines to waken what I thought was hidden inside: the ‘normal’ me. Self-medicating to fix what I perceived as broken.

Trying hard to be like everyone else, literally spinning from one moment to the next, trying hard to fill the gaping void inside myself that I saw as the absence of normality that everyone else seemed to have.

An adult now. A grown up. I stood still on the edge of the playground, but this time one that looked like the workplace. Suppressing, projecting, endlessly shifting in an attempt to find the right pattern of acceptability, every day carving myself hollower and hollower, watching as colleagues danced the same dances as those children in my street, a shoal of fish shimmering and flickering and seamlessly moving as one through the ocean of socialness.

I stood, near permanently, millimetres away from the end of my mortality. Where stepping out, no longer living on this plane of existence, attempted again and again, was the lure of dissolving into an oblivion of not being different, and of being apart. Detached from this horror.

An attempted application of some sort of agency in a life where agency did not exist.

I stood, on the edge of the playground searching endlessly for something, without knowing or understanding what that was.

I was never aware that what I was looking for was to connect with my identity and my culture.

Autistic Culture

Culture is defined by the Oxford Dictionary as:

‘The way of life of a people, including the attitudes, values, beliefs, religion, art, sciences, modes of perception and habits of thought and activity.’

The Centre for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition goes a step further, defining culture as:

‘Shared patterns of behaviours and interactions, cognitive constructs and understanding that they’re learned by socialisation. Thus, culture can be seen as the growth of a group identity fostered by social patterns unique to that group.’

Both of these definitions speak to what is happening in the Autistic community and the cultural identity that exists already within autistic people independently. Then the growth and development of that cultural identity as more and more Autistic people connect.

The description of me as a child earlier is a description which provides the context of a member of a particular culture existing within another culture, unable to utilise innate cultural behaviours, cognitive constructs and understanding, because to do so would cause the invalidation of those things – would induce trauma.

The Autistic community is a culture that has been kept apart from itself and disseminated across the planet. It is traditionally non-geographical, separated not only by borders and oceans, but also by the separation of self: Being isolated from the knowledge of who we are, and the shared experience of others like us has caused literal schisms in identity that have only recently started to become recognised in the narratives around trauma, stigma and masking.

Narratives driven by Autistic people.

We are still a non-geographical culture, but have found a unique way to become geographically connected with each other and to strengthen our cultural identity, through the medium of the internet and of social media. Which has offered us the opportunity to gather, share, talk, and find a shared sense of meaning and purpose, enabling the strengthening of those cultural bonds that previously existed within us in isolation.

The outcome of this Autistically social connectivity has been the confirmation and strengthening of definable cultural identifiers:

If we define culture as the characteristics and knowledge of a particular group of people, encompassing language, religion, social habits, music, arts, and even cuisine, then all those things exist within and are identifiable within the Autistic community.

There are often gatherings and celebrations of the existence of that culture which looks like Autistic language, social habits, literature, science, music and art, all grounded in the medium of Autistic ‘religion’: The pursuit and sharing of knowledge.

The Autistic community exists as a culture in its infancy, still finding its feet and learning to fight off the shackles of marginalisation, and battling against its own internalised ableism.

But within that we have, over the last 30 years of so, developed our own language toexpress notions previously uninterpreted by the non-autistic world, and by which we often use typically Autistic communication methods to deliver; communication which is pathologised by the non-Autistic world and seen as evidence of deficit.

We share a relatable behavioural existence that’s framed by the need to socialise the way that we need to. Again, something else we have been invalidated and pathologised over, but which so many studies in the sub-fields of double empathy and diversity in social intelligence are validating.

Our learning and sensory needs are driven by Autistic monotropic neurology, which sits at the heart of our whole existence, but which again, is defined as a deficit because it doesn’t quite match up with the neurotypical idea of ‘normal’ existence.

We have the development of art and language and music which grows from, encapsulates, and further defines our existence.

And if ‘same foods’ and Autistic food identity aren’t a perfect example of a culturally defining relationship with cuisine, I don’t know what is.

We carry an innate knowledge of our Autistic culture within us. 

But very early on, it’s something that we are forced to ignore, suppress, forced to swallow deep inside, which gets undermined, dismissed and gaslighted, because the expression of that culture is pathologised and condemned by the non-Autistic world, and seen systemically and individually as something that causes concern; seen as something to change.

And is rarely embraced.

We all want not to be coerced and subjugated. We all want not to be forced to live our lives as pale imitations of ourselves, to not live in fear, to not kill ourselves at the rates we are.

We want meaningful lives and love and happiness.

And to achieve those things, we need a lot of things to happen differently.

What Could Have Been Different?

What did I need?

Not to be left alone. That was already happening.

What I needed was recognition. Not of a diagnosis, not of a checklist, not of some theoretical ‘difference’. I needed recognition of me, as a person with a way of being that was real, valid, and not up for correction. I needed the kind of safety that isn’t situational, but relational. Not conditional inclusion, but deep acceptance that didn’t require performance as its price.

I needed islands of safety. Environments where I didn’t have to perform legibility to be permitted presence. Places where my body could rest, where I didn’t have to push my speech to the edge of pain just to prove understanding. Places where communication didn’t depend on noise.

Because for me, speech has never been reliable. It’s a demand that drains me even when I appear fluent. My relationship with it is fractured, tied to stress, fatigue, and whether or not I feel welcome in a space. But nobody told me that was okay. That it was valid to prefer text. That needing time to respond didn’t mean I wasn’t listening. That going quiet wasn’t avoidance, it was survival.

Nobody told me that I was monotropic. That my whole way of sensing and processing the world was shaped by an attention system that moves so deeply. That my passions weren’t obsessions. That switching focus cost me something real. That fragmentation, being pulled in too many directions, wasn’t character weakness. It was distress.

I needed someone to step into the social world with me, not against me. To model, to scaffold, to slow things down without assuming I was slow. But also to validate my social reality. To understand that communication is more than conversation, that silence is more than absence, and that connection doesn’t have to look like neurotypical togetherness. That social intelligence is diverse. That my difficulty wasn’t in understanding people, it was in being understood, it was being expected to perform a dance I was not designed to do without considerable cost, and it was also being kept apart from those who were dancing my dance.

I needed people who understood that the problem wasn’t that I was different, but that I was misread. Who knew that the double empathy gap is a lived reality; not a personal failing, but a structural one. That misunderstanding is mutual, but only one side is punished for it.

I needed someone to see masking not as deception, but as projection. That when I laughed too loudly, said too much, acted out or acted in, became invisible or became theatrical, I was still masking. I was projecting acceptability. Trying to survive a world that only gave me two choices: be me and be punished, or to be something else and be less punished.

I needed people who understood that this isn’t just about childhood, it’s about development. That identity is shaped in, among other things, relationships. Relationships with others but also the relationship you have with yourself. And when all your early relationships are built on the idea that you are ‘too much’, ‘too intense’, ‘too confusing’, ‘too sensitive’: what kind of self are you supposed to build?

Because stigma doesn’t just hurt, it forms. It teaches you that your instincts are untrustworthy, your body is too loud, your emotions are dangerous, your way of being is a problem to be solved. You learn to narrate yourself in someone else’s voice.

And that is what I needed someone to interrupt.

A Different Script

I needed a different script.

One where communication wasn’t a test. One where my ways of expressing and connecting were honoured, not pathologised. One where I didn’t have to explain my pain in a language that caused it.

I didn’t need awareness. I needed fluency from others, not in speech, but in humanity. In difference. In dignity.

I needed someone to say:

“You’re not wrong for how you exist. The world was simply never built with you in mind. And I’m not going to ask you to change just so the world stays comfortable and you stay uncomfortable.”

I needed someone to say:

“I’ll help you build something different.”

What We Need is our Culture Recognised, Validated and Supported to Thrive.

Because every problem that a non-autistic person faces in interactions with autistic people is not an issue of deficits, but an issue of one culture butting up against another culture.

For one example:

Social Skills Training is the imposition of a majority neuro-culture’s belief, ideals and will over a minority neuro-culture.

The imposition of neurological imperialism:

The systemic imposition of neurotypical norms, values, and ways of being, positioning them as superior, universal, and inherently human. An interpersonal assumption of experience, norms, values and ways of being as inherently neurotypical. A form of cognitive colonisation that frames neurotypical experiences as the benchmark against which all other neurological experiences are judged, measured, and controlled.

The focus needs to be on balance.

Showcasing non-Autistic communication and social skills to Autistic people is fine, as long as that is done in balance with showcasing Autistic communication and social skills to non-Autistics, alongside validating the need for both groups to exist as they need to.

We do have to live alongside non-Autistic people, but they also have to live alongside us.

Despite existing in large numbers, it is only non-autistic communication and social norms and skills that are validated. Despite the existence of a million different cultures around the globe, it is only ever the majority, or the culture with power whose needs are met.  Everything else is uncivilised, inferior, or pathologically dysfunctional.

Neuro-culture is non-geographical. Two neuro-cultures or more coexisting in a shared space, but only one is ever recognised and identified. All those cultures deserve respect but currently are not given that respect. Because neuro-culture ‘A’ dominates and refuses to recognise neuro-culture ‘B’ in any way other than as a deficitised version of neuro-culture ‘A’.

From an Autistic perspective, in order to correct this, we need to do some drastic things.

We need to stop talking about ourselves in the singular. I’m often asked to speak, and I’m often asked to speak about my life, my personal experience.

But my story is unimportant.

Why?

Because the geography changes, but the story stays the same.

Nearly all Autistic people have one major thing in common aside from being Autistic, and that’s the shared reality of our lives. Our experiences. The isolation, the loss, the lack of belonging, the invalidation, the communication breakdowns, the blame, the shame, the invalidation, the correction, the stigma, the trauma.

Being asked to talk about my lived experience is not something I do often, because it’s too often tokenistic.

It becomes about me.

In the eyes of the audience, autism becomes me.

If autism is me, then I cannot speak to the experiences of a community, only myself.

‘My autism’ – what a horrible phrasing, and what a way of saying that I do not understand what it is to be Autistic, only that I carry this thing around inside of me, like a parasite, that affects me (the ‘real’ me, the potentially neurotypical me).

There is no such as autism.  Autism is a manufactured psychiatric construct, a problematic and flawed way of describing a series of externally observed ‘deficits’ in a person. Autism is confined to the pages of a book full of equally problematic constructs. But, to be Autistic is a lived reality.

When we lean into this narrative that we ‘have’ a ‘thing’ called autism, and that ‘thing’ manifests only for us individually, and only in a particular way, we are then denied the authority to talk about ‘us’, as a varied and intersectional community collectively.

Which is particularly ridiculous when everyone who is not ‘us’, is talking about us collectively.

My story is unimportant because it’s ‘us’, who are important.

Autistic people.

An Autistic Collective

Our collective stories, the weight of our collective lives are what matters, the collective expression of Autistic culture.

My responsibility when I talk to anyone, is all of us. It’s not to tell people about ‘my’ life, but to be a platform for all Autistic lives. To be able to speak to intersecting narratives experienced by us all, if not individually, but as a collective. And that responsibility is as collective as a collective is. All Autistic people who stick their heads above the parapet of advocacy share the responsibility to be consider how intersectionality across gender, age, race, disability and more interacts. To take it beyond our ‘personal journey’.

Autistic culture is layered, not only with intersectionality, but another force. Ironically, with regards to the isolation, the loss, the lack of belonging, being on the edge of the playground… Autistic culture is wrapped in all those things.

Autistic culture is soaked in trauma: the experience of trauma, the expression of our trauma, defining our trauma, sharing our trauma, consoling each other over our trauma. To be invalidated and stigmatised over a lifespan for the way we move, think, feel, act, communicate, eat, love, express ourselves, and more, cannot help but need to be dissected, explored and shared.

And it often is.

Daily, Autistic people are broken upon the back of the wheel of society.

We are treated,

electrocuted,

bullied,

beaten,

assumed to be incompetent,

locked in institutions,

wrapped,

chelated,

force fed bleach,

normalised,

cast out,

denied jobs,

arrested,

incarcerated,

lied to,

abused,

fired,

stem-celled,

given a multitude of diets,

shoved in hyperbaric chambers,

researched to within an inch of our lives,

lied about,

denied meaningful communication,

denied agency,

denied autonomy,

denied authenticity,

invalidated,

stigmatised,

Traumatised.

An infinity of mythos perpetuates societal conscience about us.

And decisions are made based upon belief of those myths.

This negative narrative controls and dictates every breath we take, all of which is an invalidation and perpetuation of the marginalisation of Autistic culture and existence.

Utilising the tools of the language of:

haves,

withs,

lives with,

suffers from;

that is designed to isolate ourselves from the most fundamental aspect of who we are.

All of which causes a fracturing of our identity, a disconnection from our innate cultural knowledge.

The current culture of autism is driven by the professional world, which decides who we are and what we need. Professionals train other professionals in this, professionals apply the services based on this, and then professionals pat each other on the back and tell each other what a good job they’ve done.

All of these professionals are telling everybody different things dependent on their biases and training. Each professional and field holds a bias towards the studies of different researchers and research agendas; each are paid by different organisations who themselves reinforce those narratives and usually serve their own agenda.

All of these professionals follow different philosophies and use external observations based on different models of very narrow and poorly defined diagnostic criteria.

All written by professionals.

Professionals who insist on using person first language, who talk about the importance of recognising the person and not the diagnosis. Professionals who then talk about ‘autism’, like we, Autistic people, aren’t even in the room. Who can’t recognise that there is a person right in front of them with the same thoughts and feelings, hopes and dreams, the same bones and blood and sinews as any other person.

An Autistic person,

An Autistic human being.

The hubris of people who stand and observe us and decide they understand who we are, and tell us so, because they watch our external behaviour. Comparing that against their own and finding that we fall short of their self-indulgent high standards of their own self-identified perfection.

External behaviour often driven to extremes by anxiety caused by the environments the professionals have put us in in the first place, managed by those self-same professionals.

We’ve gone from generations of unidentified Autistics who spent our lives suffering because of ignorance, convinced that something was wrong with us; to now generations of identified Autistics who might as well go unidentified still, because of the belief that to be Autistic is to have something wrong with you.

We experience a lack of support, of inappropriate or ill-informed therapies, of deeply flawed and rarely critically examined narratives.

We have scores of Autistic children who today, go through exactly the same experiences at school, as we, their Autistic parents, did: Unsupported through sensory overwhelm, confusion, a lack of understanding and acceptance, not helped to recognise and learn about their Autistic identity, along with the expectation of conform or be punished.

Decades of ‘awareness’ and no fundamental change.

Still the exclusion from, and denial of, their Autistic culture perpetuates.

People face the trauma of diagnosis: huge waiting lists, decisions made not to diagnose because of myths, such as ‘they have friends‘, or ‘they make good eye contact‘.

The fact that this is a diagnosis at all.  That there is no way to identify an Autistic person officially other than through a process of dehumanisation, deficitisation, and the glorification of non-Autistic personhood for the purpose of identifying Autistic personhood.

The geography changes but the stories remain the same.

And externally to the Autistic community, never once has the lens of culture ever been applied to the Autistic community.

Because that requires an admission that Autistic people are not broken versions of neurotypicals.

I ask you this:

To be Autistic describes our neurology. Neurology describes neurological process.

Is neurological process restricted to what goes on inside our heads?

No. Autistic people are Autistic in every fibre of our being, every aspect of our senses. We interpret information Autistically. We send signals Autistically, we make decisions with our Autistic brains based on an Autistic nervous system.

So tell me?

Does being Autistic define us?

Yes, it does.

Is that a bad thing, something to feel shame for, to deny, to stigmatise?

It can be denied by anyone who cares to, but it does not change the fact that an Autistic person is Autistic from their toes to their fingers, to the tops of their head.

To be Autistic is an identity.

An identity shaped by a million things that shape any identity: Life experiences, loves and hates, illnesses, jobs, the roles we have as partners, parents, children, the way we treat people, the way they treat us back, the colour of our skin, our religions, our gender, our sexual proclivities, the language we use, the behaviour we express, the way we think, the way we feel, the way we interpret the world and find meaning in it.

For Autistic people all this is driven by Autistic neurology, and so all definable as the expression of Autistic culture.

The Autistic experience is what binds our community together. It’s what is at the heart of

Autistic culture. Despite the many disagreements that ravage our fledgling community as can be found within any culture, the internal experience of being Autistic is shared, and relatable. The emotional impact of the world on us as Autistic people is shared and relatable.

All of this, what most Neurotypicals do not realise, is communication, just in a different language. 

We all use languages that don’t require speech.

For example if you are a parent you talk to your child without moving your lips every day, modelling the fact that you are looking for a way to make them comfortable and give them a little control. This is communication an Autistic child understands.  It is simple and clear and it says:

You are safe.  They are safe.  This is safe.

Connection to community does this also.  Connection to culture does this also. It all communicates safety without speaking it.

But from Autisic youth to Autistic adult we are given mixed messages by society: 

We are told that differences are something to be celebrated, and then we go to war over religion. 

We’re told that difference is good, and then we are sat in identical classrooms in identical clothing, taught identical things and punished when we don’t do things identically. 

We’re told that everybody should be different because the world would be a boring place otherwise, then we mock people who dress strangely to us, have accents, or dye their hair, or stick rings through their noses. It’s ok to be different, as long as you keep your difference away from me.

Society doesn’t want us to be different.

Society is built to progress and someone who doesn’t fit into a narrow range of what provides progress is deemed unproductive to that progress: defective, wrong.

According to society to be Autistic is unproductive. To be Autistic inhibits progression.  To be Autistic forces society to stop and think and communicate in a different way, which slows things down, is disruptive. So society sees autism as defective.  Sees autism as wrong.

Difference, abnormality, atypicalness is all what society fears, and what society fears drives society, and us, further and further away from accepting difference.

Difference has raised us as a species, from picking berries while hanging in a tree, to a race who are taking their first steps into space.

Difference and variability are what makes Humanity so amazing. Neurodiversity is scientific fact and the most vital aspect of what keeps us moving forward, evolving.

Autistic children need to be supported to understand their experiences, and how their body-mind works.

Autistic children need to be connected and immersed in Autistic culture. They need to spend time in the company of other Autistic children and adults. Not as a tool of segregation, but as a tool of learning.

Newly identified Autistic adults need to understand themselves. Need to be validated, and supported to work through the years of isolation, discombobulation, years of stigma and lacking agency, and to be connected to the metaphorical embrace of a community that understands all this, and has the knowledge to advise and help them to understand it themselves.

One day, hopefully, Autistic people en-masse will be able to embrace the beating heart of Autistic culture and in turn have Autistic culture embraced.

All through recognising that this is the real core and foundation of our existence, not our shared trauma experience. But that are our writing, our songs, our poetry, our art, our acting, our science, our technology, our engineering, our love, our language, our communication, our social skills, our movement, our cuisine, our humour, our thoughts, our humanity, our existence, are the beating heart of our Autistic culture.

The threads of which are out there, just waiting to be pulled together by an Autistic community which understands itself, understands the context of its hardships and is prideful of its existence.

One which recognises the culture within itself, engages in restorative justice and, externally, is not the subject of colonisation by Neurological Imperialism, but instead is respected as a culture with meaning, substance and validity.

A culture which means people who were lost:

Are now home.

Have found their islands of safety.

Are longer be on the edge of the playground.

Are able to find their rhythm and join a dance that feels familiar.

Are able to talk without words.

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You might also like to read…

An Autistic Education

Masking: I Am Not Okay

School Refusal or School-Induced Trauma? Rethinking EBSA, EBSNA, and the harm we call help

What Is Neurodiversity?

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