Autism Is the Lens I See Through

For me, autism isn’t outside of my art—it’s the lens itself. The way I frame the world is the way I live in it.

I used to think I was just broken. I didn’t have the words for why noise could feel like a punch, why a tag in a shirt could turn my whole back into needles, why a simple form in a waiting room could send me into shutdown. I didn’t have the words for why some days I could cook just by smell and sight, or make a photograph that looks exactly like the picture I saw in my head weeks before I ever raised a camera—then the next day I couldn’t get a single sentence out. I thought that was failure. Now I know it’s autism. And knowing that hasn’t fixed everything, but it has given me a way to tell the truth about my life.

My autism is not a hat I put on and take off. It’s the water I swim in. It touches everything: how I see, hear, smell, taste, touch; how I judge time; how I sense my heartbeat and whether I’m hungry; how I move through a room without looking at my own hands; how I remember faces and sounds and patterns other people miss. When I say “everything,” I mean it. On good days that looks like a gift: the pan is ready because it smells ready; the light is perfect because I can feel where it will fall; the conversation lands because I notice the pattern of someone’s pauses and let them finish before I start. On hard days it looks like overload: the hum of the lights stacks with the wrong fabric, stacks with the temperature, stacks with the pressure in my chest I cannot stop noticing, and suddenly all my careful grown-up coping disappears and I’m just a person whose body is screaming for quiet.

There are days I cannot speak. Sometimes even AAC slips away and the only communication left is sound: a yell, a sob, the kind of noise that says “I can’t reach the words.” Those are the moments people don’t see when they call autism “quirky” or “a superpower.” I understand why the word “disability” matters. It matters to me. I need help. Lots of us do. Needing help doesn’t cancel out the parts of me that feel like talent or skill; talent and skill don’t cancel out the parts of me that are raw and hard. Both are real. Both are me.

Autism shapes how I write, too—maybe especially that. Open-ended writing can feel like standing in front of an ocean with a thimble. I know exactly what I want to say, see the whole essay in my head like a finished photograph—angles, light, edits—then my brain lets out a teaspoon at a time. Sometimes what comes out isn’t what I wanted to say at all; it’s just what I can say. Ask me a precise question and I can go for hours. Give me a blank page and the gears jam. That used to make me hate myself. Diagnosis didn’t turn me into a different person, but it gave me an honest explanation. I wasn’t lazy or scattered or “too much.” I was autistic. The self-hatred loosened its grip.

Masking wrapped around all of this. I learned early to perform the version of me that caused the least friction—smile right, talk right, hold still. I hid the parts people mocked, and sometimes I even hid the parts people loved, because loving them made me feel exposed. Masking kept me alive, but it also buried me. Unmasking hasn’t been a dramatic reveal; it’s been a long, slow, awkward practice of letting the real reactions show up in real time. That has cost me things. Some people liked the performance better. I can’t blame them for not recognizing me underneath; I hid for a long time. But I can’t go back to disappearing just to be easy. That’s not living.

Autism is why I believe what I believe about care. It’s not theoretical to me that small, inconvenient kindness is what holds us together. When I’m overloaded and someone turns down the radio without making a speech about it, I feel it like oxygen. When I forget to eat because my body didn’t send a clear memo, and someone puts a plate in front of me without a lecture, that’s dignity. When I freeze in a store and a stranger says, quietly, “Take your time,” that’s mercy. Those things keep people like me alive. And because I’ve needed them, I carry them forward. I stop for the car on the shoulder. I clear the neighbor’s driveway. I tell the truth when it would be easier to let something harmful slide. That isn’t saintly. It’s survival—for me and, I think, for all of us.

Autism is also why I am stubborn about honesty. The world already messes with the knobs on my senses; I can’t survive relationships that also twist the dials on my reality. I’ve lived the “conscience trap”—where someone doesn’t deny the harm but shifts the ground until you’re apologizing for noticing it. That breaks me faster than shouting ever could. So I try to say what’s true and to hear what’s true, even when it stings, and to set boundaries that keep care from becoming control. Kindness without boundaries isn’t kindness; it’s self-erasure. I’ve done enough of that.

My autism is in my work, too. In direct support, it’s the difference between treating a person like a checklist and seeing the pattern of their day, the way their face changes when the room is too bright, the way their hands tell you something before their mouth does. It’s knowing that “behavior” is often a language for a body that can’t get a message through. It’s refusing to confuse performance with care. I’ve watched spaces that claim compassion punish nuance and enforce purity. I stepped away from that for a time because it hurt too much to watch. Coming back, I chose quiet, steady help over loud correctness. That choice came out of my neurology as much as my ethics.

I don’t pretend to have the one right take on the autistic community or our fights. I’ve seen how words themselves turn into traps—how two people with different definitions can think they’re enemies when they’re describing the same needs. I’ve also seen how practices that helped one person harmed another. I know where I stand on things that hurt me and people I love. I won’t pretend otherwise. But I won’t stand on a soapbox and declare that my experience is the only map. Autism taught me that people’s insides don’t always match the label on the outside. So I try to listen longer than feels comfortable, and I try to argue less like a winner and more like a neighbor. I fail. I try again.

I won’t romanticize this. There are days I hate being autistic. Days when my body feels like bad wiring, when sound drills into bone, when I can’t reach a single word I need, when I scare myself. There are days I miss the ease of being able to blend in, even if blending in cost me myself. There are also days when I wouldn’t trade this brain for any other—when the colors line up, when the pattern snaps into place, when a photograph comes out exactly the way I saw it weeks ago, when dinner tastes like memory and home because I followed a scent right to the finish. Pride and grief live next door in me. Both have chairs at the table.

If you’ve read me before, you’ve seen the threads I keep pulling: refusing apathy, choosing care, telling the truth, setting boundaries, standing with people the world would rather erase. My autism is woven through every one of those choices. It is the reason I notice what I notice. It is the reason I break where I break. It is the reason I keep insisting that decency isn’t complicated even when life is. It is the reason I will stop to help you on the side of the road and the reason I may need you to turn off the radio while we talk. It is the reason I’m still here.

I don’t ask anyone to agree with me on all of this. I don’t ask anyone to like everything they see when I unmask. I’m still learning, and I’ll keep learning. What I do ask is simple: when you think of autism—of me, of your neighbor, of the kid in the next aisle—remember that we are not a puzzle to be solved or a trend to be branded. We are people whose bodies and senses run hot and bright and sideways. We are exhausted and brilliant and rough around the edges. We are trying. Meet us there. And when it’s your turn to fall—and it will be—let us meet you there, too.

And as always,

I love you all.