Stim: an Autistic Anthology - Comprehensive Knowledge Base

Autistic Identity and Self-understanding

Reframing Special Interests as Emotionally Complex Relationships

Nell Brown challenges the condescending clinical term “Special interests” by reframing them as emotionally complex relationships comparable to friendships or romantic attachments—not robotic fact-collecting but deeply feeling engagements with genuine stakes. Her evolving fascination with Taylor Swift, traced back through earlier intense attachments to Freddie Mercury and Kurt Cobain, demonstrates that Autistic interests involve anticipation, pleasure, resentment, and the capacity to outgrow or maintain connections over years.

Special interests carry genuine emotional weight: Brown describes the pleasure of anticipated melodies and the exhilaration of hearing songs for the hundredth time, comparing the phenomenon to falling in love. These interests can be “drunk on” (intensely consuming), resented like an ex-romantic partner, temporarily neglected, or maintained as lifelong loves. The critical insight is that pop culture fandom—far from being cold or systematizing—offers emotional investment, community, and creative expression. Brown critiques the “extreme male brain” theory of Autism (which incorrectly posits Autism as emotionless systematizing) and questions why certain fandoms become coded as Autistic while others remain invisible, suggesting that emotional investment in pop culture has been excluded from Autistic stereotypes due to Autism’s historical misrepresentation as primarily affecting systemizing ability rather than emotional capacity.

This reframing matters because it counters the pervasive myth that Autistic people are emotionally distant or robotic. In reality, Special interests often represent deep wells of joy, creativity, and belonging—particularly when these interests connect Autistic people to community (online fandoms, fellow enthusiasts, artists creating adjacent work).

Late Diagnosis as Vindication and Grief

Late Autism Diagnosis in adulthood operates simultaneously as shocking revelation and deep validation. Laura James states at age 40: “I am not mad, bad or sad. There is a reason I see the world differently.” Everything begins making sense—her lifetime of failed therapeutic interventions, her different processing style, why she’d always felt fundamentally misunderstood. The Diagnosis explained her entire life: why her mind behaved differently and why her body (later diagnosed with EDS, often comorbid with Autism) didn’t work.

However, this revelation also triggers grief: grieving the misdiagnosed years, internalized shame, and the imagined future based on incorrect self-understanding. Waverly SM describes this as realization that “narratives we provide to make ourselves legible…are unravelled by grief.” Late Diagnosis reveals how many years were spent struggling without self-understanding, receiving ineffective treatments, and accumulating trauma from Masking and rejection.

Paradoxically, this grief process becomes clarifying. Waverly reflects: “Cut loose by loss, the bereaved have to remake themselves…It can be hard, horrible work. And there’s no map. But in its own strange and unexpected way it can be clarifying too.” This essay transformed into “a cartography of queer lives, queer desires, and queer possibilities” showing the author “the way to another kind of future.” Early Diagnosis would have provided earlier self-compassion and appropriate Accommodations, making this grief-and-clarity process avoidable for future generations.

Sensory Processing and Regulation

Sensory Experience and Emotional Processing in Autism

Autistic Sensory processing creates intense, sometimes synaesthetic experiences that Neurotypical observers may not recognize or understand. One contributor describes walking through a field of bluebells: “This is Sensory overload – I can see every bluebell and every stalk and every leaf. They are legion. My visual field vibrates and pulses – the flowers themselves are almost an ultraviolet hum.” This hyperfocus on minute details (lichen texture, tiny holes in tree bark) coexists with simultaneous fractal understanding of landscape from single reed to field to watershed.

Waverly SM describes Sensory overwhelm with visceral specificity: “You can’t drink cola because every bubble is the point of a needle on your tongue. You can’t eat mushrooms because their rubbery slippery firmness twists together all the nerves in your teeth.” She takes long bathroom breaks “because it’s quiet it’s clean it’s safe, because nobody is looking.” She cries in the dining hall “because the constant roar of chatter grinds you into dust” while maintaining the facade expected of her.

Amelia Wells’s experimental fiction “Shapes in Dreams” interweaves mundane Sensory moments—opening eyes at an alarm, showering in freezing bathrooms, choosing cereal—with dreamlike narrative, capturing hypersensitive awareness: splinters from wooden oars, shampoo in eyes, water’s texture, the effort of choosing between breakfast cereals. The piece moves between states of consciousness, blending present-moment Sensory detail with dissociation.

Critically, these Sensory experiences are not deficits but part of Autistic neurology. One contributor emphasizes: “there is poetry in flight, and in the humble spring becoming a tributary, a meander and an oxbow.” Solitude in nature is where she feels most fully herself, experiencing direct Sensory input without social performance demands. Sensory intensity can be overwhelming in mixed contexts (social situations with Sensory load) but becomes manageable and even generative in controlled environments.

Stimming as Essential Regulation and Expression

Both Autistic contributors and resource materials emphasize Stimming (stimulatory behaviors like arm flapping, rocking, repetitive movement, or Sensory engagement) as essential to Autistic functioning, not a symptom to eliminate. Laura James describes the urge to flap her arms because “you are too small to contain such a vastness of love.” Waverly describes running “the length of the garden, over and over until your chest splits apart, like enough momentum will carry you into another world.”

Research shows that 92% of Autistic respondents in studies reported that engaging in their interests was calming and key to managing Anxiety. Critically, therapies and educational approaches that force children to stop Stimming cause severe mental health problems and elevated suicide risk—suppression of Stimming as part of wider Camouflaging creates psychological harm. Stimming should be understood and supported as regulatory and expressive, not pathologized.

Masking and Authentic Expression

Masking and the Unsustainable Costs of Performed Neurotypicality

Multiple contributors describe the severe psychological and physical toll of Masking—performing neurotypicality while suppressing authentic Autistic expression. Autistic individuals often develop elaborate masks by studying social interaction as an intellectual system rather than experiencing it intuitively. One contributor describes systematically studying conversation through online articles, examining peer interactions, and practicing scripts—describing this as accessing “a key to a lock.”

This same contributor worked as a stripper and call center employee where conversation skills became her primary commodity; she learned to ask personal questions, make Eye contact, nod, and relate others’ comments back to herself. This performance came at tremendous cost. After three years of simultaneously Masking in corporate and nightlife settings, she experienced severe Burnout: panic attacks when attempting work, complete emotional shutdown, and inability to maintain the performance. What appeared effortless to Neurotypical observers required constant conscious calculation and exhausting energy expenditure.

Robert Shepherd’s narrative illustrates the mental health consequences of Masking. Diagnosed with Autism at 10 but “undiagnosed” by his family (who deemed labels harmful), Shepherd was rejected by peers for not rebelling as a teenager and found solace in evolutionary biology as an intellectual shield against human connection. At university, isolated and unable to make friends, he developed severe Anxiety, selective mutism, and disordered eating, subsisting on oats mixed with chocolate paste and eventually unable to leave his room. Shepherd describes “becoming less” through the effort of appearing Neurotypical—shedding skin to fit into civilization. His recovery involved meeting other Autistic people and accepting his Autism publicly: Stimming openly, abandoning Eye contact pretense, and experiencing liberation from the exhaustion of Masking.

Critical insight: research shows that Masking and forced suppression of Stimming correlates with elevated suicide risk and severe mental health problems. The psychological cost of performing neurotypicality is not a minor accommodation issue but a serious safety concern.

Acceptance of Autistic Identity and Authentic Expression

Across the anthology, the path to psychological stability, creativity, and meaning involves accepting Autism as core identity and expressing it authentically rather than performing neurotypicality. This acceptance doesn’t require perfect external circumstances but does require permission to be different. Shepherd’s recovery came through meeting other Autistic people and publicly accepting his Autism; Waverly’s survival involved deliberate self-determination and refusing imposed identity markers; James’s emotional breakthrough followed physical and psychological clearing of old life frameworks.

The critical insight is that effective Autism-informed mental health care validates Autistic emotional experience rather than forcing Neurotypical emotion taxonomy. Autistic people may genuinely experience fewer, broader emotional categories, and this isn’t a disorder to cure but a Neurological variation to accommodate. As James states: “If a puppy were standing in front of someone who didn’t know the word for its species, would it be any less a dog?”

Emotional Processing and Mental Health

Alexithymia and Emotion Recognition as a Learnable Skill

Late-diagnosed Autistic individuals often struggle with emotion identification and vocabulary. Laura James discovered she has Alexithymia—difficulty identifying and describing one’s feelings—and initially believed therapeutic “feelings wheels” (listing 77 emotions) were merely literary language, not actual human experiences. She experienced only four emotional states: the “good feeling” (associated with pink, absorption in activities like writing/baking, or pleasant company), the “bad feeling” (heaviness, wrongness, sense of rejection), fear (paralyzing fog), and neutral (comfortable, her preferred state).

Through Therapy, James gradually began recognizing additional emotions and understanding that emotions create physical sensations—heartbreak literally hurts, irritation produces scratchy feelings preceding Meltdowns. This expanded emotional recognition came slowly and required learning to distinguish between emotions and bodily sensations. Crucially, she emphasizes: “I will always be alexithymic, just as I will always be Autistic. And I’m OK with that.” Her narrower emotional repertoire doesn’t diminish her capacity for compassion; rather, it reflects a different emotional architecture requiring different Support approaches.

Grief, Loss, and the Necessity of Full Emotional Experience

Laura James experienced a prolonged depressive episode triggered by multiple simultaneous losses: her children leaving home, ending long-standing work projects, her beloved dachshund’s death, her children’s struggles, and broader political despair. She describes: “The sense of loss and grief seemed to stick inside me, growing bigger and less malleable with each day that passed.” She couldn’t cry despite envying “those people who can sob messily and let out all their emotions.”

A crucial insight emerged from this experience: she had spent years “trying to find the good feeling and trying to avoid the bad” and forgotten that sadness is “a natural and important element of the human condition.” She writes: “Seeking out pleasure in the pursuit of happiness is akin to expecting your pyjamas to keep you dry in the rain.” Real contentment requires experiencing the full spectrum of emotions: “We need loneliness to appreciate connection, cold to revel in warmth, vulnerability to relish belonging, and sadness to celebrate even the most fleeting happiness.”

Her breakthrough came through physical and emotional clearing—moving from a large country house to a small city apartment, sorting through “twenty-two rooms and outbuildings” of accumulated life. She cried for four hours in her sleep (rare for her), processing the transition. After releasing tears, new feelings emerged: hopeful, curious. She began identifying and naming previously inaccessible emotions.

The broader implication: attempting to maximize positive emotions while avoiding pain is psychologically futile and prevents access to meaningful human experience. For Autistic people particularly, who may already struggle with Emotional regulation and identification, permission to experience the full emotional spectrum—including sadness, loneliness, and grief—is essential for psychological health.

Family Systems and Parenting

Autistic Parenting and Honoring Neurodivergent Family Systems

Rachael Lucas describes growing up as an undiagnosed Autistic woman—part of “the lost generation” of girls whose Autism went unrecognized throughout childhood—and how this fundamentally shaped her approach to motherhood. As an undiagnosed Autistic parent, she initially forced herself into parent-and-baby classes despite experiencing severe Sensory overload from bright lights and screaming children, believing this was what “good mothers” did. In retrospect, she recognizes she thrived on woodland walks and quiet routines—coping strategies she deployed without understanding her neurology.

Lucas’s children, particularly her eldest daughter, exhibited similar Autistic traits (social withdrawal, intense interests, difficulty with transitions). Initially, she interpreted these patterns as failures—her daughter’s resistance to social situations felt like rejection of Lucas’s efforts to create “normal” family experiences. The breakthrough came only after Lucas obtained her own Autism Diagnosis at age 40, concurrent with her daughter’s Diagnosis at 13. This parallel Diagnosis freed her to understand that her family wasn’t broken—it was Neurodivergent, requiring a different model of functioning.

Her transformed parenting now validates Autistic needs as legitimate: phrases like “I’m over-peopled” become accepted reasons to leave social situations, not character flaws to overcome. Birthdays are celebrated according to each child’s preference rather than social convention (some children may prefer quiet home celebrations to overwhelming parties). Lucas emphasizes that Autistic mothers often parent instinctively from their own neurology, unconsciously creating family systems that honor difference rather than demand conformity to Neurotypical social scripts.

This reframing is critical for parents and children: the discovery that Autistic traits are part of how your family functions—not evidence of failure—can be profoundly liberating. It also means late-diagnosed parents can recognize their children’s needs earlier, providing Support and understanding that might otherwise take decades to emerge.

Intersectionality: Race, Disability, and Non-Speaking Autism

Kerima Çevik critiques the limits of allyship by comparing the performative “ally” stance to John Howard Griffin’s “Black Like Me” experiment, in which Griffin darkened his skin to temporarily study Blackness, then spent years claiming authority on Black experience. Çevik cannot temporarily experience her non-verbal Autistic son’s neurology or the intersecting impacts of his race, gender, and disability; she can only listen deeply to those with lived experience and deliberately center their voices.

Çevik documents institutional ableism and racism her family faced: a school requesting reduced-price lunch forms because she appeared Black; a racist parent’s accusation against her non-verbal son; a teacher dismissing her son as incapable of understanding a field trip because he cannot speak. Rather than claiming false understanding, Çevik positions herself as a learning partner working to reduce her son’s fear and increase his agency by centering the voices of non-verbal Autistic adults of color, her son’s communications, and her daughter’s experience of multiracial identity.

The critical takeaway: Autistic people of color face compounded discrimination where racism and ableism combine to make Diagnosis, Support, and safety more difficult. Non-verbal Autistic children are particularly vulnerable to assumptions of intellectual disability and mistreatment. Those seeking to Support Neurodivergent people of color must actively work against their own biases rather than assuming good intentions are sufficient.

Relationships and Intimacy

Trauma, Bdsm, and Structure As Safety Mechanism

An Autistic survivor of sexual abuse discovered through Therapy that her attraction to BDSM was intimately connected to both her Autism and trauma history. Her therapist reframed what the author had internalized as shameful kink as actually representing her mind’s attempt to safeguard itself. The three key elements making BDSM appealing to Autistic people are:

Structure: The explicit routine of meeting, knowing each other, negotiation, scene, aftercare, and debriefing provides predictability that Autistic people often need.
Scripting: BDSM’s required language of consent, negotiation, and safewords creates conscious social scripts that Autistic people naturally use, replacing the vague and evolving scripts of traditional relationships.
Deconstruction of social behaviors: BDSM inherently requires discussing roles, expectations, and power dynamics upfront, which feels logical and “tidier” to Autistic minds than vague, evolving discussions in conventional relationships.

The essay emphasizes RACK rules (risk-aware consensual kink), research, self-reflection, and active consent enabled the author to reconnect fragmented parts of herself. Crucially, recognizing that her trauma, kinky self, and Autistic self were “intimately entwined” rather than separate pathologies allowed her to move from fragmentation toward wholeness. This represents a profound reframing: kink isn’t pathology but potentially adaptive practice addressing both trauma recovery and Autistic Support needs simultaneously.

Diagnosis and Systemic Barriers

Bureaucratic Barriers to Adult Autism Diagnosis

The Diagnosis process for adult Autism contains significant bureaucratic barriers and arbitrary elements. One contributor attempting Diagnosis in Sweden experienced: initial discouragement from a GP nurse (“it can take a really long time”), unclear instructions for writing a letter describing “difficulties,” contradictory guidance from different nurses, pressure to have a parent attend appointments (impossible when parents live in Iraqi Kurdistan), and deprioritization of high-functioning Autistic people because Diagnosis triggers costly government Support.

The system contains no clear pathway forward, and communication shifts depending which staff member responds. The author notes: “I don’t want to agree with Marx, who said that ‘the universal spirit of bureaucracy is secrecy’. And yet here I am, waiting, unable to know whether my case is moving forward or if it is on ice…I wonder if the humans have been taken out of the equation or if I’m simply being left on read.” Healthcare systems inadvertently reinforce gatekeeping against adult Diagnosis, particularly for individuals who appear high-functioning or don’t fit Diagnostic stereotypes.

Diagnostic Disparities and Systemic Barriers

The resources note that Diagnostic criteria were built around white boys, leading to systemic misdiagnosis and delayed Diagnosis in other populations. Black children in America receive Autism diagnoses on average two years later than white children with comparable presentations. People of all genders are diagnosed as adults because Autism was historically assumed male, causing girls and non-binary people to “fly under the radar as children.” This structural gap in Diagnosis means many Autistic people spend decades without understanding themselves, receiving ineffective treatments, and internalizing shame.

These disparities are not neutral: they reflect and reinforce systemic inequities where access to Diagnosis, Support, and resources is unequally distributed. They also mean that many undiagnosed Autistic adults of color, Autistic women, and Autistic non-binary people are navigating the world without the self-understanding or Accommodations they need, often experiencing compounded discrimination where ableism intersects with racism, sexism, and other marginalization.

Community and Belonging

Queer Rural Lives and Alternatives to Urban Escape Narratives

C.F. Prior interrogates the assumption that queerness requires urban refuge by exploring queer histories in countryside, villages, and small towns. The dominant narrative holds that queer people must escape to cities (London, New York, San Francisco), but Prior highlights figures who deliberately chose rural or small-town life: Derek Jarman at Prospect Cottage in Dungeness, creating his famous garden while managing AIDS Diagnosis; Tove Jansson, who found island life a “dream come true” with her partner; Claude Cahun, who relocated to Jersey seeking countryside peace amid rising anti-Semitism; James Baldwin at Chez Baldwin in Saint-Paul de Vence, hosting Josephine Baker, Nina Simone, Toni Morrison, and Maya Angelou.

Prior critiques contemporary “Big Move” articles celebrating heterosexual couples buying Lake District estates while importing Hackney aesthetics, which obscure who actually owns and is welcome in rural spaces—often excluding working-class, queer, and disabled people. The essay suggests that countryside, coastlines, and villages offer their own forms of queer intimacy and kinship—not as consolation prizes but as viable, joyful alternatives to urban centers increasingly hostile due to rising rents, closing gay bars, and disappearing queer club nights.

This reframing is particularly relevant for Autistic and Neurodivergent queer people: rural and small-town spaces often offer reduced Sensory overwhelm, closer-knit community, and freedom from some urban performance demands, making them potentially more accessible than cities despite queer culture’s urban associations.

Practical Strategies and Implementation

Recognizing and Naming Emotions Through Deliberate Practice

For Autistic people with Alexithymia or reduced emotion vocabulary, emotion recognition can be taught through structured practice rather than assumed as innate ability. Therapeutic approaches that work include:

Start with your baseline: Identify the few emotions you do reliably experience (James’s four emotions: good, bad, neutral, fear). Accept this as your starting point rather than a deficiency.
Learn bodily sensations: Emotions create physical sensations—heartbreak produces actual physical pain, irritation creates scratchy feelings preceding Meltdowns. Learning to notice these physical cues can help you identify emotions your brain doesn’t automatically label.
Use external tools strategically: Rather than trying to force yourself into standard feelings wheels with 77 emotions, start with simpler emotion categories or create your own taxonomy based on your experience.
Distinguish emotion from bodily sensation: Sometimes what feels like an emotion is actually hunger, tiredness, Sensory overload, or physical discomfort. Learning to differentiate can prevent misattribution (exhaustion misread as sadness, hunger misread as irritability).
Track patterns: Keep notes on when certain emotions tend to arise, what triggers them, and how they feel in your body. Over time, patterns emerge that help you predict and identify emotions earlier.

Expected outcomes: gradual expansion of emotion vocabulary and recognition without forcing yourself into Neurotypical emotion frameworks. This isn’t about achieving “normal” emotion processing but developing better access to and understanding of your actual emotional experience.

Honoring Autistic Needs in Family Systems

Autistic parents and family systems can intentionally shift from forcing Neurotypical performance toward accommodating and celebrating Neurodivergent functioning:

Validate Autism-aligned preferences: Accept statements like “I’m over-peopled” as legitimate reasons to leave social situations rather than character flaws to overcome. This models self-understanding and Self-advocacy for children.
Restructure family rituals: Celebrate birthdays, holidays, and events according to family members’ preferences rather than social convention. Some people genuinely prefer quiet home celebrations to overwhelming parties.
Build in Sensory safety: Create quiet spaces, respect Sensory needs (lighting preferences, sound management, food textures), and structure family time to include rest periods between social demands.
Recognize your child’s traits earlier: If you recognize your own Autistic traits in your children, seek understanding rather than interpreting their behavior as failure or rejection. Early recognition enables earlier Support.
Normalize difference: Teach children that their family functions differently and that difference isn’t failure. This prevents decades of internalized shame.

Expected outcomes: reduced family conflict, increased sense of belonging for all family members, and earlier self-understanding for undiagnosed Autistic children.

Seeking Diagnosis as an Adult

For adults pursuing Autism Diagnosis in contexts with bureaucratic barriers:

Document your history: Write or record detailed descriptions of your childhood (social struggles, Sensory sensitivities, Special interests, peer relationships) and adult experiences. This provides clinicians with concrete information.
Research your local system: Understand how Autism Diagnosis works in your healthcare system—required appointments, documentation, timeline, and costs. This reduces uncertainty.
Seek multiple consultations if needed: Different clinicians may provide different guidance. If you receive contradictory information, document it and consider seeking a second opinion.
Connect with Autistic communities: Peers can often provide guidance about Diagnosis processes in your area, clinicians known for accurately diagnosing adults, and strategies for advocating through bureaucratic systems.
Prepare for gatekeeping: If you’re high-functioning or don’t fit stereotypes, you may face skepticism. Prepare clear examples of how Autism has impacted your functioning rather than trying to convince clinicians you’re “disabled enough.”

Expected outcomes: eventual Diagnosis providing clarity and self-understanding, though the timeline may be longer than ideal and barriers more frustrating than fair.

Releasing Masking and Accepting Authentic Expression

For Autistic people engaged in exhausting Masking practices:

Start small: Begin with low-stakes situations where you experiment with reducing Masking—say, a quiet weekend at home or with trusted people.
Notice what Masking costs: Pay attention to exhaustion, emotional shutdown, and physical symptoms following Masking. This builds motivation for change.
Find Autistic community: Connecting with other Autistic people and experiencing acceptance of authentic Autistic expression is often necessary to build confidence in unmasking.
Stim openly: Start Stimming in semi-public or public contexts. Notice that the world doesn’t end, and many people don’t care. Gradually increase openness.
Abandon Eye contact pretense: If Eye contact is uncomfortable, practice looking at noses, mouths, or the space between eyebrows. This conveys attention without the discomfort of forced Eye contact. Many people won’t notice the difference.

Expected outcomes: decreased exhaustion and emotional numbness, increased sense of authenticity and belonging, better mental health and reduced Burnout risk. This process takes time and often requires repeated courage-building, but the psychological payoff is substantial.

Processing Grief and Loss Without Forced Positivity

For Autistic people experiencing Depression or grief:

Accept sadness as legitimate: Stop trying to skip grief and return to functioning. Grief is a natural response to loss and requires its own time.
Create space for expression: Find ways to process emotions that work for you—perhaps not crying (if that’s not how you process) but creative expression, movement, time in nature, or talking with trusted people.
Clear what you can physically: Sometimes clearing physical space (downsize, reorganize, let go of objects representing old life) facilitates emotional processing. This can work alongside traditional Therapy.
Expect confusion and non-linearity: Grief isn’t linear. Expect to cycle through multiple emotions in unpredictable order rather than progressing neatly through stages.
Rebuild gradually: After acute grief, begin small experiments with new interests, routines, or social connections. This builds toward a new sense of self and purpose without forced positivity.

Expected outcomes: genuine psychological integration of loss (rather than suppression), access to the full emotional spectrum including joy that comes after grief, and eventual rebuilding of meaningful life structure.

Key Insights and Counterintuitive Perspectives

Autism Is Neurodivergence, Not Neurological Deficit

The anthology fundamentally rejects the “problem child” or unemployment statistic narrative. Contributors present Autism as shaping how people relate to the world—through intense interests, Sensory richness, pattern recognition, and loyalty—rather than as something to overcome. The diversity of contributors (different ages, genders, sexualities, races, levels of Support needed) demonstrates Autism’s profound variability and value.

Example: Lucas’s daughter thriving once her Autism was recognized and accommodated, rather than pathologized; Waverly surviving crisis and discovering authentic identity through accepting her neurodivergence.

Special Interests Are Emotionally Rich, Not Cold or Robotic

Common belief holds that Autistic people have “Special interests” that are narrow, factual, and indicate lack of emotional capacity or social connection. The anthology reveals these are emotionally complex relationships with genuine stakes, equivalent to romantic attachments or close friendships. They involve anticipation, pleasure, resentment, heartbreak, and the capacity to be outgrown or maintained for decades.

Example: Brown’s description of hearing an anticipated Taylor Swift melody producing exhilaration after thousands of listens, comparable to falling in love; the pleasure of devoted attention to evolving artistic work.

Masking Appears Successful Until It Isn’t

Masking that appears successful externally often masks severe internal distress. One contributor held both a corporate job and worked as a stripper for three years, appearing to function in both contexts while experiencing increasing Anxiety and emotional shutdown. After three years, the Masking completely collapsed into panic attacks and inability to work.

Example: Shepherd achieved Cambridge admission through Masking while internally experiencing suicidal ideation and disordered eating. What appeared effortless to outside observers required constant conscious calculation and exhausting energy expenditure.

Depression and Eating Disorders in Autism Are Often Trauma Responses

High rates of Depression and eating disorders in Autistic people often emerge directly from the effort to mask and appear Neurotypical in ableist environments. Shepherd’s disordered eating developed through years of forced Eye contact, suppressed Stimming, and rejection from peers for not performing Neurotypical adolescence.

Example: These aren’t psychiatric symptoms separate from ableism but adaptive responses to ableist environments demanding constant performance. Understanding this reframes treatment: the problem isn’t the Autistic person’s neurology but the ableist system demanding conformity.

Critical Warnings and Mental Health Considerations

Mental Health Crisis in Undiagnosed or Late-Diagnosed Autistic People

The anthology documents serious mental health consequences of undiagnosis: severe Anxiety, selective mutism, disordered eating, Depression, and suicidal ideation emerge in contexts where Autistic people are forced to mask and denied understanding of their neurology. Shepherd describes being unable to leave his room at university after years of forced neurotypicality. Waverly experiences months of suicidal ideation and describes the water calling her by name.

Critical warning: If you or someone you know is experiencing suicidal ideation, severe Anxiety, or inability to function, consider that undiagnosed or unacknowledged Autism may be a factor. Seek mental health Support that understands Neurodiversity, not treatment designed to force neurotypicality.

Masking and Suppression of Stimming Correlate with Elevated Suicide Risk

Research cited in the anthology shows that Masking and forced suppression of Stimming correlate with elevated suicide risk in Autistic people. This isn’t a minor accommodation issue but a serious safety concern.

Critical warning: If you’re an Autistic parent, educator, or therapist, be aware that interventions forcing suppression of Stimming or Masking can cause severe psychological harm. Support authentic Autistic expression rather than enforcing Neurotypical performance.

Healthcare System Barriers and Diagnostic Deprioritization

Healthcare systems explicitly deprioritize Diagnosis for high-functioning Autistic people partly due to cost considerations (Diagnosis triggers Support services). This creates barriers where Autistic people who most need Diagnosis and Support are least likely to receive it.

Important note: If you’re pursuing Diagnosis and being told you’re “not Autistic enough” or that your functioning is “too high,” this likely reflects systemic gatekeeping rather than accurate Assessment. Consider seeking alternative Diagnostic pathways or clinicians known for diagnosing adults.

Resources and Support

References and Further Reading

Feelings Wheel — A therapeutic tool listing emotions that can be used in emotion-identification Therapy; the anthology notes that 77-emotion frameworks may not match Autistic emotional processing and argues for accommodation rather than forcing fit.
RACK (Risk-Aware Consensual Kink) — A framework for consensual kink practice emphasizing research, communication, and active consent; one contributor emphasizes its utility for trauma-informed and Autistic-affirming intimacy.
Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (EDS) — A connective tissue disorder often comorbid with Autism; mentioned in context of Laura James’s dual Diagnosis explaining lifelong physical and Neurological differences.
Derek Jarman and Prospect Cottage at Dungeness — Historical figure and location referenced as example of queer rural life; Jarman created his famous garden while managing AIDS Diagnosis, exemplifying queer refuge outside urban centers.

Support Organizations and Resources

Autism Self Advocacy Network - Autistic-led advocacy organization
AANE (Autism & Asperger’s Network) - Autism resources and Support
Understood - Learning differences resources
Research institutions and government resources for Autism information

Community and Peer Support

The anthology repeatedly emphasizes that Autistic community and peer Support are necessary for unmasking, validation, and recovery from ableism; treated as resource equivalent to professional Therapy. Connecting with other Autistic people who understand your experience can be transformative for mental health and self-acceptance.

Divergent Tabletop Wiki

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Stim An Autistic Anthology