Autism

You’ve always been the quiet one at the party, the man who’d rather tinker with the car than make small talk, the colleague who knows everything about one subject and finds meetings exhausting. People have called you shy, blunt or … Read more

Maybe you’ve always tapped your foot through meetings, rubbed the same smooth stone in your pocket or hummed quietly while you concentrate. Maybe someone once told you to stop fidgeting, and you’ve been holding still ever since. For many autistic … Read more

It starts with a slow build. The noise in the office, the change of plan you weren’t told about, the conversation that went wrong, the scratchy label in your jumper. You hold it together for as long as you can. … Read more

It’s been a long day of noise, conversation and demands. Then, almost without warning, something switches off. You can’t find words, can’t make decisions and can barely move. Someone asks if you’re okay and all you can manage is a … Read more

Most descriptions of autism are written from the outside, lists of behaviours as they appear to an observer, and usually an observer watching a child. That turns out to be of very limited use to an adult sitting at home … Read more

The diagnostic picture of autism was built, almost entirely, from studying boys. That single fact explains a great deal about why so many women reach adulthood, frequently middle age, and sometimes later still, before anyone raises the possibility at all. Read more

Many people reach adulthood without a formal autism diagnosis — not because autism was absent, but because it was not identified, or because their particular presentation did not trigger assessment at the time. For autistic adults who received a late … Read more

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that autistic adults describe, not tiredness in the ordinary sense, but a collapse of the systems that have kept them functioning. Read more