A year ago, I found myself tearfully saying to a friend, “I’m too Autistic to be chosen to teach on autism.”
It was a bit dramatic. A disproportionate-feeling wave of emotion that hit when I realized a non-autistic presenter had been chosen over me, and it tapped into a much older story about not being picked.
A large platform had reached out about flying me to New York to film a video on neurodiversity, specifically autism and ADHD. It was the kind of polished, high-production opportunity that felt like punching above my weight just to be asked. Exciting, unreal, and slightly intimidating all at once.
What I missed were the unspoken expectations.
The first call, it turned out, would basically be an on-the-spot audition. They would fire questions at me. “What is autism?” “What is ADHD?” And they would see how I did with quick, tidy answers.
Turns out… not great.
I went in with my usual “let’s think together” brain, not my “here is the 20-second TED-ready definition” brain.
So when the producer asked, “What is autism?” I nearly froze.
I started with, “Well… there are a lot of different theories out there…” and then did what my brain naturally does. I went contextual. I associated. I diverged. I zoomed in and out. I named that autism is debated, that there are many lived experiences, that who gets to define autism matters, and that simple definitions often erase people whose stories are already erased.
It was not a crisp, top-down sound bite.
Table of Contents
When your brain thinks in webs, not bullet points
For as long as I can remember, I have found it easier to write an entire article than to write the two-sentence summary of what the article is about.
Summarizing requires a kind of top-down thinking that does not come naturally to my system. My brain thinks in webs, associations, history, nuance, and it integrates all the side paths that feel important to name.
There is a real mismatch between how my Autistic brain works and what so many spaces ask of us: short, tidy answers to questions that live inside whole ecosystems of context.
So when someone asks “What is autism?” my brain does not pull up a single sentence. It lights up a whole map. The history of autism and the outdated, often harmful frameworks that still echo. The competing theories and sensory models. The community debates about language. The questions about who has been allowed to define us, and whose stories have been treated as footnotes.
That is a lot of nuance to fit into a sound bite.
For many Autistic people, this is not just a quirk of personality. It reflects how our attention and processing work. Monotropism, a theory developed by Autistic researchers Dinah Murray, Wenn Lawson, and Mike Lesser, describes the way many of us focus deeply on a few streams of interest at a time, and struggle to spread our attention thinly across many things. Sound bites ask for breadth and speed. Our brains often reach for depth and context.
The audition I didn't know I was in
I didn’t exactly bomb the interview, but I walked away feeling off.
If I had known it was essentially a test, I would have pre-scripted my answers and given myself a better chance. But my autism meant missing the context clues. And my autism made it hard to define autism in the way they were looking for.
I never heard back. Which I eventually understood as a “no.”
Months later, I tracked down the final video. I was curious who they chose. I imagined someone like Devon Price, another Autistic person with a strong, clear voice and a gift for short, powerful statements.
Instead, the person on screen was not Autistic and not otherwise neurodivergent. To his credit, he did a good job. He was cheerful and emotive. His definitions were short and tidy. It was well produced and impactful. Overall, the video pushed the needle toward goodness in the world.
And also: it hurt.
Not in a life-shattering way. More like that familiar, dull ache of “not chosen,” or “not shiny enough.” My internal monologue sounded something like:
My words were too heavy.
My expressions are too flat.
I’m too Autistic to be the shiny spokesperson for autism.
I was slightly amused by the irony of realizing that the very neurology that gives you deep insight into something can also make you less marketable as the person to explain it, in 30 seconds, on camera.
When your brain thinks in webs
Most of the time, I genuinely like how my brain works. I love the depth, the pattern-spotting, the way ideas braid together.
I feel the friction most when I am asked to be a spokesperson. Live interviews, panels, anything with bright lights and fast questions. The demand of “give us the heart of it in one sentence” bumps up against my monotropic, context-loving brain.
It is hard to do complex concepts justice in 30 seconds. It is harder still when you know that oversimplifying autism has historically caused real harm for Autistic people.
It is likely why I do most of my work behind words. There is comfort in the nuance that pages allow for. There is comfort in knowing my face does not need to perform emotion, the words can carry them. Writing lets me meander, pause, go deep, honor nuance, and then, eventually, distil.
Why we are building the glossary
It is also part of why we started building the Neurodivergent Insights glossary.
Selfishly, I knew that if I sat down and worked through how I define key words, autism, ADHD, masking, monotropism, it would give my nervous system some pre-scripted anchors for future interviews. Once I have written a definition, it is easier to pull it up when I am on the spot.
And beyond my own needs, I know quick “concept grabs” are genuinely helpful for many people. Not everyone has the time, energy, or executive function to sit with a 50-page workbook before they can say, “Here is the sentence I can use with my boss, my partner, or my child’s teacher.”
So the glossary has become a sort of bridge. On one side is my web brain and the long-form articles and conversations it loves. On the other side is a world that often needs short, clear anchors. The glossary helps me honor both.
Defining autism… again
I thought about that New York story this week because we have reached the “autism” entry in the glossary.
There are many theories about why autism exists and what is happening under the hood, cognitive, neurological, sensory, and more. What interests me most these days is less one grand, totalizing explanation and more the shared threads that weave through Autistic lives. Things like:
- Monotropism. Many Autistic people have attentional systems that pull us toward depth with a few streams of interest at a time. We build rich inner worlds and immersive projects, and being in those worlds can feel profoundly regulating.
- Autistic culture. The shared language, humor, values, and ways of being that emerge when Autistic people gather.
- The way we build worlds. Through our collections, our imagination, our interests, our routines and rituals, sometimes with a chosen other.
These are the things that pull my curiosity: the lived experience of having an Autistic mind, and how we capture both the patterns and the diversity in how they show up across people.
So when someone asks me now, “What is autism?” my honest answer is still not a tidy sentence. But if I had to offer a starting point, I might say something like:
Autism is a neurology and a way of being in the world that pulls us toward depth, pattern, felt intensity, and often toward one another.
This glossary entry is my current working language. I expect it to keep evolving as I keep listening to our community.
