Blaming it on my Autism

I had a really intentional blog post planned for my first real post. I wanted to start by really introducing my academic research in an accessible way. I actually started (and almost finished) the post. But in my deeply autistic manor, I stopped writing with just a little bit of work left. My brain decided it was done, and so I closed my laptop and walked away. 6 days later when I went back to the tab that I had never closed, WordPress prompted me to log in. I didn’t think anything of it, until I was looking to find my draft post, to realize I apparently never saved it. I was devastated, because the work I did was good – it had pictures and citations and personal life story anecdotes. I was proud of it. I thought about restarting it. It honestly was very similar to so many of the things that I have been writing in the past 2 years, I could have done it again fairly easily without thinking too hard about it. It’s the same content as every proposal, application, and personal essay that I have written about my research since I started researching gendered experiences of autism. women are underdiagnosed with autism because of gendered diagnostic tools, medical misogyny, stereotypes, and misinformation (including within the medical system) about autism. This contributes to women’s experiences of autism being under-represented and misunderstood. My goal is to help build more expansive knowledge about women with autism, while analyzing the socio-political impacts of late autism diagnosis, specifically in women and gender-diverse folks. For the last 8 months or so I have been joking that all I do is write about the research I want to do, but I have not actually started the research yet. That is how academia works, I am learning. First you have to convince people that your research means anything, and then you can actually start doing it. Which makes sense, but it has made me sort of resentful of writing this same sort of thing. So for the moment I am skipping that introduction – maybe I will dig up something else I have written and share it here soon, or maybe I will eventually write the post I had planned here. Regardless, this bumpy start has inspired a different kind of post; a more authentic one.

I figured starting with a post that centered my academic research was going to be the best way to legitimize myself – to prove that I had the right to speak on autism and the ways in which women experience it. By changing the nature of this first blog post, I am trying to convince myself that my academic accomplishments and achievements are not what give me authority to speak about autism; my autism is. I am trying to convince myself of fact that this post being more personal does not take any legitimacy away from my blog, but in fact lends to it. So, I am leaning into what feels uncomfortable to me, telling my own story. I have a few other posts planned to come out over the summer, but for now I just have this. An admittance of an autistic fuck-up, with no promises that it will be better in the future. Instead, I am promising to be radically honest here. Not that honesty is something I have ever struggled with. In fact quite the opposite, I have always been a painfully honest person, and I struggle to realize who I can and cannot trust. So I guess I am telling you to get used to this – messy, unplanned, awkward and painfully honest posts about life with autism. wish me luck.