Between the Lines: The Life and Liberation Behind The AutSide
Reflections on Identity, Advocacy, and the Journey to Unmasking
Welcome to The AutSide, and thank you for being here. Whether you’ve been with me from the start or are just joining this journey, I’m honoured to have you in this space. When I began The AutSide, I never imagined it would grow into the community it is today—a gathering place for stories, reflections, and connection. Some of you, in extraordinary acts of kindness, have chosen to support this endeavour financially, helping to sustain me in this work. For that, I am profoundly grateful. Your contributions not only keep this space alive but also reaffirm the importance of sharing these stories, of building a record of this journey.
I know that many of you have come to this space because you felt a connection to something I’ve written—an article, a poem, or perhaps a piece of my story that resonated with you. It means so much to know that what I’ve shared has held meaning for others, and I’m so happy you’ve found value here.
For me, writing is a joy—a way to take the swirling chaos of the Theatre of My Mind and translate it into something tangible. But I’ll admit, my passion often transforms a 500-word essay into a sprawling 5,000-word treatise. It’s an extension of my autistic urge to deep dive, to explore a subject in all its depth and complexity, and I don’t apologise for it. It’s part of who I am, and it’s part of why The AutSide exists … a kind of digital repository for my delayed echolalia.
Over the past year, I’ve also started a podcast of sorts, recognising that some readers might prefer audio summaries of the topics I write about (the Substack app will read the articles to you, if needed). Because of my struggles with language—especially English, despite how many thousands of words I seem to churn out—recording these summaries myself isn’t feasible. Anticipatory anxiety and the way my autistic gestalt-processing brain works would make it an overwhelming experience. Instead, I use Google’s NotebookLM to generate audio sumaries of my articles, released the day after publication.
I’ve heard from readers who enjoy these smaller, digestible chunks, whilst others miss the idea of hearing my “weird Westie voice” and aren’t fond of AI tools. I understand both perspectives, and I hope that whatever format you choose to engage with, you find value in the work. For now, the written word remains my greatest passion, the medium where I feel most alive and connected. Writing brings me immense joy, and I’m so grateful to have a space to share that joy with you.
The words on this Substack are part of a journey I’ve been documenting, a journey of unmasking, becoming, and reclaiming who I truly am. Whilst they may at times seem disjointed, even random, they each serve a purpose: to record my progress, to enshrine my advocacy, and to provide citable evidence for those who are engaged in the struggle for liberation. This work is both deeply personal and inherently political, a reflection of my own becoming and a contribution to the collective fight for a more just and equitable world.
To begin, I want to share with you my origin story—not the tidy version we often tell ourselves or the simplified version formatted for LinkedIn’s character limitation, but the full, messy truth of how I came to be here, in this moment, writing to you now.
On Origins
I come from a land not marked on any map, a place where words grow slowly, like moss, deliberate and unhurried. It is a land shrouded in silence and shadows, where truths were buried long before I could form the questions to uncover them. From as early as I can remember, there was a splinter lodged deep in my mind’s eye—a persistent whisper that something wasn’t right. I couldn’t name it, couldn’t grasp its shape, but I felt it—an unease, an intangible fracture beneath the surface of my reality.
I was told I was theirs, that I belonged in a story of their making. Standing head and shoulders above ‘siblings’ and ‘cousins,’ my body betrayed a truth no one would admit. My adoptive parents insisted I was their natural child, weaving a story so tight that even I began to doubt the dissonance I felt. The entire extended family—over 250 of them—upheld the lie, the collective weight of their deception pressing down like a suffocating shroud. Even my beloved Scottish grandmother, my actual maternal grandmother—whose stories I clung to like a lifeline—was in on the con. I suspect she even helped orchestrate the theft of my origins, though her reasons went with her to the grave.
Growing up in the 1970s and 80s, in a world where “children should be seen and not heard” was a mantra, I was trapped in a silence far deeper than mere obedience. My gestalt-processing autistic brain struggled to find the patterns I needed to make sense of the cracks in the façade. Any flicker of discontinuity, any tiny clue that hinted at the truth, was drowned out by a torrent of gaslighting—a firehose of denial that extinguished the smallest sparks of doubt. I was taught not to question, not to trust the unease that gnawed at the edges of my consciousness.
And yet, the splinter remained, lodged in the fabric of my mind, unrelenting and impossible to ignore. There was so much wrong—physical abuse that bruised my body, psychological manipulation that twisted my sense of self, and the quiet, lingering scars of sexual violation. Each of these should have consumed my mind, demanded my focus. But somehow, through it all, this singular niggle stood out. My brain, my autistic system, latched onto this mystery as the greater puzzle, the thread that might unravel everything else. I couldn’t articulate it, couldn’t grasp its full shape, but it loomed—a silent, unyielding companion.
The truth didn’t emerge gently or with care—it exploded, triggered by the very safeguards they had built into sealing my former life and identity. I was 17, away from home for the first time, standing in line to register for college classes. It should have been a simple task, an ordinary rite of passage. But instead, it set off a cascade of red flags and tripwires. Clerks stared at their glowing green screens, their confusion palpable as they whispered to each other. The system didn’t recognise me—not fully. Managers were called in, their unease growing with every passing minute. Their puzzled glances and hushed voices made it clear that whatever they were seeing wasn’t normal.
I stood there, unsure and increasingly alarmed, until finally, I was told I needed to provide additional documentation—my real Social Security Number. My stomach churned as I struggled to comprehend what they were asking for. How could a person have a second number? The question itself seemed impossible, yet their insistence made it clear that something was very wrong. Panicked, I called “home,” hoping for answers, some reassurance to calm the storm brewing in my mind. Instead, I was met with an ice-cold response that still chills me to this day: “Yes, you were adopted.”
Those words, delivered without emotion or explanation, shattered me. For a moment, I couldn’t even process them. I had spent my entire life being told I was their natural child, gaslit into believing I belonged in a story that was not mine. The years of insistence, the lies reinforced by an entire extended family, even my beloved grandmother—all of it collapsed in an instant.
There was no apology, no effort to soften the blow. Just the brutal truth, dropped with a callousness that implied it wasn’t worth discussing further. The unsaid hung heavy in the air: every moment of my life up until then had been a carefully maintained con. The splinter I had carried in my mind’s eye—the one that had always whispered that something was wrong—burst wide open, leaving a raw wound I couldn’t begin to heal.
I was 17, alone, and for the first time, truly untethered. Barely a week into my new life away from home, I was left to navigate this revelation without guidance, support, or even a framework to comprehend its full weight. I didn’t yet know I was autistic—I just knew I was different. The world often felt overwhelming, and I struggled deeply with language. The English, Gaelic, Spanish, German of my community—they all seemed to slip through my grasp, elusive and fragmented, making it harder to express what I felt or to process what was happening around me.
Now, on top of the disorientation of being on my own for the first time, I was faced with the collapse of everything I thought I knew about myself. The panic was overwhelming, a flood of confusion and dread that I couldn’t put into words. The betrayal was immeasurable, leaving me adrift, unmoored, and unable to make sense of how the life I thought I had lived could have been built on such a staggering lie.
The clerks, the managers, the system—they didn’t know what to do with me. And I didn’t know what to do with myself. My identity had been stripped bare, leaving me scrambling to understand who I was, where I came from, and how I could possibly move forward.
And so, I come from Værensland—a land I had to create in the Theatre of My Mind in the absence of answers, a realm where being is valued over having, and where silence hums with the echoes of untold stories. It is not a place of exile, but of reclamation. It is the home I have forged from the fragments of my past, the niggling truths I was denied, and the identity I have fought to reclaim.
Act I - A Child Adrift
Mine was a childhood of tragic circumstances, shrouded in abuse, neglect, and an unrelenting absence of connection. Placed into a family and culture not my own, I was a stranger in a strange land, piecing together a fractured reality that even now, decades later, I can only partially reconstruct. The fragments I have gathered—from the reluctant admissions of those who knew parts of the truth—paint a childhood shaped by chaos and shadow.
At the age of 4.5, very soon after my adoption, I was placed in kindergarten, not because I was especially mature or bright, but because my body, already towering over my age-level peers, demanded it. I didn’t fit—not physically, not socially, not in any way that could be smoothed over or ignored. I had no words of my own, only scripts I had borrowed—echoes of phrases in a variety of languages that seemed to me to work, though they rarely matched the prompts I was given. I sounded strange, alien, and my mismatched responses marked me as different long before I understood what that meant.
There’s a phenomenon, one I’ve learned well in hindsight, where medical science struggles to identify autism, yet schoolyard bullies can sniff it out instantly. I was no exception. My strangeness made me a target, and I was bullied incessantly. Their words tore at the fragile threads of my borrowed scripts, and their fists followed close behind. Beaten down physically and emotionally, I cried constantly, unable to process the why of my suffering. I had no friends, no allies, no one to turn to. The adults around me were indifferent, seeing my pain as weakness, something to be corrected rather than comforted.
My adopted father—once a boxer, a war hero, a drill sergeant, and now a hardened truck driver in his forties—saw my tears not as a cry for help but as a failing that needed to be stamped out. He gave me the only tool he thought might stop the beatings: permission to fight back. “Don’t start fights,” he told me. “But if someone does, finish it.” Those words changed the course of my life.
By the third grade, I had sent my first bully to the hospital. By the sixth grade, I had more school suspensions than I could count. The fights didn’t stop; they escalated. When I defeated single foes, they ganged up on me. And when their numbers grew, so did my rage. My body, already larger and stronger than theirs, became a weapon. My gestalt-processing brain absorbed moves from my father’s war films and Kung Fu Saturdays on Channel 9, stitching them into my own unconventional, instinctive training regimen. When the fights came, I drew from the Theatre of My Mind, moving as though I had practiced a thousand times.
But there were limits to even my strength. By sixth grade, it took six of them to finally overwhelm me. Bloodied but unbroken, I realised that no matter how many I fought, the battles would never truly end. My principal, desperate for a solution, suggested I take up wrestling to channel my anger and rage into something constructive. And so, in middle school, I did. On the mat, my fury became focus. I rarely lost.
Yet, even as I became a force to be reckoned with, I remained adrift. I had no real friends, no allies to stand beside me. My world was a battlefield, and I lived in isolation, navigating a terrain of distrust and hostility. My only refuge was the Theatre of My Mind—a boundless realm where I could rewrite the scripts of my life, imagine victories far greater than those I won with my fists. And beneath it all, my anger and rage burned, unrelenting, a fire that kept me moving forward even as the rest of the world tried to push me down.
Survival became my story. I pieced together fragments of myself with sheer will, enduring in a landscape of noise and shadow. Each day was a battle—not just with those around me, but with the absence of connection, the hollow ache of knowing that I was utterly alone.
Act II – An illiterate wanderer.
I graduated from a good American school system functionally illiterate. By all appearances, I had made it through, yet the world of words remained an inaccessible maze. My size, strength, and rage had carried me this far, earning me a football scholarship that hinged not on academics, but on my ability to channel violence into something the world deemed productive. College was supposed to be a new beginning, but it quickly became a dead end.
That first term, my world shattered with the revelation of my adoption. The support systems that might have kept me afloat—if they had existed at all—vanished when I was injured. My scholarship was gone, and with it, my tenuous foothold in this new life. Cut loose, I took the first offer I could find: a chance to leave with someone I’d only just met, 400 miles north, to live with her mother. I left with no intention of ever returning.
The next four years saw me adrift in the San Francisco Bay Area, stringing together a series of odd jobs and piecing together enough college credits—mostly from community college courses that required minimal reading or writing—to eventually earn an Associate's degree. But even then, I remained functionally illiterate, navigating the world by instinct, sheer will, and the brute force that had always been my fallback. The question of “what next?” loomed large, unanswered.
An offer of travel and adventure became my escape. I set off for Kansas one summer, then wound my way across the upper South to South Carolina, before landing in Atlanta and its international airport. Europe called, and I answered, boarding a plane bound for Germany, seeking something I couldn’t yet name.
In Germany, I drifted from one odd job to another, always relying on my physicality. I became a janitor, a bouncer, and even a bodyguard. These roles fit the armour I had built for myself—a persona forged in strength and tempered by anger. Yet, for all the jobs and movement, my weekends were a different story. I rode the rails of the Deutsche Bahn, exploring the vast countryside and the pulsing energy of German cities and beyond—Basel, Budapest, Paris, Vienna, and every where in between... Club life was non-stop, fuelled by the novelty of Red Bull and the lure of music that drowned out the chaos in my mind.
It was in this whirlwind of exploration that I experienced my first autistic shutdown. The world, once sharp and loud, collapsed inward, leaving me paralysed by sensory and emotional overload. The German system, precise and efficient, noticed what others had long ignored. Questions arose about my health, my visa, and the life I had built there. The truth came out: I had long overstayed my welcome. With no recourse, I was deported to the United States, landing once again in California.
I began anew—again. Back in California, I pieced together a life from the fragments I had left behind. I found a sense of belonging among local Scots, attending Highland Games as a spectator at first, drawn to the echoes of an ancestral identity I barely understood. One day, I was urged to leave the kinship’s social tent and give the caber toss a try. To my surprise, I was a natural. The Scottish heavy events became my new outlet, a place where my strength and discipline were celebrated. Over time, I amassed over 75 podium finishes in individual events, won numerous games outright, and claimed state championships in the caber toss, stones, and weights.
It was during this time that I met the man who would usher in the next act of my life—my kinship’s Chief. He needed someone to serve as a cross between a ghillie and a bodyguard, someone who could manage both the ceremonial and physical demands of his role. I accepted, drawn by the promise of adventure and the casual camaraderie of the task.
His grandmother, a woman of sharp intellect and piercing insight, saw what I had worked so hard to hide. She recognised my illiteracy, the gaping hole in my otherwise well-armoured self. Quietly and with infinite patience, she taught me to read. It was within her professional network—one that valued both discipline and curiosity—that I finally found a path to full adulthood.
For the first time, a tiny crack of light broke through the darkness that had shaped my life. Literacy, once a distant and unreachable concept, began to take hold. Words, which had always eluded me, became tools I could wield. My hands, long accustomed to the language of strength, began to learn the grace of words. It was the beginning of something greater, though I could not yet see how much it would change the course of my life.
Act III – A bridge to light
Freemasonry became a grounding force in my life, a connection to something ancient and enduring that gave me a sense of belonging I had never known. It began with an invitation from my Chief, the man whose grandmother had taught me to read. He became a Mason and asked me to join him for dinner and membership. Freemasonry offered structure, meaning, and a community that valued both discipline and introspection, and I embraced it wholeheartedly.
The Scottish Games, too, became a pivotal space in this act of my life. It was there that I met the man who would offer me my first “real job”—a civil service position with the City of Los Angeles. It was an opportunity that seemed like a chance to build something stable, something lasting. But just a few months into the job, the world changed. 9/11 happened, and with it, my position transformed into something all-consuming. My life became a relentless cycle of work. I was hardly ever home with my new wife and child, working shift after shift without end. Over those years, I crammed 33 years’ worth of eight-hour days into just 14.5 chronological years—enough to retire.
Through it all, I helped build something entirely new. I was one of the founders of a brand-new forensic science discipline: digital and multimedia forensics. I trained the first two generations of practitioners from over 40 countries within the US sphere of influence. I travelled across the country, to Canada, and even to South Africa, teaching and refining this emerging field. The work consumed me, nearly costing me my marriage, my children, and my own sense of self.
By 2016, I retired for “health reasons,” though the truth was far more complex. I had nearly died several times, dodging bullets—literally—on more than one occasion. My body had endured the toll of endless work, and my family had borne the brunt of my absence. And yet, even as I stepped away, something remained deeply unresolved.
During those years, I had gained literacy and written my first two books, along with over 2,000 articles and papers. I had built a career, crafted an identity beyond anger, and achieved milestones I once couldn’t have imagined. But through it all, something was off. My colleagues had always known me as the office “lefty” and someone they might describe as “a bit queer.” But in the US justice system, and particularly in Los Angeles, conservative homophobia loomed large. It wasn’t safe to even think about diversity in any meaningful way, let alone explore my own identity.
My “health reasons” for leaving were more than physical. They were born of a rational fear—for my life, for my family, and for the pieces of myself that had been slipping away. There was a growing chasm between the person I was in the world and the self that existed in the Theatre of My Mind. The discontinuity became too much to bear. I was living a life of achievement, but it was a life far removed from who I truly was.
It was only later that I found the answers I had been seeking all along. The autism diagnosis came like a key, unlocking an understanding of myself that had eluded me for decades. It was a turning point, a revelation that began to bridge the divide between the world I had navigated and the self I was only beginning to reclaim.
Act IV – The becoming
This is where you find me now: in the act of becoming, in the fullness of a life reclaimed. Retired from forensic science, I am no longer consumed by the endless demands of a career that once defined me. But my work continues in other forms—writing, teaching, storytelling, and poetry. I am a schoolteacher, a PhD, and most significantly, I am out in the open as a trans woman. For the first time in my life, I am living as who I am, not who I was forced to be.
There is a beauty in this act that is unlike anything I’ve experienced before. To stand in the light of truth, to feel the air on my skin as it was meant to feel—it’s a joy that is impossible to describe fully. And yet, there is also an emotional rawness that comes with being so exposed. Living authentically means living vulnerably, and recent events have left me feeling overwhelmed, my emotions sharper and louder than ever before.
To embrace the fullness of my identity and neurodivergence is to embrace a world of paradoxes. I love who I am now, yet I still feel the weight of a world that wishes I wasn’t. I celebrate this truth, but I also grieve the years spent hiding, the moments stolen by fear, and the parts of me that were erased before I could even name them. Living as myself is both a liberation and a rebellion—a quiet defiance in a world that so often demands conformity.
This act is not an ending; it is a beginning. A reclamation of self through creation. Each word I write is a thread woven into the tapestry of my becoming, my unmasking, an offering to others who might find resonance in the rhythms of this strange, beautiful journey.
And it is through this act of writing, through the Theatre of My Mind, that I process the swirling complexity of this life. Some days, it feels as though the words themselves are too much, cascading over me in torrents that demand release. Yet, they are my compass, my way of making sense of this extraordinary unfolding.
The poem below, “The Liminal World,” is born from this moment—this act of becoming, of standing unmasked in the full light of my truth. It is part of the record I’ve been creating through articles and poems, documenting my journey of unmasking, of liberating myself from the confines of who I was told to be, who I was forced to be, and embracing the fullness of who I am. This poem stands as a mile marker, a reflection of where I am now and a testament to the progress I have made toward liberation and selfhood.
Poetry as Therapy: The Liminal World
I come from a land
not marked on maps,
a place veiled in mist and silence,
where the air hums with the rhythm
of words unspoken,
of selves unseen.
In this land,
we wear our masks like armour,
woven from threads of survival,
stitched tight by hands
that have never known tenderness.
Each mask tells the story
of what the world demands—
and what it forbids.
We are born into the mask,
our names written in a language
we never chose.
It is heavy and stiff,
moulded to fit the comfort of others,
never the contours of our truth.
I. The First Unraveling
There came a crack,
a whisper of wind through the fabric.
The world shifted,
and the mask that once protected
began to suffocate.
Beneath its surface,
there was no void—
there was a forest,
a deep, sprawling vastness
where words grew wild
and being was enough.
The first thread unraveled
not by force,
but by revelation:
the realisation
that the mask
was never mine.
II. The Borderlands
The world called me a wanderer,
a creature of in-between places,
a traveller without a destination.
But they did not see the path beneath my feet—
the one that led not to new lands,
but to my own.
I walked the borderlands,
where light and shadow meet.
Here, unmasking is an act of rebellion.
To unmask is to step into the borderlands
as both target and truth,
as a beacon and a threat.
The mask was their law,
their order, their safety.
To remove it was to invite chaos—
not my chaos,
but theirs.
III. The Light Within
The mask falls,
and I see it now:
it was never a face,
only a shroud.
Here, in this liminal space,
I am the origin and the destination.
I am the untamed forest,
the unspoken word.
I am not the void they feared,
but the light they could not fathom.
In unmasking,
I do not become.
I return.
IV. The Danger of Unmasking
But to return is to risk.
The world does not welcome
what it cannot control.
They will call me dangerous,
because the unmasked
are a mirror to their own fear.
They will name me fragile,
because they cannot break me.
They will paint me monstrous,
because they cannot erase me.
The unmasking is not an arrival—
it is a rebellion.
To unmask is to claim space
in a world that denies you air.
V. The Home That Was Always Mine
I stand now
not as a conqueror,
but as a dweller.
This is my land,
the place I was always meant to be.
Its edges are wild and untamed,
its borders undefinable.
Here, the rules dissolve.
Here, being is enough.
Here, I am enough.
The world still waits beyond the mist,
still clings to its masks,
its maps, its borders.
But I am no longer bound
by the weight of its gaze.
I am here.
Unmasked.
Alive.
Home.
Final thoughts …
I hope you’ve enjoyed this journey down memory lane, and that it offers some context for the words you’ll find here on The AutSide. Every article, every poem, every reflection is a fragment of my journey—a blend of personal discovery and political purpose. If you’ve come this far, I hope it informs your understanding of the stories I share, and perhaps even deepens your connection to them.
I am, unapologetically, a devoted leftist—a torch passed down from my Scottish Marxist grandmother, whose ideals continue to shape my worldview. I grew up in the heart of the American empire, raised by cold devotees of capitalism—acolytes of Reagan—who looked down on the downtrodden as lazy or undeserving, rather than recognising them as victims and discards of a heartless system. That upbringing shaped me, but it did not define me. I found another way, one rooted in the liberatory elements of the Marxist canon and informed by my own experiences of autism, literacy, gender, and life itself. My work here is a reflection of those beliefs, and I make no apologies for them.
Marxists will always tell you to read, to do your own homework, to seek truth through study and action. The Far Right will always seek to ban books, to silence voices, to banish writers who dare challenge their worldview. This contrast is central to why I do what I do—to leave a record, a digital repository of my delayed echolalia, that might serve as both a testament and a resource. These words are my resistance, my act of defiance in a world that so often seeks to erase or distort voices like mine.
Now, having passed my autistic “best by” date, I am acutely aware of the limited time I have left. This Substack, this body of work, is how I choose to spend those years—creating, reflecting, and leaving behind something that, I hope, will resonate beyond my own time.
Thank you for taking the time to explore this space, for reading my words, for engaging with my story, and for supporting this endeavour. Whether you’ve found something here that challenges you, inspires you, or simply adds some small value to your day, I am grateful for your presence. Your support, in all its forms, makes this work possible.
Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for being part of this journey.