Autism isn’t a flaw to be fixed—it’s a signal that something in the system is broken. This reflection explores misdiagnosis, functioning labels, and why autistic truth is a call to reimagine our world from the margins.
Introduction
What’s called “high functioning” is often just low visibility of collapse. I think about that a lot—especially when I see images like the one from NeuroClastic (below), where the invisible scaffolding of autistic survival is laid bare. The panic attacks before clocking in. The overstimulation. The exhaustion. The comfort foods. The inability to access therapy. And somehow, through all of it, still being perceived as “fine”—because you made it in, because you’re upright, because you answered the phone. I see myself in that meme. Not just in the details, but in the framing: the insistence that competence is proof of wellbeing, when in fact it often hides how much support is needed just to survive.

I’ve been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, Level 2. I have significant difficulties with functional language, and I require extensive support—scaffolding I’ve spent decades building for myself out of necessity. And yet, because I write fluently, because I teach, because I appear “together” in professional spaces, that support is rendered invisible. I’m not seen as someone struggling to navigate basic communicative expectations. I’m seen as capable. As articulate. As functioning. But that visibility—of my competence—comes at the cost of my reality being misread. I mask. I script. I collapse in private. I am understood only insofar as I can perform within the structures that were never designed for me.
And that is the central harm. The system doesn’t break down when it encounters autistic people. It was never built to include us in the first place. It wasn’t made to accommodate non-linear processing, sensory complexity, relational ambiguity, or the need for gentler pacing. It was made for speed, conformity, productivity, and performance. And when someone like me shows up—someone whose very being resists that mould—the system doesn’t pause to adapt. It misinterprets. It dismisses. It reframes our distress as defiance, our overwhelm as attitude, our support needs as burdens. But we are not the problem. We are the evidence that the problem has always been there.
Wondering If It’s Just Me: The Trap of Functioning Labels and Self-Doubt
The world didn’t need me to be well. It needed me to appear manageable. That’s the quiet logic beneath so many interactions I’ve had with systems that claim to support me. As long as I show up, meet deadlines, mask my pain, and don’t disrupt the pace or expectations of others, my needs are assumed to be minimal or already met. My internal scaffolding—months, years, decades of building workarounds for language, sensory processing, executive functioning—is invisible. And so I become invisible too, except as a mirror for the comfort of others. My presence is acceptable only if it doesn’t reflect the cost of surviving in a world not built for me.
Functioning labels don’t just mislead—they distort. They trick people into believing that observable output is a valid proxy for internal experience. Worse still, they gaslight us into doubting our own reality. I have been described as articulate. As strong. As impressive. And I have also sat on the floor in my room, unable to move, because the act of enduring the world required everything I had. And still, I questioned myself. If I can write, how can I say I have language processing difficulties? If I can teach, how can I need support? If I have insight, how can I be struggling? The answer, of course, is that I am struggling—and that the system only recognises need when it’s convenient or conforms to stereotype.
This is why it hurts so deeply to encounter models that seem authoritative—scientific, credentialed, shared widely—and yet erase people like me. Hogenkamp’s 2009 article is one such model. It offers a systems perspective on autism and adaptation, and in places, it gestures toward liberation. But its framing, whilst kinder than many, still carries the same old shadow. It describes autistic people as neurologically distinct, even evolutionarily valuable—but also as metabolically fragile, emotionally dysregulated, and socially limited. It’s the language of admiration laced with caution. The autistic mind is cast as a marvel—but only if it can produce something others find useful.
And then there’s the invocation of Kanner—again. As if his framing wasn’t steeped in eugenics, in maternal blame, in assumptions of brokenness. As if we haven’t spent a century trying to undo the harm he set in motion. Kanner named autism but failed utterly to understand it. His legacy is one of misrecognition and containment, not care. And yet he continues to be referenced as foundational, whilst the work of people like Dr. Grunya Sukhareva—who wrote of integration, support, and belonging—is ignored or sidelined.
It is painful, too, to see the same binary appear even in well-meaning texts: broken versus brilliant, liability versus legacy, illness versus gift. These dichotomies don’t liberate—they trap. They tell us that we are only acceptable if we excel, only lovable if we produce, only tolerable if we entertain or enlighten. They reduce autistic people to potential contributions and then decide whether or not we are worth accommodating based on the yield. But I do not exist to be understood in terms of output. I do not exist to justify my presence with novelty or usefulness.
The models that erase people like me don’t just live in medical journals or diagnostic criteria. They shape how we are responded to at work, in schools, in social circles, even in movements that claim to support us. They teach people to look for visible struggle as the only form of legitimate need—and to dismiss anything that falls outside that narrow frame. But we are not exceptions. We are not mysteries. We are not metaphors. We are people. We are here. And we are tired of being explained away.
Researching Others’ Experiences: Finding the Pattern, Naming the Mismatch
At a certain point, the loneliness cracks open—not because the pain disappears, but because I realise it isn’t just mine. I begin to find the others. I read their words, feel the shape of their experiences echo mine, and slowly the pattern begins to surface. What I thought was personal failure turns out to be something else entirely: a systemic design flaw disguised as individual inadequacy. The more I search, the more obvious it becomes—autistic people aren’t broken. We are responding to a world that treats our differences as defects. The problem isn’t inside us. It’s in the mismatch between our needs and the environments we’re forced to navigate.
There is a shift happening in the discourse, and it matters. We are moving—from causation to emergence, from pathology to ecology. From asking “what causes autism?” to asking “what kind of world creates distress for autistic people?” Hogenkamp’s more recent writing, especially the Evolutionary Stress Framework (ESF), begins to gesture in this direction. Her five questions—particularly the reframing of autism as an emergent, co-adaptive neurotype—land in a very different place than her earlier work. They no longer treat autistic traits as by-products of dysfunction, but as signals—clues about how humans respond to stress, unpredictability, and relational imbalance. It’s a move away from medicalisation and toward system-level thinking. A move that resonates, at least in part, with what I’ve long felt but didn’t have the language to explain.
That’s the central thesis of No Place for Autism?—that the real issue is not the presence of autism, but the absence of environments where it can thrive. School systems designed around compliance and speed punish autistic pacing and processing. Workplaces that prize spontaneity and verbal fluency erase those of us who communicate in more structured, deliberate ways. Healthcare settings that rely on quick assessments and assumed norms overlook the depth and complexity of our embodied experiences. In every one of these spaces, the message is clear: adapt, or be excluded.
But autistic distress is not inevitable. It is not written into our neurology. It is a response—to chaos, to unpredictability, to constant misinterpretation, to environments designed to overwhelm. When we falter, it is not because we are too rigid or too sensitive or too withdrawn. It is because the systems we move through are too noisy, too fast, too brittle to make room for another rhythm of being.
Autism may be the signal—but are we brave enough to ask what the system is screaming? Are we ready to admit that the distress we see is not a personal flaw, but a collective warning? That what we call disorder may in fact be the only honest reaction to a world spinning too far from care?
Discovering Systemic Patterns: What the System Is Actually Doing
At some point, it’s not enough to name the mismatch—we have to ask why it exists. Why do so many environments fail us in the same ways? Why does support so often come with strings attached, or not at all? Why are we only believed when we’re visibly falling apart, and disbelieved the moment we try to advocate for ourselves? The answers aren’t found in the brain scans or chemical pathways that dominate so much of the scientific literature. They’re found in the design of the systems themselves. The system doesn’t misread us accidentally. It was built to devalue difference.
This is where the Power Threat Meaning Framework (PTMF) offers something vital. Unlike diagnostic models that locate the problem in the person, PTMF asks what’s happened to us, what threats we’ve faced, how we’ve responded to survive, and what meaning we’ve made from those responses. When applied to autism, it reveals a profound truth: our behaviours—our so-called symptoms—are not random. They are patterned responses to a world that constantly threatens our sense of safety, coherence, and belonging. It’s not that we are wired wrong. It’s that the world we’re navigating was wired with different priorities—ones that often see our ways of being as obstacles to be managed, rather than expressions to be understood.
This is why I find the scientific obsession with neurotransmitters, metabolic markers, and structural differences so frustrating. It’s not that those things are untrue. It’s that they’re incomplete. They reduce distress to biochemistry and ignore the meaning behind it. Hogenkamp’s 2009 article is full of references to the amygdala, dopamine, testosterone, oxidative stress, and mitochondria. But very little is said about the systems that create chronic stress in the first place: the schools, workplaces, and institutions that pathologise difference while demanding conformity. What does it mean to have an overactive stress response in a world that is always hostile? What does it mean to be “vulnerable” to dysfunction when every system you move through is a source of harm?
The patterns are everywhere. Educational systems standardise knowledge and pace, punishing anyone who needs more time, more input, or a different approach. Medical institutions gatekeep care through norms that erase non-typical communication and embodiment. Workplaces reward speed, compliance, and social fluency, sidelining those who process deeply or communicate differently. Patriarchal norms enforce rigid standards of autonomy, emotional restraint, and gendered behaviour—making it harder still for autistic people, especially those of us who are trans or gender nonconforming, to be seen and supported. These aren’t bugs in the system. They’re features.
And so we learn to contort ourselves. To shrink. To script. To endure. Not because we are disordered—but because we are surviving systems that were never meant to recognise us as fully human.
Writing Toward Understanding and Alternatives: Pattern as Pedagogy, Autism as Insight
This is how I’ve come to understand the world—not through formal training alone, not through professional development seminars or tidy instructional models, but through a lived pattern. A pattern of harm, doubt, reaching out, connecting the dots, and then writing toward something new. It wasn’t something I set out to develop. It emerged out of necessity. As an autistic person—especially one who processes language gesturally, holistically, and often painfully—I couldn’t rely on the typical scripts. I had to create my own. And in doing so, I discovered a different kind of knowing. A slower, deeper, pattern-seeking kind of knowledge. One rooted not in slogans or bullet points, but in the body. In pain. In resonance. In survival.
I’ve written before about this five-part process. It begins with a sense of wrongness—often physical, often unnameable. A tightening. A withdrawal. Then comes the self-doubt: am I overreacting? Misreading? Broken again? Then I reach out—not always to people I know, but to writing, to voices, to the digital fragments of others trying to name the same ache. That’s where solidarity lives. Where loneliness becomes evidence. Where the pattern emerges. And finally, I write—not just to describe, but to make sense. To metabolise harm. To build scaffolding where none existed. To say: I was here. And this is what I saw.
This is my professional development. This is my research. And I refuse to treat it as less legitimate because it doesn’t wear the costume of objectivity. This process is iterative. Messy. It doesn’t map neatly onto checklists. But it has produced insight, clarity, and genuine alternatives to the systems that failed me—and that continue to fail others like me. What would it look like if schools, workplaces, and care systems adopted this process? Not “identify and fix,” but: recognise the harm. Sit with the doubt. Seek resonance. Uncover the system. Create from it. What would it mean to treat autistic experience not as something to decode, but as a feedback loop—a warning system for structures that have become too rigid, too fast, too exclusionary to sustain human life?
Because autism isn’t the failure. But the world that reads it that way might be.
That’s the core of No Place for Autism?—a book that began as a question and ended as a mirror held up to the institutions that shaped me. It’s also the foundation for my ongoing work—The AutSide, a place for writing at the edge of systems, and the early development of a Critical Autism Studies framework grounded in intersectionality, lived experience, and resistance to deficit thinking. I am not interested in rebranding the old models with new vocabulary. I am interested in something else entirely: in creating a space where autistic people can live, learn, and contribute without needing to justify our existence through excellence or compliance.
Autism doesn’t need to be fixed. But the world that treats it as failure—does. And maybe our way of seeing, of feeling, of knowing differently is not a flaw to be corrected, but a compass to help reorient a culture that has lost its way.
Final thoughts …
We are not broken. We are the evidence that the system is.
That truth matters—not just because it affirms our worth, but because it reframes the entire conversation. Autistic people have been speaking, writing, scripting, stimming, resisting, withdrawing, and rebuilding for generations. Not to be inspirational. Not to be cured. But to be heard. To be included. To be allowed to exist as we are. And if we’re willing to listen—not just to our symptoms, but to our meanings—then maybe we can begin to see autism not as a deviation from the norm, but as an invitation to imagine something better.
I know these are complicated conversations. I know they make some people uncomfortable—especially those invested in older models or in the authority of scientific frameworks that were never designed to accommodate our realities. But I want to end with a note of gratitude, especially to Lori Hogenkamp. It takes courage to share a hypothesis, to publish early thinking, and to allow those ideas to evolve over time. I’m genuinely glad she did. Because it gave me something to wrestle with, to reflect against, to build from. It gave me the chance to say: yes, and also—not quite. That’s the gift of discourse. It’s how movements grow. It’s how understanding deepens.
This reflection, like everything I write, is not a claim to absolute truth. It’s a gesture of participation. A piece of the wider dialogue. An offering shaped by my particular pattern of living, processing, and surviving. I write not to have the last word, but to keep the conversation alive—for those of us on the edges, in the margins, in the quiet peripheries where important things are still being felt, still being named.
So here it is, one more time: we are not broken. We are the evidence that the system is. And in that evidence, there is not just pain—but the possibility of change.
smoke
sorry