Training in Public: Why I Write So Much

On Writing as Preparation, Autism as Translation, and the Hidden Labour Behind Seeming Fluent.

Why I write so much: not for flair, but survival. Writing is my training—my bridge between worlds. This is how I prepare, as an autistic GLP, to show up fluent in a language that never came free.

Sunday Musings: That One Training Day

It was a simple graphic. You might have seen it before. Two timelines stacked one atop the other. The first shows the life of a professional athlete: alternating blocks of teal and rust red. Teal is for training, red is for performance. The rhythm is visible, almost musical. Train, train, train, perform. Train, train, train, perform.

Below it, another row. This time, the line is almost entirely red. Just a sliver of teal near the end, labelled wryly: “that one training day.” This is corporate life. Or at least, how it’s come to be caricatured—endless performance, no preparation.

The caption didn’t mention education. Or neurodivergence. Or writing. But I saw myself in it immediately, layered and refracted through multiple lenses. It was like holding a mirror up to a mirror, and seeing the long corridor of my days stretch out before me. Because what that image captured, inadvertently, was not just the nature of modern work, but the impossible architecture of autistic professionalism—the kind that relies on illusion, translation, and exhaustion to stay afloat.

People often ask why I write so much. Sometimes the question comes with admiration. More often, it’s tinged with something else—mild disbelief, perhaps, or suspicion. As though the volume of my output is evidence of some obsessive compulsion, or a maladaptive need for control. And maybe there’s some truth to that. But the deeper reason is simpler, and less visible.

I write because it is how I train.

Not in the way one might rehearse a speech or outline a presentation—though I do that too. I mean something more fundamental. Writing is how I locate my thoughts, how I rehearse social meaning, how I translate the contours of my internal world into a language others can hear. My inner language is not English. It is not even verbal. It moves through shapes and echoes, patterns and pulses. Many of my scripts exist first in German, or in Scots Gaelic—not out of preference, but because that is how, where, and when I encountered them. Gestalts are not built in isolation; they arrive whole: language fused with emotion, sensory trace, memory, place. To pull them into English is not simply translation—it is disassembly. And English, for all its ubiquity, often feels like the sewer drain of language: functional, flattening, a vessel that leaks meaning as fast as I pour it in. As I work with my students and their families—many of whom move through Spanish—I’ve begun, slowly and deliberately, building a script library in their language too. Not merely for communication, but for coherence. For reciprocity. For the possibility of meeting one another intact.

English is my third language. Neurotypicality is, arguably, my fifth.

What seems to others like polished clarity—an email crafted with nuance, a comment in a meeting that threads the needle—is almost always the product of hours of unseen labour. The late-night drafting of possible questions. The scrolling of past correspondence to predict tone. The rehearsal of phrases. The imagined branching paths of how a conversation might unfold and what I will say, or not say, if it does. This is the work behind the work. And it is not optional.

Amongst other autistic professionals, particularly those of us who are AuDHD and gestalt language processors, we’ve come to refer to this phenomenon as the “autism tax.” It’s the extra hours we put in to appear competent. The emotional toll of scripting our lives in a language not our own. The delayed costs of navigating professional spaces designed for minds that move differently. We are praised for our poise, our insight, our preparation—without any recognition that the preparation is what keeps us from falling apart.

And this is where the writing comes in. It is not merely expression. It is not a luxury or an afterthought. It is the training that makes performance possible. When I write, I am pre-processing. I am preparing future scripts. I am distilling the ineffable into something holdable—first for me, and then, sometimes, for others.

To many, the volume of writing I produce seems extravagant. Why craft a full written response to an email that could be answered in three lines? Why draft a 2,000-word reflection when a bullet list would suffice? Why document processes, reword scripts, pre-empt objections?

Because this is how I keep myself safe.

I learned this long ago—marooned as a horribly bullied child in a place and space that felt entirely foreign to my being. Not just misunderstood, but fundamentally misread. Language became my shelter, but only in the slow, painstaking way that moss makes a home on stone. I learned to script before I learned to speak freely. To pre-empt harm by rehearsing every possible version of myself that might pass undetected. Safety was never about authenticity—it was about survival. And survival, for me, meant learning to translate the unspeakable into something tolerable to others.

Because when I am under pressure—cornered in a meeting, spoken over, or asked to improvise—I cannot simply call up clarity on demand. Not without cost. Not without consequence. Writing in advance is how I survive in environments that do not accommodate lag. It is how I train for conversations that do not allow silence. It is how I rehearse professionalism in a tongue not my own.

The corporate world, and its parallel in education, often expects us to perform continuously. Preparation is an afterthought. Professional development is superficial. Reflection is a luxury item. You’re expected to execute, adapt, respond—in real time, with poise. There is no training arc. There is only performance. And for people whose communication isn’t linear, whose language arrives in constellations rather than lines, this becomes unsustainable.

So we train ourselves.

We write. We map. We build internal archives of past interactions and scripts. We try to pre-empt not just the question, but the tone. We learn how to seem competent by becoming linguists of our own delay. And the more fluent we appear, the more invisible the labour becomes.

This is part of the paradox. When I speak well, people assume I am neurotypical. When I write fluidly, they assume it was easy. When I advocate clearly, they assume I am fine. They do not see the quiet mornings spent writing dialogue for a conversation that might never happen. They do not see the myriad drafts I went through to make the point that landed in one neat paragraph. They do not see the inner negotiation between sensory overload and verbal response, between emotional knowing and linguistic translation.

But this is the reality for many of us. We are fluent only because we’ve trained. And we’ve trained only because we’ve had to.

When I think about the graphic again, I don’t just see the absurdity of “that one training day.” I see the collective exhaustion of people performing without pause. I see the consequences of systems that reward output but punish process. I see colleagues, autistic and otherwise, burning out not because they don’t care, but because they’ve never been given time to prepare for the care they’re expected to give.

What would it mean to flip the model? To build workplaces—and schools—where training isn’t an indulgence, but an integrated part of the cycle? What if we treated reflection, scripting, rehearsal, and silence not as signs of weakness or delay, but as essential forms of professional intelligence?

What if we built in more teal?

I don’t know what that world would look like yet. But I imagine it would be quieter. Slower. More humane. A place where writing wasn’t seen as extra, but as necessary. A place where autistic professionals weren’t applauded for how well they hide the work, but supported in making that work sustainable. A place where training wasn’t relegated to the margins, but honoured as the centre.

Until then, I write.

Not because I have time. Not because I’m especially disciplined. But because I am always training—for meetings, for misunderstandings, for moments when I will need to speak aloud what my body already knows. I write because it is how I build the bridge between the world I carry inside and the world I am asked to serve.

And if that bridge looks polished, sturdy, even elegant from the outside—it is only because every stone was laid by hand, in the quiet, long before I was called upon to cross it. The truth is, I’ve trained like this before. Seventy-seven podiums, four championships—it didn’t happen by luck or instinct. It happened because I showed up, over and over, even when no one was watching. And if I am to call myself a professional now—as a teacher, a case manager, a builder of access—I train no less often. The arena has changed. The discipline has not.