The AutSide Podcast

This video introduces The Wrong Reader—a series on therapy, misreading, and autistic jeopardy. Not content, but script garden: a warning, an offering, and a record from inside the weather system of being read wrong.
This morning’s video is less a conventional introduction than a threshold note—a quarter turn before the next doorway opens. I begin by thanking the many new readers and listeners who have found their way here, and by naming how much it matters when someone doesn’t simply consume the work, but recognises themselves in it. Those moments of resonance matter to me because they confirm what I have long suspected: that what so often gets treated as idiosyncratic or excessive in autistic, gestalt, or otherwise marginalised lives is often shared—just rarely named aloud.
From there, I make something plain that feels increasingly important to say in a culture that flattens everything into “content.” The AutSide and Sensual Residue are not content pipelines. They are not engineered for clicks, virality, or market logic. They are, for me, a kind of externalised script garden—a place where delayed understanding can land safely when it finally arrives. As a gestalt processor with significant support needs around language, I often do not have the answer in the moment. Sometimes the answer comes the next day, or the next week, or much later. Writing is how I preserve what would otherwise be lost. The archive is not branding. It is accommodation, memory, and survival.
The heart of the video is an introduction to the new series, The Wrong Reader. I explain that this series emerges from a deeply personal and politically charged question: what happens when an autistic gestalt mind enters therapy and is misread from the start? I reflect on the profound risks built into that first encounter—especially when seemingly simple questions like How do you feel right now? are anything but simple for someone living inside layered time, multiple simultaneous “nows,” somatic memory, and delayed linguistic processing. What is framed as a neutral intake can quickly become a site of surveillance, misclassification, coercion, or even legal jeopardy.
I also name the deeper problem: therapy is never just a private room between two people. It is shaped by professional training, diagnostic assumptions, institutional liability, mandated reporting structures, and increasingly by the logic of private capital. A clinician may present as affirming, but if they do not understand gestalt processing, autistic cognition, or the cultural and bodily realities I carry into the room, then the “fit” may already be broken before the conversation even begins. This new series sits inside that tension. It asks what it means to seek care in systems built to read quickly, categorise prematurely, and default to the limits of their own frameworks.
Throughout the video, I frame the series as both warning and offering. It is heavy, honest, and at times painful. It draws on my own therapeutic history, including moments of being read incorrectly, funnelled toward the wrong interventions, or treated through models that were never designed for minds like mine. But it is also meant to function as a script garden for others—for my children, for autistic readers, for anyone who has ever walked into a room needing help and realised too late that the room did not know how to read them. If the system insists on first contact without scripts, then part of what I am building here is a way to enter with some.
I also reflect on form. I explain why there will be no AI-generated summaries for this series, why the poems will be narrated but the pieces themselves allowed to stand whole, and why I continue to distrust tools that impose guardrails where nuance, tenderness, or danger need to remain intact. The series is written from inside the weather system, not from outside it. It is autotheory and autoethnography in the strongest sense: not a detached commentary on autistic life, but a record from within the storm itself.
By the end, I return to gratitude—but with clarity. I thank readers and subscribers sincerely, and I name the material truth that their support has sometimes paid for groceries, equipment, and the practical conditions that make this work possible. But I also insist, gently and firmly, that this is not a business machine. There is no content team, no strategy apparatus, no polished funnel. There is just me—writing, recording, preserving, and leaving behind what I may one day need again. The video itself becomes part of that archive: not a performance, but another script left in the garden.


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Today’s episode examines how societal institutions utilise simplified questioning as a method of systemic control. The author of the source article, Dr. Jaime Hoerricks, argues that schools and workplaces prioritise compressed, rapid responses to make individuals easier to manage and categorise. By shifting the focus from personal experience to structural critique, her writing explores how the pressure to be concise can be a form of institutional erasure. Dr. Hoerricks suggests that resisting these narrow demands is a political act that challenges the way systems demand legibility. Ultimately, her article serves as an invitation for readers to recognise how their internal struggles are often shaped by external power dynamics.
Here’s the link to the source article: https://open.substack.com/pub/autside/p/wh-questions-and-the-cost-of-compression-4bb
Let me know what you think.
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This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit autside.substack.com/subscribe

In today’s chat with Cathy, we circled a familiar truth: for many autistic GLPs, the whole arrives before the parts. Recognition often begins in resonance, memory, and misreading—long before language catches up.
Here’s the link to my support script that I mentioned in the video.
Today’s conversation with Cathy ended up circling a truth I keep returning to: for many autistic, gestalt-oriented adults, understanding does not begin with explanation. It begins with contact. With pressure. With the felt whole of a thing arriving before any clean language for it exists. Cathy had asked me for “five things,” and what arrived in me was not five tidy bullet points but an entire weather front: a long support script, multiple related pieces, and the familiar flooding that happens when a prompt lands in the field and starts organising itself below conscious language. That became the first living example of the point itself. The whole comes first. Only later can the parts be pulled out.
From there, we talked about what it means to feel information before you can parse it. Not just language, but rooms, people, classrooms, requests, emotional tone, sensory charge—the entire ecology of a moment. I tried to name how a request, a classroom, or even a person can arrive already carrying every prior encounter, every stored pattern, every earlier strain or safety signal, all at once. Cathy kept returning to something she heard clearly in the support piece: that for many of us, the feel of a thing matters before the words do, and often more than the words do. That led us into a deeper conversation about trust—learning, especially later in life, to trust the body’s recognition when the official language arrives late or not at all.
A central thread was adult recognition. We spoke about how so many late-identified autistic and gestalt-oriented adults first encounter themselves not through diagnostic language, but through their children. A parent comes in trying to understand why their child is being misunderstood at school or in therapy, and suddenly realises—often with a kind of shock—that the architecture being described is their own. That felt important. Recognition often precedes vocabulary. People do not necessarily begin with the label. They begin with resonance. With the strange relief of finding a rhythm, an archive, or a body of language that feels like home before they yet know why.
We also touched the danger of frameworks that can only see gestalt processing in children. These children grow up. They become adults, colleagues, parents, writers, teachers, and late-identified survivors of educational and clinical misreading. If a model can only recognise the architecture in a clinic-room child, then it is not simply incomplete—it is mistaking a lifespan orientation for a temporary developmental anomaly. That was one of the strongest undercurrents of the conversation for me: the adults matter, not as an afterthought, but as evidence. The younglings become us.
Memory and recursion came in too, which felt especially alive. Cathy reflected back something she has noticed in my work: that my thinking, writing, and remembering do not move in neat sequence. They loop, recur, return, and gather. That opened the door for me to talk about writing—and Substack in particular—not simply as output, but as storage. As script. As a practical support for a nervous system that needs to place things somewhere stable enough to come back to later. Not a tidy archive in the institutional sense, but a script garden. A field of returns. A place where coherence can remain visible long enough to be recognised.
We also grounded the conversation in classroom life, which mattered to me. I spoke about being misread as “gifted” in childhood because I could draw, whilst what was actually happening was that image and pattern were carrying cognition before language could. Cathy made an important distinction there: that some children think in pictures, some in words, and some in both—but what matters is that schools and adults stop assuming only one valid route to meaning. That felt like a gentle but important bridge between lived autistic experience and educational practice. If we only honour the children who can show understanding in sanctioned forms, we will keep missing the actual architecture of learning.
What I appreciated most was that the conversation did not flatten into tips or diagnostics. It stayed with the deeper pattern: that whole-to-part is not just a speech profile in children. It is often a lifespan orientation. It shows up in how we read, how we remember, how we recognise ourselves, how we learn, how we write, how we return to unfinished meaning until it becomes speakable. The children in the caseload are not the only place this architecture lives. The adults are still doing it. We are doing it when we circle a truth for years before the right phrase lands. We are doing it when a book rotates a field we were already carrying. We are doing it when language arrives late, but true.
The AutSide is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber.



This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit autside.substack.com/subscribe

Today’s episode introduces a conceptual shift in communication by prioritising the needs of Gestalt Language Processors and others with field-first minds. The author of the source article, Dr. Jaime Hoerricks, advocates for moving away from interrogative extraction toward an atmosphere where truth and inquiry are invited through relationship. By imagining rooms designed for connection rather than compliance, Dr. Hoerricks challenges traditional styles of questioning that can feel restrictive or harmful. Readers are encouraged to engage with these alternative possibilities gently, acknowledging the emotional weight of past exclusionary experiences. Ultimately, her article serves as a visionary guide for creating more inclusive and supportive spaces for diverse cognitive styles.
Here’s the link to the source article: https://open.substack.com/pub/autside/p/wh-questions-and-the-cost-of-compression-05c
Let me know what you think.
The AutSide is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber.



This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit autside.substack.com/subscribe

Today’s episode introduces an exploration into the social scripts and linguistic rituals that often mask the true internal experiences of neurodivergent individuals. The author of the source article, Dr. Jaime Hoerricks, examines how common inquiries like "How are you?" frequently prioritise social convenience over genuine emotional connection. Through the lens of masking and alexithymia, her article addresses the exhaustion that comes from performing emotional fluency to satisfy societal expectations. It serves as an invitation for readers to reflect on the emotional labor of appearing "fine" when they are actually struggling. Ultimately, her writing offers a gentle space for those who have historically used scripts as a survival mechanism to prioritise their own nervous system over performance.
Here’s the link to the source article: https://open.substack.com/pub/autside/p/wh-questions-and-the-cost-of-compression-4c3
Let me know what you think.
The AutSide is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber.



This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit autside.substack.com/subscribe