A rich chat with Cathy on my new paper, category error, echolalia as meaning, and the lifelong cost of being misread. We also touched on The AutSide as script library—and ended with an invitation to her new podcast.
This morning’s chat with Cathy felt like a warm, generous pause inside a very full week—a chance not just to mark the publication of my new journal article, When Delay Is Category Error: Gestalt Processing and Misreading Autistic Development, but to name what the piece is really trying to do. We spent time unpacking the phrase category error in grounded, practical terms: what happens when a system uses the wrong tools, the wrong assumptions, or the wrong frame, and then mistakes that mismatch for defect. I found myself reaching for the everyday analogies that make the point plain—a mechanic using the wrong tools, a market that was never built for certain bodies, an assessment battery that was never normed for minds like mine. The through-line was simple: too often, autistic and gestalt-oriented people are not being read incorrectly because we are incoherent, but because the instruments were never fit for purpose in the first place.
From there, the conversation moved into language—especially the way scripted or echolalic communication is so often dismissed as empty, rote, or non-communicative when, in fact, it may be densely meaningful. Cathy spoke beautifully about what changes when someone gets curious instead of dismissive: when a repeated phrase is treated not as noise, but as signal. That opened a rich exchange about how behaviourist and functionalist models still shape so much of speech and language practice, reducing communication to an input-output machine. I found myself naming how often the real question is never asked: what does this mean? Not in the narrow sense of literal correspondence, but in the deeper sense of function, pattern, power, and threat. That is where the PTMF keeps returning for me—not as an abstraction, but as a way of understanding why a child might flee into a bathroom request, a script, or a familiar phrase under pressure. The issue is rarely refusal. More often, it is response to threat in a system that has mistaken escalation for readiness.
What I appreciated most is that we were able to widen the frame beyond child language alone. We touched on motor planning, developmental timing, the false siloing of autistic traits into separate therapies, and the lifelong cost of being continuously misread. I spoke a bit about my own body—being labelled clumsy, struggling in sports that others assumed should come naturally, and later finding out that what looked chaotic from the outside was often just a different route to coherence. We also landed, as we often do, on the role of my writing itself. The AutSide came up not just as a publication, but as a kind of external script library—a place where I can park long-form meaning so it doesn’t vanish under the demand for immediate speech. That felt important. It named something true about why I write the way I do, and why the long form is not indulgence for me, but access.
And then, in the loveliest turn, Cathy invited me to be a guest on her new podcast, Gimme Five. I was genuinely delighted—and immensely flattered. It felt like a natural extension of the conversation we’ve been building across these weeks: themes folding back into one another, each chat opening onto the next. There was something quietly affirming in the way the conversation ended—not with closure, exactly, but with continuity. The paper is out in the world now. The book is still coming. And the work, as ever, keeps weaving.
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Ireland