A dawn reflection on why this next turn is not a detour but a continuation—moving from collapse, precarity, and autistic futurity into the hostile “simple questions” that demand impossible answers from gestalt minds.
This morning’s video sits in that strange in-between place—the liminal edge between one body of work ending and another beginning. I recorded it at dawn, with rain outside and that particular quiet that sometimes makes truth easier to hear. After the weight of When the Future Won’t Hold, The Collapse of Futurity, and Priced Out of Personhood, I felt the need to pause long enough to explain the turn that comes next—because from the outside, it may look abrupt. From the inside, it is anything but.
April is always difficult for me. “Autism awareness” season tends to bring a flood of flattened narratives, market-friendly scripts, and social media performances that describe autistic life in ways that may be true for someone, somewhere, but rarely hold the full weather system. And for gestalt processors in particular, so much of what gets circulated still misses the interiority. It notices the structure, perhaps. It offers scaffolds. But it does not always capture what it feels like to live inside the arrival of language, panic, context, memory, and meaning all at once. That gap—between representation and reality—has been pressing on me all month.
The recent series were not separate from that pressure. They were, in many ways, my answer to it. I wanted to name what so many of us are living under: not simply the emotional experience of uncertainty, but the material conditions that make futurity collapse in the first place. For many autistic people, the future is not something we fail to imagine because we are deficient. It is something structurally withheld. Some are made palatable enough to be folded into capital on acceptable terms. Others are left in precarity, made legible only as surplus, burden, or reserve labour. I know that terrain personally. I’ve lived too close to the edge not to recognise it.
And that is precisely why the next turn matters. The coming pieces move toward those so-called “simple questions”—the what, the why, the favourite colour, the seemingly harmless prompts that so often function as tiny gates of legibility. I want to write from inside the weather system of those moments: what it means to be asked for a clean, linear answer when your mind is anchoring in five-dimensional space; what it means when the person asking does not really mean the words they have used; what happens in the body when language arrives as field before part. This next arc is still autotheory. It is still autoethnography. But it is also about the politics of being forced to translate yourself for systems that mistake simplification for truth.
There is no disconnect between these themes. Employment, therapy, education, diagnosis, interviews, institutional life—so much of modern survival depends on answering hostile questions in acceptable forms. Every autistic person trying to stay employed is haunted by the possibility of losing that tenuous foothold. Every autistic person shut out of work is haunted by the machinery required to get back in. This next series sits exactly at that threshold. I am not offering neat solutions. I am offering mirrors, windows, and language for an experience too often misread as confusion when it is, in fact, an encounter with systems that demand a false kind of coherence.
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Ireland