The AutSide Podcast

I came to functional literacy in my late thirties. Now I can write about how meaning becomes words, what phonics can do in a learner’s hands, and who gets to decide what counts as knowledge about minds like mine. Come on in.
I keep trying to write a book, and the book keeps developing another side. In this recording, I begin with So You Think Differently, the perpetually developing outline for my field guide to gestalt minds and still one of the most popular pieces on The AutSide. It’s a map you can enter from several directions, which seems fitting for a book about a mind that comes to know things by returning to them.
Then I turn to The Speed of Dark, which began when Cathy sent me seven perfectly reasonable questions and I came back with seven essays. Some people would have sent bullet points. I needed time to find words for what had already arrived whole, and the writing let me discover how much of what I knew was still waiting for a way to be said.
Those two collections are open and free to read. Follow the links and you’ll find millions of words across more than four years of scholarship. There’s no journal route through which I could have published that body of work on the timescale of the conversations that gave rise to it. On The AutSide, somebody can question a claim, send me a source, or tell me where my account loses them, and I can follow that correction whilst we’re still talking about the thing itself. You can disagree with me for free. I consider that quite a generous subscription tier.
Then there’s phonics. In Phonics, If You Must, I answer a practical question about when I’d introduce it to a gestalt language processor and what I’d actually do. In Resistant, Non-Compliant, Whole, I ask what happens when the same tool becomes a gate a child has to pass through before they can get on with their peers. There’s a history to the authority of parts-first teaching in the Global North, and it helps explain how a system can get very good at recording what a child does on cue whilst overlooking what that child is already doing with language.
And then, a wee quarter turn into Breaking News. I have a bit of fun with the conferences and professional bodies that can find room for an autistic person’s story on the programme and still reserve the right to tell the room what it meant. When we say you’ve misdescribed what happened, can we change the account? Can we change the practice? There is, alas, no billing code for understanding.
I’ve been writing in this space for more than four years. I’ve been living in it my entire life. I came to functional literacy in my late thirties, and it took longer still for writing to become something I could use as I do now. I have words I can use to speak up for myself, and to stand alongside spellers, non-speakers, and other gestalt language processors when their ways of communicating are called into question. It took me a lifetime to get to these words. They’re mine. And I’m using them.
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What might happen when a wee school teacher reaches back through time to create the education she would have needed when she was a wee school girl?
That is the question behind The Mathematics That Was Allowed to Become Meaning, my latest Sensual Residue series.
I began with an imagined classroom. One where an autistic child did not have to fail before someone recognised that her way of making meaning might be different. Where silence was not mistaken for ignorance, and belonging was not something earned through compliance.
Then I followed that child through seven years of mathematics.
In Grade 6, she discovers numbers in shared bread, measurement, and rhythm. In Grade 7, equivalence offers something trustworthy: the pieces can change without losing the relationship. In Grade 8, she watches water rise and discovers that slope gives a name to something she already recognises.
Algebra becomes a language rather than a barrier. Geometry becomes a place where someone takes her unfinished thinking seriously enough to help her prove it. Complexity brings uncertainty, but not the familiar terror of having missed something.
And by Grade 12, standing before slope and the derivative, she recognises the relationship connecting them.
The mathematics remembers her.
The accompanying presentation follows a blue thread through these years: wonder, trust, recognition, ownership, being understood, courage, and agency. Eventually, the thread leaves the classroom altogether.
An adult stands in a garden, working out measurements and quantities. No examination. No rubric. Just a familiar mathematical relationship appearing in an unfamiliar place.
I cannot give my younger self that education. There is grief in imagining what might have been different.
But I can teach. I can write. And I can imagine something better for the children who come after me.
Perhaps the most enduring lesson is not a formula at all.
No child should have to learn to fear her own way of understanding in order to learn mathematics.
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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 episode, our virtual hosts outline a series of articles by Dr. Jaime Hoerricks investigating why many students struggle with advanced mathematics despite successfully passing foundational courses. Her essays distinguish between genuine mathematical understanding, the mathematical language used for representation, and the mathematical performance required by schools. She argues that traditional instruction often teaches students to memorise symbols and execute procedures without grasping the underlying relationships and quantities. By examining maths progression from early counting to calculus, she highlights the challenges faced by gestalt language processors who learn wholes before parts. Ultimately, her series of essays challenge educators to ensure that passing grades reflect true conceptual comprehension rather than merely the ability to mimic classroom tasks.
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

I didnae need the words to be who I was. I needed the words to make what I had already lived available to language—and, eventually, to other people. I have been thinking about this quite a lot lately, particularly as we approach the US midterm elections, when so much of my ordinary existence—my gender, my sexuality, my neurodivergence, my place in education and public life—somehow becomes a matter for political discussion. There is something deeply unsettling about watching strangers debate who you are, especially when they seem more interested in their account of you than in the person actually living the life.
I am fifty-six years old. I grew up and became an adult before much of the language I now use to describe myself was available to me. Trans. Queer. Pan. AuDHD. Gestalt language processor. These words have different histories, and some existed long before I encountered them, but none was available to me in the ways I can use them now. Yet the experiences were already there. The attractions, the longings, the ways of knowing, the sensory relationships, the gendered experiences that I could neither explain nor safely express. I lived the life before I found the language to describe it.
And this creates a peculiar difficulty when people who knew me years ago encounter more of me now. They remember someone. They have stories, impressions, and an understanding of who I was. But what they knew was the portion of me that could become available under the conditions of that earlier time—the language I possessed, the safety I had, the capacities I had developed, and the expectations I was trying to survive. Sometimes people are surprised. Sometimes they are delighted. And sometimes they insist that their memory of me is more authoritative than my account of myself. But you weren’t like that before. Perhaps what you mean is that you didn’t know.
There is a deeper question here about what has to happen for meaning to become language. As an autistic gestalt processor, I know that meaning does not always arrive in the tidy sequence our educational and clinical frameworks expect. Sometimes the whole of an experience is present long before its components become accessible. Sometimes the words arrive without the meaning. Sometimes the meaning has been accumulating for decades, waiting for enough language, time, and safety to become communicable. And sometimes, even after we find the words, the people listening are unwilling to revise what they thought they knew.
None of this means I have remained unchanged. I have grown, matured, loved, learned, developed new capacities, and become able to inhabit my life in ways that were not possible when I was younger. Coming out changed my life, but it did not create me. Nor am I claiming that my experience is universal. I am an n of one—a person whose development, language acquisition, and opportunities for recognition have unfolded under particular historical and personal conditions. But an n of one is still a life, and that life may reveal something about the limitations of the categories through which we interpret other people.
In this week’s Sunday Morning Musings, I am inviting you to consider the difference between knowing someone and knowing the version of them that was available to you. The words may arrive late. Recognition may arrive later still. And the person standing before you may exceed everything you thought you knew about them. I am not unchanged. But neither did I begin when you first became able to recognise me. So, rather than asking me to fit the image you have carried, perhaps we might begin somewhere else.
Let’s meet the whole of me.
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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

Cathy and I explore the distance between understanding and having the words available, following a thread through forensic science, the Script Garden, and maths—with fresh bread giving fractions somewhere meaningful to land.
Cathy and I finally managed to sit down for another chat after a few weeks away, and we covered rather a lot of ground: language, learning, forensic science, calculus, and fresh bread. There is usually a thread. Sometimes it takes us a wee while to find out how much is attached to it.
We began with something that can be difficult to explain when you write and speak professionally: having language does not mean having the words available for every situation. I can lecture on a familiar subject and still encounter a moment for which I have no usable response. There is always more growing to do in the Script Garden.
I also talked about how my writing happens. Something sets off a flood of connections, I talk into my voice notes, and then comes the work of finding the threads and giving them somewhere to live. What eventually appears as a tidy series of essays began as rather a lot happening at once.
That brought us to maths, including Cathy’s account of a young person who can calculate what he needs whilst working in a garage but struggles with the questions presented at school. How do we help someone recognise the relationship between what they already understand and the language an examination expects?
Naturally, I brought bread into it. Making a loaf, sharing it fairly, and eating it together gives fractions and proportions somewhere to land. By the time we introduce the mathematical language, we have something to talk about—and hopefully some olive oil and herbs to go with it.
Cathy later observed that I had her with the bread and lost her with the Xs and Ys, which rather helped demonstrate the point. A lovely morning of conversation, a little silliness, and the question that keeps finding its way into everything I do: what has to happen for meaning to become language?
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