The AutSide Podcast

What if support succeeds so well that it becomes invisible? A conversation on autism, GLPs, assessment, adulthood, Kairos and Kronos, and why affirming practice begins not with labels, but with ecology.
This week’s conversation with Cathy began with a deceptively simple question: what does it actually mean to be neurodiversity affirming? The longer we talked, the less interested I became in labels and declarations and the more interested I became in environments. The discussion moved through diagnosis, assessment, education, adulthood, accommodation, and support, but a deeper thread kept returning. What happens when we mistake adaptation to an environment for evidence about the person? What happens when success inside a supportive ecology becomes justification for removing the very supports that made success possible?
One of the first questions we explored was who gets included when people talk about neurodiversity-affirming practice. Too often, a narrow slice of autistic experience becomes the template against which all other autistic experiences are measured. Autistic women, autistic people of colour, those who were socialised female, late-diagnosed adults, and those whose presentations do not match traditional expectations frequently report that they do not see themselves reflected in professional discourse. Before we can claim to affirm a population, we must first understand who that population actually contains. Inclusion is not a slogan. It is a methodological question.
We also spent time discussing evidence and what counts as evidence. Contemporary practice often privileges randomised controlled trials and standardised measures as the highest form of knowledge. Yet much of the evidence professionals claim to seek already exists inside the diagnostic records, educational assessments, and lived experiences of autistic people themselves. The issue is often not a lack of evidence but a failure to recognise what the evidence is already telling us. If autistic people repeatedly describe the same patterns of language, communication, sensory experience, burnout, and adaptation, perhaps the problem is not that the evidence is absent. Perhaps the problem is that we have trained ourselves not to see it.
A recurring theme throughout the conversation was adulthood. Much of the professional literature seems to stop at childhood, as though autistic lives reach some natural conclusion once formal schooling ends. Yet adulthood is where many of the most important questions begin. What happens when someone develops access to language decades later? What happens when services end at twenty-two but support needs remain? What happens when a person spends most of their life without the words required to explain their own experience? These are not edge cases. They are central questions that remain largely unaddressed.
The conversation also returned repeatedly to the distinction between Kairos and Kronos. Kronos is clock time, industrial time, curriculum pacing guides, assessment schedules, deadlines, transition timelines, and age-based service cut-offs. Kairos is ripening time. It is the time required for understanding to emerge, for language to arrive, for learning to take root. Much of modern education assumes that all learners move according to Kronos. Many autistic people experience something very different. The question becomes whether our systems are designed to support learning itself or merely compliance with a timetable.
Perhaps the clearest example of this tension emerged when I described requesting professional development materials in advance from my own school district. As an autistic educator and gestalt language processor, advance access allows me to prepare language, reduce cognitive load, and participate more fully. The request was denied. This was not a story about a hostile institution openly rejecting neurodiversity. It was a story about an institution that publicly describes itself as affirming whilst failing to recognise accommodation needs when they appear directly in front of it. The gap between affirming language and affirming practice remains one of the most significant challenges facing our field.
Underlying all of these discussions was a pattern that appears repeatedly across education, therapy, and support services. A student receives an accommodation and begins to succeed. The accommodation is removed because success is interpreted as evidence that it is no longer needed. An autistic adult develops effective scripts and communication strategies. Their support needs are questioned because those strategies are working. A person survives a hostile environment and is told they no longer require assistance because they appear capable. Again and again, the support itself becomes invisible. The very thing that enables success is used as proof that support was unnecessary all along.
By the end of the conversation, I found myself returning to a simple conclusion. Neurodiversity-affirming practice is not a credential, a badge, or a marketing statement. It begins with understanding. It requires listening to the people whose lives are being discussed. It asks us to consider not only the individual but the ecology in which that individual exists. Most importantly, it asks us to stop treating successful accommodation as evidence that accommodation can be removed. The goal is not merely to help people survive the environments they find themselves in. The goal is to build environments where they can genuinely flourish.
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Mathematics was born inside stories of trade, navigation, building, and survival. This talk explores how story creates meaning, why GLP learners need scripts before symbols, and what happens when education forgets both.
This talk was not planned.
At least, not in the way most talks are planned.
I am currently approaching the end of a long writing cycle. The Whole of It as Accommodation is nearing release in it’s print form—the chapters have been coming for a few weeks now here on the AutSide. The Story of Math has been quietly developing in the background for months. My largest project, So You Think Differently (aka, the GLP Field Guide), continues to assemble itself piece by piece, finding its shape in the spaces between articles, conversations, classrooms, and lived experience. Like many of my projects, none of these emerged from a linear plan. They emerged from coherence. From patterns gradually gathering enough weight that they eventually demanded attention.
Then this script arrived.
Born from a diagram about inevitability and irreversibility. About how potential becomes structure through passage. About how some ideas spend a long time exerting pressure before they finally emerge into the world.
And suddenly a thread I had been carrying for years moved to the front of the queue.
Perhaps that is fitting. It is the end of another school year. The point in the cycle where teachers begin looking backwards and forwards at the same time. Grades have been submitted. IEPs have been written. Graduates will soon cross the stage. The noise begins to recede and larger patterns become visible. What worked? What failed? What did students actually carry away? What remains after the assessments, the pacing guides, the benchmarks, and the compliance requirements have passed?
For me, one question keeps returning.
Why do so many intelligent students come to believe they are incapable of mathematical thought?
This talk is an attempt to follow that question wherever it leads.
Along the way we will visit Babylonian merchants, Polynesian navigators, Scottish stonemasons, and the House of Wisdom in Baghdad. We will explore rhetorical algebra, gestalt language processing, the role of story in human cognition, and a metaphor I have come to think of, the Script Garden. We will ask what happens when knowledge becomes detached from meaning, why so many autistic, AuDHD, and gestalt-processing learners struggle in systems built around fragments rather than wholes, and whether some of the solutions we seek may have been hiding in plain sight for centuries.
At its heart, however, this is not really a talk about mathematics.
It is a talk about meaning.
About how human beings transform uncertainty into understanding.
About the stories that carried knowledge across generations long before there were textbooks.
About what happens when those stories disappear.
And about why I increasingly suspect that many of our educational problems begin not with the learners, but with the removal of the narrative structures that once allowed learning to take root.
This talk sits at an interesting intersection of my work. It draws from my experiences as an autistic gestalt language processor, a special education teacher, a writer, a historian of ideas, and someone who has spent years trying to understand why some forms of knowledge seem to come alive while others remain inert. It is also, perhaps, a glimpse into where The Story of Math and So You Think Differently may eventually meet.
Sometimes an idea arrives quietly.
Sometimes it spends years gathering coherence.
And sometimes, at the end of a school year, it simply refuses to wait any longer.
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Today’s digression argues that establishing inclusive educational environments requires moving beyond simple classroom adjustments toward true partnership between teachers, students, and families. Author of the source article, Dr. Jaime Hoerricks, highlights how systemic inequities, such as underfunding and the lack of affordable housing for educators, prevent teachers from building deep roots within their school communities. She also emphasises that marginalised voices, particularly from the LGBTQIA+ and disabled communities, must be centred to transform school culture from one of compliance to one of mutual respect and safety. Challenges like standardised testing and institutional resistance are identified as major hurdles that stifle the flexibility needed for authentic collaboration. To overcome these barriers, she suggests co-creating curricula and prioritising relational trust over rigid mandates. Ultimately, she presents a vision where education is a collaborative act of resistance that affirms the humanity of every participant.
Here’s the link to the source article:
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

After evacuation warnings during a California wildfire, I reflect on recursive memory, autistic overwhelm, voice notes as survival infrastructure, and why assistive technology is not cheating but a way back to coherence.
The strange thing about catastrophe is that the body often understands it before the mind does. The alarms go off. The mobiles erupt. The message arrives in the flat administrative language of modern emergency systems—leave now, no one is coming for you—and suddenly the ordinary world collapses into triage. Not abstractly. Materially. Which objects. Which documents. Which memories. Which living beings. And because my daughter and I are both autistic gestalt processors, the panic does not arrive in neat linear thoughts. It arrives as flooding. Twenty nows at once. The fire approaching the house. The plushies on the bed. My grandmother’s voice. The smell of chaparral smoke. The possibility that entire emotional geographies could vanish in an afternoon.
And even after the danger shifts—the wind changes, the fire stalls, the house remains standing—the nervous system does not recognise chronology as resolution. This is the part I keep trying to explain. For me, “now” is never singular. The evacuation is still happening whilst I am talking about it. The terror keeps arriving recursively through objects, rooms, smells, fragments of sound. That is part of why I use voice notes the way I do. Not because I am trying to produce polished speech, but because speech itself becomes flotation. I ramble into the phone because the alternative is drowning in simultaneous signal. There are no scripts for this kind of overwhelm. Only release valves.
And that is where the conversation unexpectedly turned toward technology and writing and AI and all the strange moral panic surrounding assistance. Because when I am driving up the mountain in absolute terror, speaking into my phone in fragments, repetitions, associative leaps, emotional collisions—those notes make no sense to most people. But when I feed them into NotebookLM (Gemini), the system can separate the threads. Not replace my voice. Find it. Pull apart the different nows long enough that I can actually work with them. And I do not experience that as cheating any more than I experienced crutches as cheating when my knee was destroyed, or calculators as cheating when richer children had access to tools my family could not afford. Infrastructure is not fraud. Accommodation is not fraud. Support is not fraud.
What sits underneath so much of the suspicion toward autistic communication is the demand that legitimacy must appear in approved formats before it counts as real. My daughter saying “enoughness” communicates something immediately and precisely to the people who know her. But outside relationship, outside attunement, the word becomes unintelligible noise. The same thing happens with echolalia, recursive speech, spelling, flooding, associative connection, non-linear storytelling. Systems trained to recognise only compressed linear output often cannot perceive communication that arrives globally first and sequentially later. And then the failure of recognition gets projected back onto the autistic person as deficit.
At the same time, I keep thinking about how much of human communication has always been collective and recombinant. Mentor texts. Grandmothers. Public speaking coaches. Books read aloud in childhood. Substack writers feeding each other language across oceans without ever directly speaking. We absorb phrases, rhythms, gestures, atmospheres. We metabolise them. Reconfigure them. Return them changed. That is not artificiality. That is culture. That is how language itself survives. My writing exists because thousands of voices accumulated inside me before I had the literacy to unlock them. And when literacy finally arrived, all those stored scripts flooded forward at once.
So much of this conversation was really about recognition. About who gets granted humanity when their communication does not conform to institutional expectations. About what happens during crisis when the polished adult performance falls away and cognition reveals its actual architecture. And perhaps that is why I am still shaken. Because the fire did not just threaten the house. It exposed how fragile legitimacy becomes when the systems around you only recognise one narrow way of being coherent.
Here’s the link to the article we discussed:
Let us know what you think.
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In today’s episode, a cross over piece from Sensual Residue, Dr. Jaime Hoerricks examines how consent is often ignored in both social and educational settings by drawing parallels between a coercive encounter at a club and the academic pressures placed on autistic children. She describes witnessing a woman’s subtle physical withdrawal being dismissed by a partner, much like how an autistic child’s lack of interest in traditional reading is frequently reframed as a deficit rather than a valid boundary. Dr. Hoerricks argues that systemic insistence on compliance often disguises itself as care, effectively silencing an individual’s “no” in favor of a predetermined goal. Ultimately, she advocates for epistemic respect, urging practitioners and peers to recognise non-traditional communication as a coherent expression of self rather than a problem to be solved. This transition from enforced participation to genuine attunement is presented as the only ethical way to foster true connection and learning.
Here’s the link to the source article: https://open.substack.com/pub/sensualresidue/p/the-shape-of-a-no
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