The AutSide Podcast

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.
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

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.
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

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

I supply the life; others claim the authority to explain it. Across womanhood, autism, language, and queerness, I carry the work of correction—and ask what future my children inherit when who we are is treated as up for debate.
I supply the life; someone else is granted the authority to explain it. This Sunday morning, I am thinking about how often that relationship returns across my life—my body, my language, my work, and my queerness—and how lonely it becomes when being the person concerned does not reliably make me the person heard.
I am six feet seven inches tall, athletic, and powerfully built. I am a woman. Yet narrow expectations of womanhood make my body something other people believe they may question. I am autistic and a gestalt processor who struggles mightily with language, working within a system that tolerates my autism whilst largely ignoring the conditions through which speech becomes available. I am queer, living within patriarchal and capitalist arrangements that make recognition conditional upon conformity.
These pressures accumulate in one life. Mine.
The ASHA correspondence gives this relationship a concrete form. I identified discrepancies between claims published about my work and the source cited to support them. The journal reported a review and declared it closed without explaining how those discrepancies were resolved. Its account travels with institutional weight. My correction has to travel with me.
I do not “identify as” autistic, queer, or a woman. I am. When I speak, I am telling you who is here. Yet finding the words does not guarantee that anyone will allow them to change their understanding.
I am getting older, and I worry about the future my children inherit: whose needs will shape support, whose testimony will matter, and how much life they will spend defending their existence.
Self-knowledge cannot perform all the work of belonging. I need others willing to listen, revise their assumptions, and share the labour of understanding. When my life exceeds the norm, there must be room for the norm to change.
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