Recently I asked a published author what writing a short story is like.

If that seems like an odd question, you should know that I can’t write fiction. I’ve tried — oh I’ve tried — but it’s like squeezing the last toothpaste from the tube.

She said a story idea usually starts with a scene that she feels compelled to write down. Sometimes the meaning or significance is clear at once; sometimes it comes out in the writing. What if that first inspiration never appears? I explained my past struggles. She told me about the concept of “useful limits”: erecting a few constraints can paradoxically unstick creative writing.

I’ve long known that my fiction bone is missing — yet I’m always eager to try a new tactic, hoping I’ll prove myself wrong. I have plenty of conceptual ideas, that’s not a problem. A few months ago at dinner with a comedy writer who’s sold a script to Netflix, I relayed an old plot idea for a screenplay. She leaned forward. “Whoa. I’m surprised no one’s done that, it’s great! You should write it.” I told her my problem. “Just do it,” she said. But everything lies in the gap between idea and execution. As for just doing it, I have tried.

More recently I had an idea for a novel. It would be a mock-version of a form I find fascinating: collected remembrances of a complicated artist, a la Recollections of Virginia Woolf By Her Contemporaries (ed. Joan Russell Noble) and Bartók Remembered (ed. Malcolm Gillies). A fragmented bildungsroman that reveals a character through other people’s memories.

After the story writer and I hung up, I set myself a timed exercise. I’d write a brief recollection of a complicated-artist subject from the point of view of a fellow writing student. It would start with this sentence: “I met her at a workshop that no longer exists.” As far as constraints go, I felt these were pretty good.

*

Oh but those 15 minutes were painful. Nothing came on its own; it was all labored pushing. I was scraping the barrel for absolutely anything and naturally turned up only cliches. A group of workshop participants were “New England prep school” types who excluded the narrator with her Southern drawl. Everything was told; nothing shown. The preppers “walked around like they owned the place.” The subject of recollection was “the odd one out.” There needed to a revealing conflict so I had the subject parrot the narrator’s “twangy” accent and everyone laughed.

Look, I know about show-not-tell. I know other things too. I can deconstruct a text into a spear of romaine, a sliver of parmesan, an oily anchovy. I can parse the text’s constituents, see how they relate and how the ratios balance and how the dialectical hits — acid and base, crunchy and soft — merge and conflict. But I can’t make the salad.

Take that “odd one out” trope. How can I show that? This I asked myself while attempting a revision. What details, what actions and reactions, present that implication to the reader? Probably many fiction writers don’t even pose a question like this consciously, intuitively running right past it. For me, scrounging even a single idea was like trying to set a millwheel in motion with a flyswatter.

The end result was awful. I’m not naïve; I don’t expect every first attempt to sound promising. But there was no connecting thread of authenticity, no undercurrent of realism. Imagine a Sims player tackling landscaping: dropping a tree here, flowers there, a bush there — all constructed, all superficial, all arbitrary. There’s nothing organic beneath the effort; no natural logic tying the parts together. And in my case, I think that’s because I had no intuition for the situation I was creating.1

*

Why was this so?

“Fiction writing,” AI tells me, “is basically directed mind-wandering with memory recombination.”

Well there’s an idea. I struggle with autobiographic memory — an understatement of a label, since it entails the failure to recall not just my life memories but also scenes from books I’ve read and films I’ve watched. I can’t even steal inspiration from fictional lives.

“At the neurological level fiction requires two things: the Default Mode Network to generate ideas and the Executive Control Network to organize and connect them.”

It continues: “You’re analytical; probably, your ECN is taking over too soon. Try this: Run a scene mentally for 20 to 30 seconds. The only prompt should be: What happens next? Just visualize it, don’t put it into words. Then write what you remember.”

OK, here goes. I close my eyes. Two people are in my kitchen. Two pale, nongendered adults who — what’s this? — are copies of each other with different colored shirts. They stand. Nothing happens.

I start again, this time outdoors. Anything might transpire outside! The mannequins are now on the sidewalk, and maybe this is interesting: it’s my childhood street. Daytime. Silent, empty. No birds, no cars, no people. Something needs to happen. I make them walk. Time is up. I report back.

“That’s a different failure mode than what I was assuming. You have imagery, but it’s static and non-generative.”

What then?

A new direction: “The fix is not to ‘relax’ or ‘write worse,’” it says, “you need to explicitly supply the missing temporal engine.”

I should start with actions (“she turns”; “he reaches”) instead of scenes, it says, and I should rely on memory recombination because pure invention is hardest for someone like me. Just one problem: my memory shelves are bare.

At this point, I end the experiment. Whether the words I’ve hammered out could be moulded into something passable or not, none of the scenes at any point felt alive to me, including that writing workshop of prep school kids. If it doesn’t even feel alive to the person creating it, what’s the point? The juice — in my case, a cliched collection of college students and synthetic figures staring blankly in a kitchen — was not worth the squeeze.

*

What happens next?

This. I record the experiment; draft up a case study; try to make sense of what I don’t understand through a kind of essay.

We will do what we will do.

Recollections of Geneva Strong By Those Who Knew Her

Angie Martin:

I met her at a workshop that no longer exists. Ten of us gathered at this late summer retreat put on by our college for promising creative writing undergraduates. It was in the Hudson River Valley where I’d never been before at a grand mansion and I was the clear fish out of water. From the deep south and still resisting the urge to say “y’all,” not yet realizing that the point of writing wasn’t to sound like other people but to figure out how you sound yourself. Most of the others were rich liberal types who wore comfortable clothes and flip-flops and walked around like they owned the place.

She was the only other odd one out, and you’d think that would have allied us against the rest but she was so literally odd that I avoided her as if it might rub off. I was already at such a disadvantage in this group that I couldn’t add yet another handicap.

For instance she had this weird habit of impersonating the person she was talking to right in front of them. She’d repeat something back to you not just in words but the way you said it — and then say, yes. Like she never agreed with someone so much. Some people seemed to like it, find it validating or something but it was so goddamn weird.

There was a girl I really liked in the group. Jane. She always smiled at me unlike some of the others, who all seemed to know each other from the New England prep school scene. She was such a cool dresser and I was asking where she got her quilted jacket. It was after dinner one night at the tree stumps, where we’d go before bed. A thrift store, she told me, and she was talking about how it had all these quilted pieces and I told her about my granny who quilts. “She still sews quilts from scratch even in her 80s!” I said. And then Geneva who I didn’t even realize was there bursts out: still sews quilts from scratch in a twangy accent that was her version of the way I talked and then everyone started laughing, even though they didn’t even like her.

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Stay curious,

Laura

If you’ve read Passing from words to matter or The return of the Why mode of thinking, you’ll see echoes.

There was a moment, after writing this third essay, when I realized I was back in the same terrain as the first two. Is that boring? I wondered. Am I the essayist equivalent of a doddering fool, repeating myself? I’m publishing it anyway. I keep returning to the well—because each time I return, the water yields a new taste.

And for those craving a change: I’m working on something as far from these themes as I could imagine. Gender philosophy. (Groan, I know.) Stay tuned...

I heard a song recently. The melody is beautiful; the words seized me. It’s called “Disappearing.”

I’m disappearing again …

The clouds are collecting and moving back in

And I’m disappearing again

I began an essay last year that I never finished. Titled “A House with Many Rooms,” it was about my sense that I contain different personas. Not just different parts of my personality; but fully separate identities.

After diagnosis, I assumed that this long-held sense of containing different identities was connected to the concept of autistic masking. Masking is the idea that autistic people override their natural way of being to fit societal expectations and reduce the friction of interaction. But I found the concept didn’t map perfectly to my disparate identities. The notion of a mask implies falseness, while my various selves have felt both false and real at once. Neither fully one nor the other.

Depending on when and where you encountered me, you might have thought me charismatic, or cold and flat. Silly and loose; a performer of imitations and sayer of nonsense words. Or uncomfortable with spontaneous expression. I’ve been known to dance at a club until 5:30 a.m. and to feign sickness to avoid a close friend’s party. I’ve worn clothes designed to attract notice, and clothes designed to camouflage. These are not daily changes; they come in seasons. I’m a certain person for months, even years, and then I’m not.

Unsurprisingly, I’ve had a hard time maintaining relationships. I’ll meet someone and feel pulled to them. The way they are brings out a version of me that feels natural or enticing. But then the grid snaps and what felt natural suddenly feels foreign. The terms of the friendship no longer work for me, and I breach them. For a while, the loss of the friendship feels restorative, like being freed. At some point, though, I change again into a person who craves togetherness — and find I’m alone.

I’ve written before about cycling through special interests, but I see now there’s more to it. Just as I shift from one hobby to another, I also rotate through ways of being, shifting in how I relate to people. If I kept digging, I’d probably find other shifts too.

This past fall, when I lost the urge to write in favor of making things with my hands, I lost a lot of adjacent urges too. I stopped reading nonfiction, essays, and even text-based social media. No more browsing Substack Notes; I rarely opened the app, whereas before I opened it multiple times a day. Instead I scrolled makers’ accounts on Instagram.

One afternoon I spent hours laying a miniature brick floor: cutting rectangles from cork sheets, dabbing them with acrylic paint, gluing them down in offset rows, and grouting the seams with modeling paste. The hours passed like minutes. I felt a deep, wordless pleasure.

During this period I’d get comment pings on things I’d written here, and I’d ignore them. And I don’t know how to explain the sensation I felt other than to say: those pings were not for me.

Like a note from an old violin

Tapering off and reaching the end

They weren’t for me because I wasn’t the person who wrote the essays. This conviction took firm hold after a new reader discovered my Substack and left many generous comments. She said she’d just found my writing and was devouring it. The author of those essays would have been tripping over herself to engage. But she was off somewhere, unreachable.

Until suddenly, she reappeared. I can pinpoint the day. Over coffee, I opened The New Yorker app for the first time in ages, looking for an essay to read.

That’s how I know: seeing what I do during free moments tells which me I am. The shift happens without intention, and I only noticed it because I was surprised. I even tested myself — looked through some textile projects I’d been planning. Not even a spark of attraction. My mind turned away.

Drifting away like a leaf in the wind

And I’m disappearing again

All of the things that had unwound in the fall — the loss of the writing itch, the cessation of reading, the abandonment of Substack Notes and subscriptions — rewound themselves. I’m reading biography and philosophy and ideas for essays are appearing once more.

And there was old business to attend to. I responded to that generous commenter, because I was the author of the essays once more.

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Logically, of course, there’s only been one person here all along. I can narrate the changes from summer to fall to winter; a throughline of experience persists.

It seems my mind orients around one center of gravity at a time, and when that center shifts, my self — the I who speaks – reorganizes with it.

And yet. I have the sense, still, that the I who’s talking to you now is not the one from December.

The “house with many rooms” metaphor can go further: a House with Many Wings. One day I’m in one part of the house, and then I look around and the setting has changed. A familiar place, but disconnected. There’s no hallway that connects the wings, no path I can take to get back. It’s like a video game and I’m a sim who’s been picked up and dropped somewhere. In the new space I feel both at home, and yet cornered.

For now I’m back in the Wing of Words. The furnishings feel stiff but they’ll soften with use. The Wing of Making is shut up for the season. The Wing of the Social Butterfly has been closed so long, I’m not sure if it’ll ever reopen.

Maybe I’ll come back around …

Maybe I’ll be here tomorrow

…

In this House of Many Wings there’s one thing I haven’t figured out. When I’m moved to a new wing, who issued the order?

This essay rounds out a loose trilogy, alongside Passing from words to matter and The return of the Why mode of thinking. If it resonated, I’d love to hear what shape your own “house” takes — or how you’ve experienced your creative shifts.

Stay curious,

Laura

Is it back?

It’s the morning after a sleepless night in Miami in a hotel room with a broken air conditioner. I’m there to celebrate a friend’s milestone birthday, and now everyone is traveling back. Over a luxuriously solitary breakfast, I notice that I want to write.

It’s not a desire to write per se. It’s that small, persistent ideas keep pushing into my awareness, elbowing for attention. Questions and possible answers. I open a Google Doc on my phone to channel some of the flurry. What I want is to record what I’m puzzling in my mind.

Like, this question: Why do I like novels that cultivate ambiguity? I finished the first half of How to Be Both by Ali Smith, a diptych novel that surfaces countless questions about the characters, hints at different answers, then leaves them unresolved. Forever. Since unlike in the natural world, where things don’t end but only change, a definitive curtain closes at the end of a novel, leaving an infinitude of uncertainty.

A theory: Perhaps because I’m uncomfortable with uncertainty in real life, the forced ambiguity of a novel is thrilling. It’s a relinquishment of control, a safe kind of danger. Like skydiving — except the diver remains suspended over the patchwork earth, anticipating the queasy thrill of freefall that never comes. In a novel like How to Be Both, mysteries surface, possible explanations shimmer, and I brace for the warming flush of resolution that spreads like the first sips of liquor — but it never comes. I’m left in a half-space, suspended, expectant. I can return to that state for days, even months after reading the final page — take the feeling out of the drawer and wear it again, just by remembering the characters and their questions. The sensuality of an ambiguous novel lingers. A novel that ties up its loose ends rarely has such an afterlife.

I tapped these ideas into my phone over breakfast.

Late that night, after hours of flight delays, I arrived home. I brought my bags up, changed into PJs, and got into bed. Our house, as I always notice after being away, smells bad. Like a linen closet sealed for years. That simile is the best I can do, and it’s imperfect. I can also simply say it smells musty, but that’s too blunt. It wants specificity.1

So, a question: Why is it so hard to describe a smell? Beyond broad metaphors that tip easily into cliche — a smell is metallic, or floral, or oniony, or sulphurous — why aren’t there better tools?

A theory: In the end all description is metaphor, and describing smells is harder than describing, say, visuals because we have fewer comparators. We can say that a person is shaped like a pear and a pear is shaped like a bell and a bell is shaped like a snowdrop. Or all of that in reverse or in combination, as when Steinbeck writes:

These too are of a burning color — not orange, not gold, but if pure gold were liquid and could raise a cream, that golden cream might be like the color of the poppies.

The tools for visual description feel more refined because there are simply more of them, even though there is still no word denoting the fundamental pear-ness of a shape, or the essential golden creaminess of a color.

But wait: a counter-theory. I can say that a pear is like a bell, but I can also say that a pear has a smaller section comprising a semicircle that grades into a larger semicircle. And, there are certain colors that exist as atomic units of description. Blue and orange aren’t just metaphors (though they can be used that way); they are metaphysical concepts in themselves. Yet we don’t have words for the indivisible building blocks of olfactory experience that I can use to describe my house smell. Do we? So the inadequacy of smell descriptions compared to visual descriptions isn’t just one of degree, but of kind, too.

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Last year when I was writing, this is how my mind used to work all the time. An observation cracks open a question, which invites a theory, which provokes a counterpoint. This kind of recursive noticing and theorizing is the stuff of my writing.

And then when September came around: silence. At most, there were only fleeting theories that I had no compulsion to record. The looping questions and answers that played through my mind yesterday marked the return of a prior way of being. Something fundamental has changed.

I consider how I’ve been occupying myself in recent months when I am free to choose: I’ve been working with physical materials, figuring out technique, using my hands and body, turning one thing into another thing.

The change I noticed yesterday — one that came on all of a sudden — seems to be a mode shift. When I stopped writing, it’s not that I stopped creative problem-solving. It’s that the problems changed. They became ones that couldn’t be worked out through language but only through physical action, by bringing about state changes in the material world around me. The problems were how to create something useful or visually pleasing or having certain qualities from material that — as yet — didn’t have those qualities.

Which prompts another question: Why did the problems change back again?

Maybe I’ve gotten my fill of material problems. Their solutions are definitive. Either the fabric creates a three-dimensional shape when sewn a certain way, or it doesn’t. Either the object balances upright, or it doesn’t. Either certain colors and patterns ineffably “work” when thrown together — a question of personal taste, to be sure, but one that is knowable — or they don’t.

By contrast, problems that are worked out through language alone are more like the ambiguity of a novel. They linger and we can take them back out and work them again. We’ll never know for sure and maybe that’s the thing that draws us in sometimes and sometimes repels us.

Another way to explain the change: I’ve gone from How? back to Why?

How is the space of method, technique, material, action. How is solved by doing.

Why is the space of theory, metaphor, pattern. Why is solved by conceiving.

So, a final theory: Maybe the Why and the How can be a framework for understanding how our minds are oriented. Whether as a matter of tendency (philosophical v. mechanistic minds) or of a transient mood or phase.

Perhaps we misdiagnose periods of silence as creative depletion, when really they’re mode saturation.

Maybe we need to be both, at different times. The person who makes the thing, and the person who asks why we’ve made it.

Stay curious,

Laura

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The essay is titled, “Nonfiction Isn’t False, but Who Says It’s True?” If you check it out, I’d love to hear what you think.

I cold-pitched the idea on July 24, when I was in the thick of a writing compulsion that started in March and left in September without so much as a by-your-leave.

The editing and publication timeline is such that the seed I planted in July is only being harvested now. I enjoyed the process of working with the editor over the past month to find and hone the truest kernels of the essay. And I’d often think that the me of this summer would have found that process extraordinarily motivational. I would’ve leveraged my “forthcoming Electric Literature publication” in other pitches to editors. But that was the old me, not the current me, and I haven’t made any pitches since the summer.

What happened? Well, my mode of expression changed, from words to materials.

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Here are the facts: the continual ideas and insights that used to interrupt my every waking moment vanished. The flowing spigot went bone dry. At the same time, I ended a voracious reading spell that saw me devouring out-of-print works of criticism, multiple biographies of the same person, essay collections, philosophy. It wasn’t a conscious choice to stop. My desire just evaporated.

In its place: I started handsewing. First, squares for a simple quilt. Then, tiny stuffed animals for my kids. Next cardboard became my medium, constructing critter houses. Which needed furnishing, so I got sticks of bass wood and balsa, wood glue and mitre shears. I hauled my old fabric stash out of the attic (a relic of 2021’s apparel-making obsession) to make tiny pillows and upholstered furniture. I ordered new fabric in micro prints, the right scale for the miniature world I was creating.

I talked about it with my kids. My daughter put in an order for a lamb queen with a blue cape, silver crown, and red-and-blue dress, which I’m working on for her birthday later this month. With the twins last night, I constructed cardboard sailboats for their tiny critters and they cradled their sailboats while we read Ahoy! at bedtime.

Some things I make are objectively cool looking, but most of it’s what you’d euphemistically call “naive.” Unlovable except to its maker — and her kids. The little critters I gave them are nothing special, but they adore them. Same with the messy cardboard structures I’ve made.

The other day I discussed all this with my daughter. I said: Remember how before I was always reading, and I was working on that book? Now, instead, I’m crafting. My interests change. I don’t really have a choice. There will come a day where my interests change again. But for now, this is what I’m interested in.

It was a chance to tell her something real about me, the me who is not just her mom. She took that in, then said: I won’t let your interest change! I’ll make you do projects forever!

The version of me that makes tiny chairs is far more exciting to my kids than the one that reads theories of the novel.

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As an observer to myself, what I see is this: most of the year I was driven toward intellectual pursuits. Ideas and concepts expressed through a single medium: words. Reading and writing, thinking and expressing, all in words.

Word overload, perhaps.

It’s like I’m enacting a personal version of Kant’s dialectics, where yesterday’s thesis of verbal reflectivity was pushed out by today’s antithesis of nonverbal doing.

It’s as if I became burned out on language itself and reached for its opposite.

Crafting. Materiality. Mind, hands, body, matter combine to create something that wasn’t there before. Thinking without words. The use of tacit knowledge that exists somewhere inside (where?) to bring a new physical object into being.

Anthropologist Tim Ingold writes in The Textility of Making that material creation is “an ongoing, generative movement that is at once itinerant, improvisatory and rhythmic.”

He continues:

It is about becoming rather than being. You cannot be a mountain, or a buzzard soaring in the sky, or a tree in the forest. But you can become one, by aligning your own movements and gestures with those of the thing you wish to draw.

In Ways of the Hand, pianist David Sudnow writes about learning jazz improvisation. The keyboard is a terrain, a landscape, and the pianist has trekked it over and over. He’s come to know countless paths through the landscape, all the ways to get from one place-note to another place-note. Making music is a matter of traversing physical locations by means of hands and arms.

So already, the expert pianist is a bodily, physical thinker. And on top of that, Sudnow explains — in words — that learning jazz improvisation isn’t something that can be taught in words. Much to his frustration, while trying to learn improv from his teacher:

I would spot him going over what I saw was a course. He would go many places where the courseness in this sense could not be detected, involving intricacies that seemed puzzling, but I figured they were constituted as all the rest, and within his play many Iittle spates of orderly passage couId nonetheless be spotted. I would ask ‘what was that?’ He would say ‘what was what?’ … I would say, ‘that little thing you just did on the G minor chord,’ and he would have a hard time finding what he had ‘just done.’ He would at times frankly say, ‘I’m not following rules so I don’t really know what I just did’ (and on other occasions admit, ‘I just improvise, I really cannot tell you how, you have to have a feel for it’).

You have to have a feel for it. That applies to so much we do with our hands, including sewing. A feel of bunchiness in the hand; a sense of place in a sea of stitches. We know what to do based on the imperceptible communion of our senses (touch, sight, proprioception) and physical material.

All happening at the level of nonverbal thought. Perhaps with no thought at all. You might call it “processing,” but that makes us sound like computers. I’m tired of the computing analogy. When you’re sewing a hem, you’re not accomplishing it through programmatic, rote thinking. I am sewing a hem. A hem is a bound edge of a garment. A hem requires that the fabric be folded in on itself and stitched fast. Something else entirely is happening, and not strictly in the mind.

As my old friend Wittgenstein said – in a different context I’ll shamelessly appropriate – “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” Some things cannot be expressed in words.

I’ve tried a few times to merge this new state of existence with my established writing practice here. I started drafting two earlier pieces on similar themes, and true to my old habits, read some books in the same neighborhood: as well as the Sudnow book mentioned above, there’s The Craftsman, by Richard Sennett. Both excellent, both remain unfinished.

My old intellectual curiosity still smolders. Why am I now drawn to handcrafting? What happens in our minds when we use our hands? How is it that I’m figuring things out in my brain without verbal thought? What kind of thinking is that, and how does it work? But I’m no longer able to see these threads through to completed pieces.

And so I didn’t publish anything here in all this time. I’ve been measuring my present efforts against my old standards, the ones that led to fully realized pieces like this one, and my current efforts keep falling short.

Today, on the day of my first “real” publication, I decided to just get something out. Don’t overthink, don’t be too self-critical. Because I do want to keep one foot in the writer’s world; I’ll even settle for a mere toe. The writing itch will come back one day, and I don’t want to lose all that I built in the season that’s just ended.

While crafting, I like to put on YouTube videos. Often, they’re long walks through the English countryside (the rainier the day, the better). The sounds of birds, running water, visions of lichen and moss and irregular stone walls. Or, it might be craft technique videos, since learning through seeing is really the only way, aside from trial and error. You can’t learn to sew or expertly use materials from a book.

Recently I stumbled on Jane Lindsey’s channel. She’s a Scottish textile crafter who talks about changing curiosities, creativity, and handcrafting – all things that speak to me right now.

In one video, Jane mentions a concern from a member of her crafting community. Sue’s creative spark had left her; she had made nothing for the whole month of October. Sue was worried the spark would never return. Jane used Sue’s experience to muse about the seasonality of creative inspiration, and the fallow periods that lie between intense phases. I saw parallels to my own changing interests. My intellectual season came and went. Now I’m in a material season, a hands-on season, a season that produces physical artifacts.

Toward the end of the video, Jane offers an analogy. Creative inspiration, she says, is like surfing. Sometimes you’re on the crest of a wave, but a lot of times you’re just paddling, waiting. You can’t control when the wave comes, nor what form it takes. When it does arrive, you have a choice: ride it, or sit it out.

Just as I can’t control the ocean, I’m helpless to control where my interests turn. That’s honest wisdom I’ve earned by age 40. All I can control is whether to seize the wave, or to shun it. To ride it, harness it, or turn my back on it. And so here I am, sewing, gluing, constructing, painting. And curious to see where this wave – and the next, and the next – take me.

If any of this resonates with you, I’d love to hear it.

Leave a comment

Stay curious,

Laura

Where I’ve been

This August, we went to Iceland for two weeks where my husband is from. It was our first flying trip with all three kids, not to mention our first family trip over an ocean and timezones, and it was… challenging. Next to my anxious nature and desire for control, my husband is a go-with-the-flow type. And even he struggled with all the absences: of daily routines, of our paid caregiver, of carefully placed baby gates that hem in the all-out torrent that are twin toddlers. (It will be a dark day when they realize you need to pull the handle up before you slide it sideways).

On my side of the equation, I knew this trip would be personally difficult. Routines and calm are my moat against disintegration. So, even though I took those weeks off work, I negotiated time on weekday mornings to myself, when my husband and mother-in-law would mind the kids.

Each morning, around 9:30, I waited for the Reykjavik Number 12 bus to take me downtown, where I’d plunk down at a coffee shop chosen precisely because it offered filterkaffi (no espresso for me, takk).

My plan for this solo time was to write.

Specifically, I was focused on external pieces. Having actual bylines will make my nonfiction book proposal more attractive to literary agents. Also, I’m finding essay writing so stimulating that I’d love to make it a real part of my life. “Real” in a subjective sense; for me, this means trying to publish beyond my own newsletter.1

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Getting back to Alys’s question: Initially, I started newsletter-writing to channel the furious storm of research and writing that my autism diagnosis unleashed. It’s been about six months since that diagnosis, and I started this Substack not long after.

It was a productive decision, in a literal sense. Researching with a goal in mind creates a virtuous cycle where instead of idly wandering, you’re advancing with a critical eye.2 And then the satisfaction of having a testament to your work spurs you to create more.

Because I was so fascinated with autism at the start, that was my focal point. Though, knowing I dislike being constrained, I intentionally made my mission more capacious: I would write about the strangeness of the mind, a boundless topic, with a bias toward neurodivergence and neuroscience.

Best laid plans and all. At the beginning I barely sensed the constraint but now I keep bumping against it. During those filterkaffi mornings, none of my work was within the original bounds of this newsletter. Instead, my interests now sprawl across philosophy, literature, and criticism. Neurodivergent frames are still close at hand, but they’re not center stage.

Where I am

What’s happening, I realize, is the waning of one special interest and the rising of another. I had tricked myself into thinking it was all the same because it’s still writing, but now I’m flinging my own words back at myself: “writer: one word, too many referents, all tenuously grouped together.”

You see the shift in the reading I’m consuming these days. Here’s the story of my past month told through books purchased or borrowed:

• Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology by Michel Foucault

• The Rhetoric of Fiction by Wayne C. Booth

• Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism by Lauren Fournier

• Frantumaglia by Elena Ferrante

• Feel Free by Zadie Smith

• The artful edit: on the practice of editing yourself by Susan Bell

• Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen by Mary Norris

• The Western Canon by Harold Bloom

• The White Man’s Guide to White Male Writers of the Western Canon by Dana Schwartz3

Previously, I connected my special interest cycling to this very newsletter, wondering if writing about autism would crash just as other interests have. But something was different, I noted then: my new awareness that this cycling

isn’t just idiosyncrasy; it’s part of a neurotype. Maybe I can learn to harness this special interest cycling with intention and avoid the prior pattern.

And avoiding that prior pattern might be what’s happening? I’m not yet at the burnout stage where the interest turns distasteful, like the sight of leftover birthday cake after you’ve had three slices. I’m just not freely turning toward my old go-to topics.

On Thursday, wondering what the hell I was going to publish this week, I perused my drafts inventory. I count 20 pieces in various states. Those are the graduates from my idea stable, where I dump post ideas so I don’t forget. That document has 84 ideas!

Many of them relate to autism or how minds work, the stuff of this newsletter. Going through them, I didn’t feel revulsion—but I didn’t immediately open a doc and start working either, which used to be the reflex.

Instead, I started writing this post.

My autism interest isn’t fully exhausted, but I think it would be soon if I forced myself to keep writing about it. Maybe I just need some time apart, some breathing room, to let my interest recharge. Because I do want to keep the spark alive for the kind of research and writing that first prompted Strange Clarity.

Where I’m going

What I’m circling is this question: do I let this newsletter follow my interests? Or, do I obey the chorus of platform-building advice, which is: have a clear niche, a delineated focus, so that readers interested in your topic can find you and once found, they get what they came for.

I do have a data point. The newsletter I published during my trip—on the god trick, mansplaining, other stuff—was more aligned with my current interests in literature and philosophy. A few readers commented and liked it, and it even prompted the first external response by the always fascinating Overweening Generalist. (His response is a work of art.) But the interest was muted compared with my posts on autism and neuroscience/pyschology.

Which is fine by me, so long as I’m not alienating readers who were drawn here on the promise of something else. Am I?

To return to Alys’s question, why am I on Substack? Why do I post this newsletter? The path out of my haze lies in the answer to that question.

But the answer is manifold; multiple reasons are competing with each other. I write this newsletter to connect with people who think like me (and people who don’t), to be an autism advocate in my own way, to develop my writing muscle, to provide a channel for my research and curiosity, to create an archive of my work (because I’ll forget otherwise), and to share my ideas with readers. In isolation, each of those goals would suggest a discrete path. Taken together, the compass needle lurches unsteadily from one point to another.

Feeling pulled in different directions is not new. I have been so many different people across my lifetime, often at the same time. Who I was depended on who I was with. Such that, if people from different milieus assembled, I wasn’t sure how to be. That sounds disordered, and I suppose it is, but I don’t view it entirely—or even mostly—negatively. Because it wasn’t people pleasing, not in the typical sense of doing something just for someone to like you. It’s more that I’ve never been able to pin myself down. I’m not one person. I can flit in and out of different personas and somehow, there’s a kernel of truth to all of them, even if the personas are exaggerated. The conventional advice when you’re diagnosed with autism is to unmask, but what if your real self is split across those masks?

Which makes the present quandary—attempting to write a newsletter as one person—both familiar and difficult to sort out.

Is this newsletter the place where I let my different intellectual selves coexist? Or is it the playground of just one?

That’s the lingering question.

So, Reader: Why do you read this newsletter? Your answer will help me think through this quandary. And if you write or create for others, how do you decide whether to follow your changing interests or hold fast to one focus?

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I hadn’t planned to begin with this journal entry. I found it by accident while searching my Evernote archive for the word “memory.” What turned up was uncanny.

I wrote it eight years ago, in 2017, while getting a pedicure—something I only know because I left an abrupt note to my future self at the end. At the time, I had no idea I was autistic. I was just trying to process an unusual feeling of loss after divorce.

What follows is that entry, nearly in full.

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I've always had trouble with memory. I noticed it first with movies. Friends quoted entertaining or witty lines with precision. On the other hand, I forgot critical turning points of films, entire plot points. Recently a friend asked if I remembered an apparently critical scene in Pulp Fiction. I did not, even though I did remember that I’d had to watch the film at least a dozen times for a college research assistantship. Yet I had no memory of a pivotal scene.

But that’s a harmless example. Comparing notes with my brother about our childhoods is more alarming. He remembers where we went and what we did, even who said what to whom. I remember decapitated feelings and free-floating impressions. I remember catastrophic events, but very few of the quieter moments that make up a life.

And so I rely on others to remember those things, and in doing so to reveal, in a way, who I was then. (Because who can say they are the same person over time—or that they would even want to be?)

My longest romantic relationship was with my ex-husband. We met when I was 23, he was 30. I left when I was 29, he was 36. We were miserable and suffered from an inability to connect for sustained lengths of time. But he knew me better than anyone in the world, and he probably still does.

When I think of the rare moments when I felt connected with him, it often involved his ability to tie the present to my unremembered past. “I know this look,” he’d say. “The way you're resting your elbow on the table with your palm up, the way you're lowering your chin and raising your eyes, it's just like that time we had dinner at your law professor’s house. Just before you started arguing with him.” In this way he would teasingly recall so-called “classic” moments. In his recitations and remembrances, I felt seen and loved.

After we divorced, I started having him over for dinners on Sunday. This was over a year after we had separated; I had begun and ended two new relationships in the meantime. We drank the bottle of wine he always brought and talked about our past. And without being fully aware I had missed them, I regained six lost years of my life through his ability to testify to their contents.

Prompted by these engaging dinners and the unusual connection they entailed, we got back together. And then broke up again, for good.

And so I lost access once more to that period of my life I had regained, and to the more complete sense of myself he offered. It’s as if a library holding rare volumes, the only copies in the world, burned to ashes. The volumes mattered only to me and so it’s a personal tragedy, but a tragedy nonetheless.

Without a witness who has paid close and curious attention to the way I was and am, I feel erased.

As it pertains to my memories (or lack thereof), this all feels true still and I’m grateful to my past self for writing it down. But it leaves something out.

In certain ways, my memory is excellent. As a lawyer, I can recall the minutiae of a case—names, dates, document details—on the spot, without notes. It’s served me especially well in court. If an opposing counsel fudges a fact, I can tick through the rebuttal in real time, citing specific evidence from specific documents. I well, actually the hell out of them. Once, in a long case against a particularly misogynistic attorney, I did it so thoroughly the judge ordered that the other side pay my attorney’s fees—twice!—because I’d shown, line by line and in real time, just how unsupported his claims were.

So my recall is inconsistent: excellent for facts that don’t involve me; terrible for events from my own life.

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What is autobiographical memory?

Until recently, I hadn’t encountered the term autobiographical memory. But according to a 2022 comprehensive review, it describes what I wrestle with: the ability to remember the events of your own life, including what happened, where, when, and how you felt.

Autobiographical memory weaves together different types of memory—facts, emotions, sensory details—into coherent scenes.

Researchers often describe autobiographical memory as a form of “mental time travel.” It’s not just recalling facts; it’s reliving personal moments as if you were there once more.

For everyone—neurodivergent and neurotypical alike—these memories serve three core functions:

1. Self-identity. Remembering your past helps you understand who you are over time.

2. Social connection. Shared memories create continuity and bonds in relationships.

3. Directive use. Drawing on past experiences guides us in making decisions and imagining (and preparing for) the future.

Even the perspective from which we recall autobiographical memories has been studied. We revisit these memories in either field mode (through our own eyes) or observer mode (watching ourselves as if we’re a character in a film).

When I read that, I realized that I almost always remember in observer mode.

Other firsthand autistic accounts

The struggle I described back in 2017 isn’t unique to me.

Reddit provides the richest trove of firsthand autistic experiences to be found online, and there are countless posts and comments on this topic.

A sampling:

• “My memory is either very sharp or absolute garbage, it’s annoying.” (link)

• “My partner often expresses their worry for how bad my memory is, I don’t remember most of the things we’ve done together in the past, if I do remember it’s usually just the emotions surrounding them.” (link)

• “I had all kinds of problems in my last relationship because of this. They’d be mad at me for not remembering going to a specific store with them, or not remembering some small event that happened years ago.” (link)

• “I have this and am shocked by how bad it is. My best friend has a good memory and I'm amazed by how often she brings stuff up that I have no recollection of. It must get annoying for her.” (link)

• “My family brings up things I've done that I completely forgot. Like sewing by hand an entire eternal sailor Jupiter costume.” (link)

• “I essentially can’t remember my life at all. Apart from a few glimpse my childhood is complete gone for me. Eg. I went to boarding school for two years and can’t remember a single day. I went to university for 4 years and essentially can't remember any of it. I retain the knowledge, but can’t practically remember any of it.” (link)

• “I can tell you facts like ‘I went to school at whatever university, studied this major, worked at this agency, then moved to some city’ but a lot of memories of day to day experiences are just gone. Once in a while people will say ‘do you remember when we did xyz’ and I just won’t. Makes me kinda sad.” (link)

Commenters have also supplied their theories for these personal memory losses: burnout, trauma, masking, aphantasia. And many express anxiety over it. “I am really worried for myself. I don’t remember my life. It’s like I have Alzheimer’s,” a poster wrote.

Not everyone in these threads has memory deficits. Some say they remember too much, especially painful experiences. But at least according to these self-reports, profound disruptions to autobiographical memory appear to be more the rule than the exception.

Reddit comments aren’t scientific data, but they offer a kind of distributed anecdotal evidence. And in this case (as in many others), the research backs them up.

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Autobiographical memory impairment and autism

There is resounding evidence that autobiographical memory is impaired in people with autism.

The aforementioned 2022 review by Carol Westby summarized the striking ways in which autobiographical memory is often impaired in autistic people. Research has found that we tend to:

• Recall fewer memories overall, especially specific, one-time events

• Retain less detail: fewer sights, sounds, emotions, and contextual cues

• Take longer to retrieve memories, or struggle to access them at all

• Recall general patterns more easily than specific episodes

• Struggle to place events in time or understand the sequence

• Have a reduced ability to describe our own past emotional states

• Remember from an outside perspective (observer mode) more often

• Show stronger memory for facts (semantic) than for lived experiences (episodic)

• Have a weaker connection between personal traits and personal memories

• Find it harder to use past experience to plan or problem-solve

• Construct less coherent life narratives—making it harder to feel like you have a stable identity over time

• Engage in less autobiographical reasoning (connecting the past to a larger sense of meaning or growth)

• Experience diminished mental time travel to both the past and future

• Recall actions performed by others more readily than actions performed by ourselves

While some researchers started mapping these impairments as early as 2006, the scope and depth are still coming into focus.

In fact, just last year a new compelling explanation was offered for why these deficits occur. That will be the focus of a future post. (Trying to keep a reasonable length here!)

Augmenting my mind with an external archive

What strikes me most, rereading my 2017 journal entry, is how closely I described what I now know is a distinctly autistic experience. I noticed the connection between memory and selfhood, and how my inability to recall the events of my life left me feeling “erased.”

I also now recognize the loss of the directive function described in the research. How memory helps us use the past to understand the present and predict the future. I have a gnawing suspicion that I’ve had the same insights multiple times in my life without realizing it. That I’ve arrived at personal truths, forgotten the paths that led me there, and then rediscovered them later, thinking they were new.

Finding the 2017 entry—having no memory of writing it—brought this suspicion home.

It’s become clear that I need help accessing my own life. I need to write things down not just to share them with others but to preserve them for myself.

I had already noticed this when it came to parenting. Other parents recall when their kids first crawled, or what they were like as babies. I struggle with this, and it’s painful. The vivid child in front of me elbows out any ability to picture how they were before. I’m lucky to have photos and videos, but I’m starting to see how important narrative is, too.

So I’ve begun writing down everyday occurrences: the funny phrases my kids invent, the obsessions of the week, other fleeting moments. These small things add up to something monumental that I don’t want to lose.

I don’t regularly keep up with it; something more pressing always comes up. But writing this piece is impressing on me just how important that practice is. When my kids are grown, I won’t be able to tell the story of their childhoods from memory. So I need to create an archive for us all to draw from.

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Looking for more to read? Check out these past posts:

• When you see yourself in your child—and start worrying for two

• My autistic special interests: the fire that burns itself out

Research cited in this post:

• Carol Westby. 2022. Nature and Effects of Autobiographical Memory Issues in Persons with Autism Spectrum Disorders. Neuropsychiatric Disease and Treatment 2022:18 2279-2293. Read online.

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Stay curious,

Laura

Ever since my diagnosis, I have not stopped riffling through memories and behaviors to reconsider them in a new light. In my free time, I’ve been voraciously reading everything I can get my hands on about autism.

I recognize this state. It happens every time I start a new project, and there have been many such starts!

Past fixations have included portrait drawing, sewing clothes, and screenwriting. They range from the highly general (bread-baking) to the highly specific (translating the 20th-century horror stories of a little-known Argentinian writer).

This cycling through intense fixations is a variation on the autism-defining “special interest,” a trait first documented nearly a century ago.

Soviet psychiatrist Grunya Sukhareva, one of the first to describe the modern profile of autism, observed in the 1920s that her patients often had highly specific, intense interests that they pursued with remarkable focus and depth.

These were distinguishable from mere hobbies. For instance, the patients had a particular focus on details. And some children displayed an exceptional ability to absorb and retain information about their interest, often at a level far beyond their age. Plus, their desire to engage with the interest was particularly strong. They demonstrated distress if they were forced to shift focus.

The trait was initially thought to be an avoidance mechanism, a way for autistic people to retreat from external stress.

Researchers now understand that the special interest is a reward in itself.

Special interests often survive into adulthood. (Cue Reddit post: “I just found out about my Autism and now my special interest is Autism.”)

In a 2014 study of 76 adults with Asperger syndrome, participants reported that they spent an average of 26 hours per week on their special interest.

A fascinating 2021 article in The Transmitter collects stories of childhood special interests that turned into lifelong careers. Mariana de Niz, for instance, grew up in 1990s Mexico City, where a cholera eradication campaign ignited an intense fixation on pathogens.

“Sort of obsessed,” as she put it, she followed that passion all the way to her current role as a research professor in Cell & Developmental Biology at Northwestern University.

“She is known for making compelling images that require a degree of patience some of her colleagues say they could never muster,” the article reports, adding:

She often spends hours following a single T. brucei and capturing its most ephemeral movements. She gets so absorbed in the experience that she often forgets to eat, and her ophthalmologist says she is wearing out her eyes.

I can relate. I regularly skip meals when a project takes hold, and my personal care routines start to slip. (The fact that I work from home and am not forced to socialize in person doesn’t help.)

My lifelong pattern of deep dives into new pursuits was one of the first clues that led me to autism. Curious, I googled this aspect of myself, and found the connection.

Whereas some people with autism have a singular focus throughout their lives, like Tudor history or geology, I’ve never had a definitive special interest. Instead, I have a series of them, ranging in duration from three months to a year.

Nearly always, the project is something entirely new, where I lacked even a rudimentary knowledge of the thing to start.

When it was quilting, I began with the fundamentals – threading my machine, pre-shrinking fabric, precision-cutting pieces, ensuring seam allowances were exact.

For gardening, rather than just buy plants and put them in the ground, I read several books on landscape design. I created a design, then carefully selected varietals based on aesthetics, shade positioning, and native principles. Finally, I planted the garden, which at the end of it all, became overrun. Partly because of my strong aversion to late summer weather (I couldn’t weed in the blazing heat and sun), and partly because my interest had worn itself out.

Because each of my special interests follows a pattern: an intense learning phase, a peak of all-consuming engagement, and then just as suddenly… indifference.

I lose the hunger and abandon the interest without a backward glance.

This cycle is exhilarating, but exhausting. Having lived with the pattern for decades I know its arc well. I begin with the knowledge that I’ll likely never finish the thing I set out to do.

Pondering this cycle of continuous renewal, in which I pour significant effort and enthusiasm into a new project knowing it will end half-baked, I’m reminded of a passage from a favorite essay, “The Crack-Up” by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It describes the paradox of trying again when you know you’ll fail (in my case, a failure to see a thing through):

I must hold in balance the sense of futility of effort and the sense of the necessity to struggle; the conviction of the inevitability of failure and still the determination to "succeed" — and, more than these, the contradiction between the dead hand of the past and the high intentions of the future.

Fitzgerald was writing about something very different, but this perfectly describes the tension I feel when I think back on all the hobbies I’ve taken up and discarded over the years.

Despite all I’ve learned through my research, I’m still trying to account for the crashing part of my cycle. I don’t see it discussed in the autism literature, and it doesn’t line up with the concept of autistic burnout, either.

Autistic burnout has long been discussed within the autism community, but the first research conducted on the topic was not until 2020, at which time researchers defined autistic burnout as an all-encompassing state that is

characterized by pervasive, long-term (typically 3+ months) exhaustion, loss of function, and reduced tolerance to stimulus.

My form of burnout is not pervasive. It’s highly specific, affecting only my special interest. The other aspects of my life – work, caring for my kids, watching the TV show of the moment with my husband – continues as normal.

Perhaps the crashing of my special interests is a different phenomenon entirely. Or perhaps burnout exists on a spectrum, just as special interests and seemingly everything else related to autism does, and my form of burnout is one variation.

As I ponder what all this means for my current project – researching and writing about autism – the looming question is: If I come to a breaking point, like I have so many times before, how much will I get done before then? And will I ever return?

I’m encouraged that this time, a couple things are different:

• First, I know I’m not alone. This isn’t just idiosyncrasy; it’s part of a neurotype. Maybe I can learn to harness this special interest cycling with intention and avoid the prior pattern.

• Second, for the first time, I suspect my interest might produce something useful not just to me, but to others too; that there are people who might be interested in the perspectives I bring.

My internal motivation now has company: an externally-oriented motivation to say something out loud.

And so here I go again, setting out with the “high intentions of the future,” as Fitzgerald put it in that brilliant essay.

Thanks for reading Strange Clarity, where I write about neurodivergence, cognition, and the hidden architectures of thought.

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More to explore:
🔍 My path to autism diagnosis: Why autism gave me supersonic hearing
🎁 My newest form of social challenges: Reflections after attending a four-year-old's birthday party

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With curiosity,

Laura

This weekend I went to a 4-year-old’s birthday party. It was hosted at a local playground, and the morning started out with my kind of weather: low 60s, overcast. I love a cloudy day in spring, when the technicolor of new growth just snaps against the muted gray sky.

The party, too, was perfect. Brightly decorated picnic tables laden with trays of fruit and veggies and sugar cookies. Coffee and bagels were set out for adults. There was no schedule to follow and no set game you had to referee your kids through—just people milling and mingling under gentle gray skies.

I had been looking forward to some adult socialization all week. I work from home with few opportunities to interact IRL. But despite the favorable setup – perfect weather, easy activities – things didn’t go as I had hoped.

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When my daughter started preschool two years ago, it opened up a whole new world: the micro-society of parents. At first, I felt entirely out of place. She had enrolled midyear, in a kind of panic decision, when I was about to give birth to twins and realized she’d need something consistent outside the house. So the other parents had already formed their friend clusters, and I showed up to school-sponsored events alone, sleep-deprived and unsure how to break in.

I have a personal taxonomy of social discomfort. The most anxiety-inducing, by far, is the group setting where everyone knows each other except you.

Most people might rank that similarly, but I suspect they don’t dread it like I do. Neurotypical people might notice the dynamics, feel a flicker of awkwardness, and move on. For me, it feels like a puzzle I’m being asked to solve while juggling three balls, blindfolded – all while trying to make my juggling look normal.

This kind of hyper-awareness isn’t uncommon for autistic or otherwise neurodivergent people. The brain tries to make sense of unspoken rules, detect subtle shifts, and predict the right moment to jump in. It’s not that we don’t think about social norms; we often think about them too much because they don’t come intuitively.

Two years in, I do know some of the parents now. And I’ve even had one really wonderful school-related outing. A few months ago, a parent organized a moms' night out at a tapas restaurant. I was nervous but forced myself to go. It ended up being great.

As I think back now, I realize the critical difference. That night, we were seated at long tables, not mingling. I didn’t have to navigate how to break in to conversations, and whom to speak with and when. The choice was made for me: I naturally talked to the parents seated next to and across from me.

For people with social processing differences—autism, introversion, anxiety—the difference between unstructured mingling and a fixed seating chart can be everything. One feels like chaos; the other like a manageable opening to settle in and connect.

That’s how it was for me. I got to know the women around me in that confiding way that feels like middle-of-the-night sleepover talk: the shared stories of struggle, the quiet confessions, the little nods of recognition. When someone says, "Me too," and you both exhale.

We discussed our struggles to keep up with life’s accumulating pile of tasks. We confided our (sometimes guilty) relief in handing our kids over to someone else for a while. We talked about what we wanted to model for our kids, especially our daughters: a life and interests outside the home, so they would see us not just as mom but as whole people with many sides. (This is something I think about a lot).

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The party on Saturday was not that kind of gathering.

Those same moms were there, but now, so were many other parents. Groups formed. People greeted each other warmly and shared updates about shared adventures. I tried to make conversation to deepen some of the fledgling relationships I had started to build. I saw one mom smile when she saw me, and I smiled back. Another parent realized we work in the same industry, and we tried, a couple of times, to talk.

All three of my kids were there, including the youngest two—toddlers who cannot yet be left to their own devices, even in a neighborhood park. The invitation said siblings were welcome, and I jumped at the prospect of entertaining all three at once.

I should’ve known it wouldn’t be that simple. One toddler kept trying to open the birthday kid’s presents. The presents stayed wrapped, but just barely. The other kept grabbing my hand, tugging me away from conversations: “Come play with me, Mama.” I must have said, “I’m talking, sweetie,” about 15 times, which is about the number of seconds I got to talk to an adult without interruption.

The thing is, I wasn’t even solo parenting. But it was still nearly impossible to find a free minute to talk, as one toddler ran off into the middle of a game of pickup basketball and the other put their hand in the veggie tray to touch all the carrots.

With every interruption, I found myself calculating: Should I keep talking or attend to my child? Should I go stand in that group of parents mingling, or is that weird since I don’t know them well? Should I speak to the birthday kid's mom or leave her to her hosting duties? Had I talked enough to the moms I bonded with at the dinner, so they know I’m interested in becoming friends?

I kept asking, not just what I should do, but even more theoretically: What would a person who knows how to do this do?

I wasn’t just trying to talk—I was trying to belong. I felt the strenuousness of trying to figure out how to behave, and I wondered if others could sense my straining.

Back in my early thirties, when close friends were starting new lives in other cities, people used to tell me that parenting would open up a new chapter of friendship. Once I had kids, they explained, I’d naturally connect with the other parents. We’d become friends because our kids were friends. I pictured running into parent friends at soccer practice and laughing over things our kids had said or done; sharing recommendations for books, TV shows, and take out.

I believed it because I wanted it to be true.

I didn’t consider that forming connections has never been effortless for me. These parents would be the same people I struggled to connect with in my twenties. They were the kids I struggled to connect with growing up. It’s never been easy.

Changing the backdrop — my 1990s school playground for my daughter’s school holiday pageant — doesn’t erase that basic fact.

At the birthday party, while I was navigating this swirl of should-I-or-shouldn’t-I, I noticed my daughter. She wasn’t playing with the other kids. She was happily absorbed in sidewalk chalk, creating elaborate artwork by herself. Or playing with her little brothers. She hadn’t even wanted to come to the party until I told her they were invited too.

She’s proud of her brothers. She loves them. And she seems to prefer their company to her classmates. I wonder if she, too, struggles with the unpredictable dynamics of a crowd. If she has trouble matching the rhythm of the interactions around her.

In other words, I worry she’s like me. And I fear she will sense my worry—that she’ll pick up the message that something is wrong with her.

If she’s anything like I was as a kid, she won’t need anyone to tell her she’s different. She’ll know.

So how do I help her be comfortable with herself, when I’m still not comfortable with myself?

I don’t have the answer. I thought that once I had kids, I’d find people. And I did find people. But it turns out, being one of them—being myself among them—is still the hard part.

When I was diagnosed with autism, I was ecstatic. I told close friends as if I’d gotten a new job or won a fellowship. There was no shame in it—just relief and clarity.

My friends already know me. Years of shared experience have carved their perception of me into deep, familiar grooves. If anything, the diagnosis reshapes their understanding of autism, not of me.

But with people who don’t know me well, the logic reverses. Lacking a personal history to go on, they start with the label. And that label carries its own grooves—worn not by me, but by cultural shorthand.

Autism is one thing about me. It’s not the thing.

We all use labels to present ourselves. Our social media bios are little product descriptions: what you’re getting, in shorthand. My default tags are woman, lawyer, mother, and now, autistic person. Each one carries baggage—positive or negative—based not on who I am, but on how society in general and how a person in particular views that group.

Some discomfort comes from how society distorts those labels. I’ve experienced this, on an almost shameful level, with the term “mother.”

I know, intellectually, that I and the mothers I admire are curious, whole, intelligent people. And yet I’ve internalized the stereotype: that mothers today are over-attached, fearful, easily prey to conspiracy theories.

I hate that this image exists—and I hate that part of me flinches when I see “mother” in a bio, including my own.

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In the late 2010s, I was working at a law firm as colleagues began adding pronouns to their email signatures.

I understood why. Making pronouns visible helps trans colleagues navigate a world hostile to their existence. It’s a real form of allyship.

And yet, for me, there was friction. To add “she/her” to my signature felt like declaring, in every professional interaction, that my gender was relevant. But I didn’t believe it was. Not for how I think, argue, or solve problems. If anything, autism has shaped my work style more than gender has.

Looking back, I now recognize this dissonance as deeply autistic: discomfort with signaling something outwardly that doesn’t match what I feel inside.1

Declaring my gender felt performative—misaligned with the context, unnecessary to the conversation.

I wanted to support others in naming their identities without having to foreground mine.

So I pieced together a haphazard approach. No pronouns in my email signature. But I accepted LinkedIn’s prompt to include them.

That said, labels do have their uses.

I’ll mark “female” on medical forms. I’ll book a woman’s haircut. When I walk into a department store, I ask where the women’s shoes are.

In those settings, the label clarifies something relevant. I want the person on the other side of the interaction to use that information.

So what does this mean for autism?

It means I won’t lead with it in every room I enter. There are places where it matters—like here, where I’m writing about it explicitly. And there are places where it doesn’t—or where the danger of being misread outweighs the potential benefit of disclosure.

I wish more of us would consider not just what labels we use, but why we’re using them in a given context. If your identity—neurodivergent, trans, parent, woman—is central to how you move through the world, then by all means, name it boldly. But if it’s only one part of a more complex self, you don’t owe the world your taxonomy up front.

Sometimes the best way to teach people who you are is to let them meet you first.

For more views on the topics in this post, read Emma Roig at the Big Shift on Neurodivergence beyond labels; Davina Cooper on the London School of Economics Blog, Presenting our pronouns: When feminist politics pull in different directions; and Megan Anna Neff at Neurodivergent Notes on Being Perceived, The Morning Show, and Autism Moms.