This captivating personal essay manages to convincingly describe the reality and debilitating potential of autism, while at the same time describing the individual diversity behind ‘neurodiversity’ that sometimes makes me doubtful how helpful these DSM-defined labels are:

ASD is a spectrum, but there is often a presumption that the spectrum is a linear gradient from mild to severe. In fact, the disorder is not a spectrum but spectra, a solar system of sprawling constellations in 3-D that differs from one person to the next. Within autistic communities, they say, “If you’ve met one person with ASD, you’ve met one person with ASD.”