First-Person Accounts
Nobody can better describe living with an Asperger profile than those who live the experience every day. At AANE, we deeply value the unique perspectives and voices of those we serve and hope that their personal stories can help to foster understanding, generate empathy, bolster respect, and build connection within our communities. These irreplaceable first-person accounts will enhance your understanding of the gifts and challenges of those with Asperger profiles and the strategies that help them to succeed.
Essential Resources:
Speakers Bureau
Perspectives on Adult Life
Artist Collaborative
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The Turning Point
01/05/2023
TW: This article discusses experiences with suicidal ideation.
In 2015, my husband was hospitalized and diagnosed with advanced metastatic lung cancer while on an out-of-town trip. It blew apart the foundation of our lives and heralded an accelerated medical crisis for which I served as his... more
The holidays are a time of joy, gratitude, and kindness, but for some of us, it’s also a time of stress, grief, and trauma. With all those emotions rolling around, it can be a confusing time of year, filled with social and familial obligations stealing our energy and an overload of shopping,... more
Reflections on Apologies and Tire Swings
11/03/2022
TW: This article discusses trauma, including death and school-related incidents.
“What makes a girl start a fire in the hall, leave a lipstick scrawl on the bathroom mirror?” Ezra Furman, a trans singer/songwriter, sings with a tone of desperation and longing on “Trauma” off of her album... more
The Good Enough Doctor
Article
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Neurocurious: Creating a Learning Culture
10/04/2022
Twenty years ago I had been at a job for a number of months working for a supportive manager who’d recognized my skills and nurtured my development. But then she’d left for another role, and another group began supervising my position. The group was led by a tyrant of a man who supervised a... more
Autistic Voices on Creativity
08/02/2022
We asked autistic creators about the role creativity played in their lives or to tell us something about their creative process. Here's what they shared.
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Olivia August Nied
In many ways, my creativity and my autism are linked and work in tandem with one another. I’m a musician and... more
Handling Disclosure as a Self-Advocate
07/07/2022
As an autistic self-advocate, it is no secret that disclosing my autism to others has and always will be a complicated process throughout my life. There are many factors that go into how, when, why, and to whom I will disclose my autism, but they all have to do with the purpose for the disclosure... more
My Kaleidoscope Life
06/09/2022
My name is Olivia (She/They) and I’m a 24 year old, autistic, transgender woman. Actually, scratch that. That sounds really clinical, and I feel like I’m anything but clinical. I’m a weird sandwich, of tics, stims, non sequiturs and interesting perspectives that shape my existence and color... more
Gender as Performance
06/09/2022
To preface this article, it’s important to understand the spaces I occupy and from which I speak. My name is Jay, I am a 27 year old autistic, white, non-binary, and queer identifying individual with ADHD. I grew up in an extremely neurodivergent household with a mother who is likewise autistic... more
The Multiple Masks of Trans Autistics
06/09/2022
When I realized I was autistic at age 40, I experienced a range of bittersweet emotions: grief & relief, embarrassment & enlightenment, confusion & confirmation. People who are neurotypical don’t usually have this type of extreme retrospective self-realization at some point in their... more
Trust the Client
06/09/2022
The question often arises, how to best support transgender people? How to best support autistic people? People with ADHD? People who are otherwise neurodivergent? To answer this question, I draw from my experiences in these communities and from my education as a therapist. When I was working on the... more
The Emotion Allergy: Anxiety
05/05/2022
It’s common knowledge that anxiety is woven into the story of many autistic people. One study puts the prevalence of anxiety disorders among autistic people at 40 Percent, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it was much higher, due to the lack of diagnosis of both autism and of most mental health... more
My Autistic Anxiety Snowball
05/05/2022
One source of anxiety for me is knowing that people don’t say what they mean. They skirt around the truth because they expect people to translate. This convention works well for some, because hearing the truth would be too painful; inferring the truth is gentler. The problem for me is I never... more
Being an Autistic Parent
04/05/2022
Being an Autistic parent is hard.
Life for any parent is already EXHAUSTING. Add in navigating all the demands of parenting with being Autistic, and… it’s not easy.
First, there is the sensory nightmare of how incredibly loud these small, unpredictable people can be. In the early years, I... more
What an interesting journey parenting has been, some 14 years now, and yet it has only just begun. Interesting, in part, because I became a father not yet knowing that I was autistic, and once I found out, my perspective on fatherhood changed rather dramatically. The diagnosis raised several... more