The AutSide Podcast

A reflection on classroom ecology, gestalt learning, sensory regulation, and why many autistic and gestalt-oriented students are failed not by inability, but by systems that mistake compliance, fragmentation, and noise for learning.Today’s conversation with Cathy kept circling back to one central idea: ecology. Not accommodation as an afterthought. Not support as a bolt-on intervention once a student is already drowning. Ecology in the deeper sense—the total sensory, emotional, relational, and epistemic field that a person must live inside in order to learn at all.We talked about classrooms, but really we were talking about nervous systems. About the way schools often assume that fluorescent light, constant chatter, crowded walls, synthetic scents, abrupt transitions, and performative “joyful noise” are neutral conditions rather than highly specific environmental preferences. The dominant system treats these atmospheres as normal because they suit the people who designed them. But for many autistic and gestalt-processing students—and, frankly, for many autistic adults working within those systems—they are physically and cognitively destabilising. The hidden question beneath the whole conversation became: who is a classroom already designed for before accommodation is ever discussed?A second throughline emerged around curiosity and institutional rigidity. Cathy spoke about educators beginning to notice children for whom phonics-first approaches simply do not work. Children who read in wholes. Children whose literacy emerges through scripts, patterns, emotional attachment, rhythm, repetition, and meaning rather than sequential decoding. And yet so much of the institutional machinery remains invested in defending the method rather than investigating the mismatch. I realised again that much of my own work—whether the books, the Substack scripts, the journal papers, or the classroom improvisations—comes from refusing that closure. From remaining curious where systems become static. From continuing to ask what happens when the framework itself is the thing failing the student.The conversation also kept returning to the distinction between part-to-whole teaching and whole-to-part understanding. Cathy described young children becoming engaged through personalised books, favourite scripts, and meaningful narratives. I found myself extending the same logic into secondary mathematics and science. The principle never actually changes. Many students cannot meaningfully hold fragmented procedural steps without first perceiving the shape of the system they belong to. Once the whole becomes visible, the parts begin to organise themselves naturally. But most curricula are designed in reverse. They scatter disconnected fragments across years and expect coherence to somehow emerge through repetition alone.What sat quietly underneath all of this was the reality that autistic people often spend their lives performing invisible ecological calculations. Not simply “can I do this task?” but “can I survive this room?” Can my body tolerate the lights, the sounds, the smells, the social atmosphere, the pace, the unpredictability? I realised whilst speaking that much of my classroom has become an unconscious refusal of environments that once harmed me. The natural light, the quiet room during assemblies, the lack of sensory clutter, the permission to stim, build, regulate, or simply exist without constant performance—none of these things began as pedagogical theory. They began as survival strategies. But because they emerge from lived necessity rather than institutional design, students recognise them almost immediately.Another theme running through the discussion was the way education systems mistake compliance for comprehension. Students are rewarded for reproducing procedures and disconnected facts, even when no real understanding has formed beneath them. High-stakes testing then measures whether students can successfully navigate the language of the system itself. And when they cannot, the failure is located inside the student rather than in the architecture of the curriculum, the assessment, or the environment surrounding them.I think the deepest thread tying the entire conversation together was this: learning is inseparable from meaning, and meaning is inseparable from ecology. Minds do not develop in abstraction. They develop in relationship to environments that either permit coherence to form or continuously fracture it. And when institutions only recognise one acceptable route to knowledge, one acceptable sensory profile, one acceptable developmental rhythm, they do not merely exclude other minds. They render those minds unintelligible within the system itself.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

A geometry moment became a flood. This video traces how one sentence—“the whole may be the accommodation”—unlocked a book, exposing how schools mistake sequence for learning and offer meaning only after access is denied.It begins small, because it always does. A classroom moment. A student working at the edge of fit—not incapable, not disengaged, but misaligned with the route being enforced. Then a sentence lands—quietly, almost casually—and something in the pattern gives way. What follows is not an idea but an arrival. The whole system steps forward at once. Not metaphorically—cognitively, physically, insistently. This video sits inside that moment of rupture, where recognition outruns language and demands form.What it reveals is both simple and destabilising: much of modern schooling is built on a part-to-whole logic that assumes sequence is neutral. Break the concept down. Order it. Pace it. Measure it. Then, if a learner cannot enter through that sequence, we offer “accommodation.” But what if that framing is already the error? What if, for many learners—particularly autistic gestalt processors—the whole is not enrichment or extension, but the entry point itself? What if the accommodation is simply the thing that should have been there from the start?From there, the argument does not stay contained. Geometry becomes a doorway into everything else—language, science, history, assessment, credits, time. Each structure reveals the same underlying assumption: that the sanctioned path through content is the content. That fragmentation is rigour. That support is something added after the system has already excluded. This is not presented as a grand theory but as a pattern traced from lived experience—one classroom, one practitioner, one mind mapping the terrain it moves through daily.The form of the project matters as much as its claims. This was not written linearly. It arrived as a field—dense, recursive, insistent—and had to be released before it could be organised. What you are encountering here is both an introduction and a threshold into that field. The video names the conditions of its own making: the flood, the urgency, the need to translate pattern into language before it calcifies into distress. In that sense, it is not only about schooling. It is about a way of knowing that does not begin with parts.What follows, across the series, is offered as a script garden. Not a doctrine, not a fixed model, but a set of phrases and patterns that can travel. Into classrooms, meetings, conversations, decisions. A way of asking different questions. A way of noticing when “support” arrives too late. A way of holding open the possibility that the difficulty may not belong to the learner at all—but to the design that refused them the whole. 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

Today’s episode explores the disconnect between scientific evidence and the aggressive marketing of executive functioning interventions, particularly for autistic and gestalt-oriented children. The author of the source article, Dr. Jaime Hoerricks, argues that popular service providers frequently misuse research by applying studies of allistic populations or broad diagnostic categories to children with unique cognitive architectures not represented in the data. By analysing three specific papers, the text highlights a category error where typical developmental correlations are mistaken for proven treatments for neurodivergent learners. Families are cautioned that what is labeled as executive dysfunction may actually be a structural mismatch between a child’s natural processing style and neurotypical environmental demands. Ultimately, Dr. Hoerricks advocates for ethical transparency, urging practitioners to prioritise relational safety and environmental adaptations over commercialised compliance training.Here’s the link to the source article: https://autside.substack.com/publish/post/194947984Let 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

After another Autism Awareness Month, this video offers a decoder ring for claims about gestalt processing—showing how research, marketing, and hope get entangled, and how to ask whether a support actually fits the child in front of you.There is a particular kind of fatigue that follows April—a saturation of language that claims to see, paired with a quiet absence of what actually needs to be seen. Gestalt processing remains largely untranslated in mainstream discourse, or worse, translated into forms that no longer resemble the thing itself. This video begins in that gap—not to fill it completely, but to name it clearly.What emerges online, especially in parent-facing spaces, is not always false—but it is often misaligned. Interventions are shared as solutions, research is cited as proof, and personal success stories are offered as pathways. Yet beneath that surface, there is a recurring structural problem: the child being described is not always the child being addressed. When language architecture is misread, support can become a kind of well-intentioned misrecognition.This video is an attempt to slow that process down. To take the confident claims and return them to their source. To ask what was actually studied, who was actually included, and what kind of mind the task was built to recognise. In doing so, it introduces a simple but necessary shift—from asking “does this work?” to asking “for whom, and under what conditions?”It is not a rejection of support. It is a refusal of overreach. Because in a space where urgency and hope are easily mobilised, the difference between evidence and extrapolation begins to matter deeply. Families deserve more than adjacent research stretched into certainty. They deserve clarity about what is known, what is assumed, and what is being sold in between.As an opening, this piece sets the ground for a larger analysis—one that moves beyond the surface language of intervention and into the systems that produce it. The research pipeline, the service economy, the expansion of constructs like “executive functioning,” and the quiet erasure of gestalt language processing within all of it. Not as abstraction, but as something that lands—materially—on children, and on the people trying to care for them.Here is the link to the larger piece, Executive Functioning: Where the Evidence Stops Short. 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

A brief re-introduction: an autistic gestalt processor, late to language and diagnosis, writing from a script garden of delayed echolalia. Fifteen short points to orient new readers entering the work midstream.Opening — Welcome / Re-introductionWith Cathy off enjoying a jazz festival this weekend, I wanted to take this time to do something a little different.There have been a lot of new people arriving—through conferences, through quotes shared on Instagram and Threads, through someone passing a piece along—and I’ve realised that many of you are stepping into the middle of something that’s already been moving for quite a while.So, this is a kind of re-introduction. Not a summary, not a “best of,” but a way of placing myself—so you have a sense of what you’re stepping into.I’ve written over 2000 pieces on The AutSide, and over 200 on Sensual Residue. That’s not because I set out to build something that large. It’s because this is how my mind works. Language accumulates. Patterns return. Things get placed, and then re-placed, and then seen differently over time.So, if you’re new, you’re not arriving at the beginning. You’re arriving somewhere in the middle of an ongoing process.And I don’t expect you to catch up. I don’t expect you to read everything, or even most things.What I do want to offer is a kind of orientation.A way of saying: this is how this space works. This is how I work.Because what I’m doing here doesn’t always map cleanly onto what people expect writing—or teaching, or theory—to look like.So instead of trying to explain it all at once, I’m going to give you fifteen short points. Not as rules, not as claims—but as places you can stand for a moment.And from there, you can decide how close you want to come.And before I move into those fifteen points, I think it’s important to place something more personal.I’m an autistic adult. A gestalt processor—and I mean that in the whole sense, not just language. It’s how I organise experience, memory, meaning. It’s the architecture underneath everything I do.I also live with ADHD, with alexithymia, with sensory processing and integration differences. All of that shapes how I move through the world—what I notice, what overwhelms, what holds.I came to literacy quite late. Language, as it’s typically understood, wasn’t something I “acquired” in childhood. It’s something that formed over time, differently, and often outside the structures that were meant to support it.And I was diagnosed late.Which meant that for most of my life, I didn’t have the frameworks for any of this. I had to figure it out from the inside—through pattern, through experience, through returning to things again and again until they made sense in a way I could hold.So, what you’re encountering here isn’t just writing.It’s the result of that process.1. I’m not a content creator.First things first.I think it’s important to say that plainly, because it frames everything else.I’m not here producing content to meet a schedule, or to grow something, or to keep an algorithm fed. That’s not the relationship I have with writing. What I’m doing is much closer to needing somewhere for language to go—somewhere for things to land when they arrive.There are days where nothing comes. There are days where something arrives fully formed and I just have to get it down before it moves again. And there are long stretches where I’m circling something without quite knowing what it is yet.So, if you’re here expecting a consistent product, that’s not what this is. What this is…is a record. A living one. Of how something moves through me over time.And if people are here for that, I’m grateful. But I’m not shaping it to hold them. I’m shaping it so I can stay with it.2. The Substacks are my script garden.The phrase that makes the most sense to me is “script garden.”Not archive. Not portfolio. Not platform.A garden is a place where things are placed, but not finished. Where something can sit, and change, and sometimes come back in a different form entirely. Some things grow. Some things don’t. Some things come back years later and suddenly make sense.That’s what these spaces are for me.I park language there. Phrases, patterns, fragments—things that feel like they matter, but aren’t fully understood yet. And over time, I start to see how they relate to each other.So, if you read across pieces, you’ll notice repetition. Return. Slight shifts.That’s not redundancy. That’s how the meaning forms.3. Much of what I write is delayed echolalia.This is something that often gets misunderstood.Echolalia is usually framed as repetition without meaning. But for many of us, it’s actually how meaning is processed. Language comes in, sits, and then returns later—changed, layered, carrying something new.That’s what I mean by delayed echolalia.A phrase I heard years ago might reappear in a piece, but now it’s holding something entirely different. Or a memory will come back, not as a memory, but as a pattern that suddenly connects to something I’m writing now.So, when you see repetition in my work, it’s not because I’ve run out of things to say.It’s because something has come back, and this time I can hear it differently.4. I’m a gestalt processor, and this is what that looks like in the open.A lot of descriptions of gestalt processing stop at childhood.They describe how language is acquired, how scripts are used, how things are pieced together over time. But they don’t often show what it looks like when that process continues into adulthood.This is that.You’re not hearing something that’s been translated into analytic steps. You’re hearing the pattern as it forms—sometimes mid-formation.That means it won’t always be linear. It won’t always resolve cleanly. Sometimes it will circle, or return, or layer.But it will hold together.And part of what I’m doing here is making that visible—so that it’s not only recognised in children, but understood as a lifelong way of being.5. I don’t start with ideas—I start with something felt.Most pieces don’t begin with a concept.They begin with a sensation. A pull. Something that doesn’t quite have words yet, but insists on being followed.And I don’t always know where it’s going.The writing is the process of finding out what that thing was. Of staying with it long enough that it reveals its structure.Sometimes that becomes something recognisable as theory. Sometimes it stays closer to the original feeling.But the direction is always the same:Not from idea to expression.From experience to understanding.6. Recursion isn’t a quirk of my work. It’s the method.I come back to things.Not once or twice—but over and over, across months, across years. The same moment, the same phrase, the same question.And each time, something different becomes visible.That’s recursion.It’s not going backwards. It’s not being stuck.It’s a way of turning something, slowly, until you can see more of it.And for me, that’s how depth happens. Not by moving on quickly—but by staying long enough that the thing begins to open.7. My past isn’t behind me.There’s a strong expectation, culturally, that we move on. That we leave things behind. That the past becomes something resolved, or at least contained.That’s not how this works for me.My past is active. It’s material. It’s something I return to—not to relive it, but to understand it differently as I change.So, when I write about earlier parts of my life, I’m not stepping away from the present.I’m bringing those parts into relation with now.And that’s where a lot of the meaning emerges.8. The split between my Substacks isn’t a split in me.I know some people encounter The AutSide and Sensual Residue as two different spaces—and they are, in terms of tone and entry point.But they’re not two different selves.They’re two ways of approaching the same underlying pattern.One might feel more recognisable as “theory,” the other more obviously embodied. But the coherence—the thing that holds them together—is the same.And if you read them in relation to each other, that becomes clearer.9. I’m not trying to make this legible on demand.There’s often an expectation that writing should be immediately clear, immediately accessible, immediately useful.That’s not always how this works.Some pieces take time to land. Some don’t land at all until something else comes along later.And I’m okay with that.Because forcing immediate legibility would mean simplifying something that isn’t simple.So, if something doesn’t make full sense right away, that doesn’t mean it’s failed.It might just not be ready yet.10. I live in a place and time that is openly hostile to people like me.That’s part of the context for all of this.I’m not writing from a neutral position. I’m writing as someone who exists in a system that doesn’t readily make space for the way I am.That affects what I write, how I write, and why I write.This isn’t just exploration—it’s also a way of staying intact.Of maintaining coherence in an environment that would prefer fragmentation.11. I don’t separate intellect from body.For me, understanding doesn’t come from abstraction alone.It comes from how something is felt, remembered, carried physically as well as cognitively.So, when I write, those things aren’t separate streams.They’re part of the same process.And that’s why some pieces move between registers—between analysis and sensation.They’re not switching modes.They’re following the same thread through different forms.12. I’m not interested in presenting a cleaned-up self.There’s a version of writing—especially in academic or professional spaces—that involves presenting only the parts that are considered appropriate.That’s not what I’m doing here.Not because I’m trying to provoke—but because removing parts breaks the coherence.The understanding comes from holding things in relation, not from isolating the acceptable pieces.So, what you see here is not curated for safety.It’s held for truth.13. I’m not writing for an audience.This might sound strange, given that people are here.But the writing doesn’t begin with an imagined reader. It begins with the need to write.That said—I am aware that people read, and respond, and share.And I don’t take that lightly.There’s a responsibility there, even if it’s not the driver.So, I hold both things:I write for me.And I respect that others are here.14. If something here resonates, I trust that.Not everything will resonate with everyone.But when something does—when there’s that sense of recognition, even if it’s not fully articulated yet—I take that seriously.That’s often how understanding begins.Not with clarity, but with familiarity.So, if you feel that, I would trust it.Even if you don’t yet have the words for why.15. This is me, as I am, in motion.None of this is a final statement.It’s not a fixed position, or a completed framework.It’s something that’s continuing.What you’re seeing is a process unfolding over time.So, this isn’t an introduction in the traditional sense.It’s more like a point of entry.Into something that is still moving.Closing — Gathering / Forward motionSo those are fifteen ways of placing what I’m doing here.Not the whole of it—but enough, I think, to give you a sense of the shape.If you’ve been here for a while, some of that will feel familiar. If you’re new, some of it might not fully land yet—and that’s okay. This isn’t something that has to be understood all at once.It’s something you come into over time.I’m genuinely grateful that people are finding their way here—whether through a conference, or a quote, or someone sharing a piece that meant something to them.I don’t take that lightly.At the same time, I want to be clear about what this space is and isn’t.It’s not curated to be neat. It’s not structured to be easily consumed. It’s not designed to present a single, stable version of me.It’s a place where language is placed, revisited, reshaped. Where patterns emerge slowly. Where things that didn’t make sense before sometimes start to.And there isn’t just one way to engage with it.Some people move through it in the Substack app, following along as new pieces arrive. Others come in through the web, where you can search the archive—by word, by idea, by something you’re trying to find language for in a particular moment.That can be useful, if you’re looking for a script—for something that meets you where you are, rather than starting at the beginning.Both ways are valid. You don’t have to take it in linearly. You don’t have to do it all.You can dip in. You can follow threads. You can leave and come back later.The work holds that.And if something here resonates with you—if there’s that sense of recognition, even before full understanding—then you’re in the right place.The work will still be here, continuing. It remains open, free to access, something you can return to as you need.And I’ll say this simply—as a wee school teacher doing this alongside everything else—if you choose to support it through a subscription, it’s deeply appreciated. It helps keep the space open, and it helps me keep doing the work.Because that’s what it does.And that’s what I’m doing. 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

This video introduces The Wrong Reader—a series on therapy, misreading, and autistic jeopardy. Not content, but script garden: a warning, an offering, and a record from inside the weather system of being read wrong.This morning’s video is less a conventional introduction than a threshold note—a quarter turn before the next doorway opens. I begin by thanking the many new readers and listeners who have found their way here, and by naming how much it matters when someone doesn’t simply consume the work, but recognises themselves in it. Those moments of resonance matter to me because they confirm what I have long suspected: that what so often gets treated as idiosyncratic or excessive in autistic, gestalt, or otherwise marginalised lives is often shared—just rarely named aloud.From there, I make something plain that feels increasingly important to say in a culture that flattens everything into “content.” The AutSide and Sensual Residue are not content pipelines. They are not engineered for clicks, virality, or market logic. They are, for me, a kind of externalised script garden—a place where delayed understanding can land safely when it finally arrives. As a gestalt processor with significant support needs around language, I often do not have the answer in the moment. Sometimes the answer comes the next day, or the next week, or much later. Writing is how I preserve what would otherwise be lost. The archive is not branding. It is accommodation, memory, and survival.The heart of the video is an introduction to the new series, The Wrong Reader. I explain that this series emerges from a deeply personal and politically charged question: what happens when an autistic gestalt mind enters therapy and is misread from the start? I reflect on the profound risks built into that first encounter—especially when seemingly simple questions like How do you feel right now? are anything but simple for someone living inside layered time, multiple simultaneous “nows,” somatic memory, and delayed linguistic processing. What is framed as a neutral intake can quickly become a site of surveillance, misclassification, coercion, or even legal jeopardy.I also name the deeper problem: therapy is never just a private room between two people. It is shaped by professional training, diagnostic assumptions, institutional liability, mandated reporting structures, and increasingly by the logic of private capital. A clinician may present as affirming, but if they do not understand gestalt processing, autistic cognition, or the cultural and bodily realities I carry into the room, then the “fit” may already be broken before the conversation even begins. This new series sits inside that tension. It asks what it means to seek care in systems built to read quickly, categorise prematurely, and default to the limits of their own frameworks.Throughout the video, I frame the series as both warning and offering. It is heavy, honest, and at times painful. It draws on my own therapeutic history, including moments of being read incorrectly, funnelled toward the wrong interventions, or treated through models that were never designed for minds like mine. But it is also meant to function as a script garden for others—for my children, for autistic readers, for anyone who has ever walked into a room needing help and realised too late that the room did not know how to read them. If the system insists on first contact without scripts, then part of what I am building here is a way to enter with some.I also reflect on form. I explain why there will be no AI-generated summaries for this series, why the poems will be narrated but the pieces themselves allowed to stand whole, and why I continue to distrust tools that impose guardrails where nuance, tenderness, or danger need to remain intact. The series is written from inside the weather system, not from outside it. It is autotheory and autoethnography in the strongest sense: not a detached commentary on autistic life, but a record from within the storm itself.By the end, I return to gratitude—but with clarity. I thank readers and subscribers sincerely, and I name the material truth that their support has sometimes paid for groceries, equipment, and the practical conditions that make this work possible. But I also insist, gently and firmly, that this is not a business machine. There is no content team, no strategy apparatus, no polished funnel. There is just me—writing, recording, preserving, and leaving behind what I may one day need again. The video itself becomes part of that archive: not a performance, but another script left in the garden. 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

Today’s episode examines how societal institutions utilise simplified questioning as a method of systemic control. The author of the source article, Dr. Jaime Hoerricks, argues that schools and workplaces prioritise compressed, rapid responses to make individuals easier to manage and categorise. By shifting the focus from personal experience to structural critique, her writing explores how the pressure to be concise can be a form of institutional erasure. Dr. Hoerricks suggests that resisting these narrow demands is a political act that challenges the way systems demand legibility. Ultimately, her article serves as an invitation for readers to recognise how their internal struggles are often shaped by external power dynamics.Here’s the link to the source article: https://open.substack.com/pub/autside/p/wh-questions-and-the-cost-of-compression-4bbLet me know what you think.The AutSide is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, consider becoming a aid 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 chat with Cathy, we circled a familiar truth: for many autistic GLPs, the whole arrives before the parts. Recognition often begins in resonance, memory, and misreading—long before language catches up.Here’s the link to my support script that I mentioned in the video.Today’s conversation with Cathy ended up circling a truth I keep returning to: for many autistic, gestalt-oriented adults, understanding does not begin with explanation. It begins with contact. With pressure. With the felt whole of a thing arriving before any clean language for it exists. Cathy had asked me for “five things,” and what arrived in me was not five tidy bullet points but an entire weather front: a long support script, multiple related pieces, and the familiar flooding that happens when a prompt lands in the field and starts organising itself below conscious language. That became the first living example of the point itself. The whole comes first. Only later can the parts be pulled out.From there, we talked about what it means to feel information before you can parse it. Not just language, but rooms, people, classrooms, requests, emotional tone, sensory charge—the entire ecology of a moment. I tried to name how a request, a classroom, or even a person can arrive already carrying every prior encounter, every stored pattern, every earlier strain or safety signal, all at once. Cathy kept returning to something she heard clearly in the support piece: that for many of us, the feel of a thing matters before the words do, and often more than the words do. That led us into a deeper conversation about trust—learning, especially later in life, to trust the body’s recognition when the official language arrives late or not at all.A central thread was adult recognition. We spoke about how so many late-identified autistic and gestalt-oriented adults first encounter themselves not through diagnostic language, but through their children. A parent comes in trying to understand why their child is being misunderstood at school or in therapy, and suddenly realises—often with a kind of shock—that the architecture being described is their own. That felt important. Recognition often precedes vocabulary. People do not necessarily begin with the label. They begin with resonance. With the strange relief of finding a rhythm, an archive, or a body of language that feels like home before they yet know why.We also touched the danger of frameworks that can only see gestalt processing in children. These children grow up. They become adults, colleagues, parents, writers, teachers, and late-identified survivors of educational and clinical misreading. If a model can only recognise the architecture in a clinic-room child, then it is not simply incomplete—it is mistaking a lifespan orientation for a temporary developmental anomaly. That was one of the strongest undercurrents of the conversation for me: the adults matter, not as an afterthought, but as evidence. The younglings become us.Memory and recursion came in too, which felt especially alive. Cathy reflected back something she has noticed in my work: that my thinking, writing, and remembering do not move in neat sequence. They loop, recur, return, and gather. That opened the door for me to talk about writing—and Substack in particular—not simply as output, but as storage. As script. As a practical support for a nervous system that needs to place things somewhere stable enough to come back to later. Not a tidy archive in the institutional sense, but a script garden. A field of returns. A place where coherence can remain visible long enough to be recognised.We also grounded the conversation in classroom life, which mattered to me. I spoke about being misread as “gifted” in childhood because I could draw, whilst what was actually happening was that image and pattern were carrying cognition before language could. Cathy made an important distinction there: that some children think in pictures, some in words, and some in both—but what matters is that schools and adults stop assuming only one valid route to meaning. That felt like a gentle but important bridge between lived autistic experience and educational practice. If we only honour the children who can show understanding in sanctioned forms, we will keep missing the actual architecture of learning.What I appreciated most was that the conversation did not flatten into tips or diagnostics. It stayed with the deeper pattern: that whole-to-part is not just a speech profile in children. It is often a lifespan orientation. It shows up in how we read, how we remember, how we recognise ourselves, how we learn, how we write, how we return to unfinished meaning until it becomes speakable. The children in the caseload are not the only place this architecture lives. The adults are still doing it. We are doing it when we circle a truth for years before the right phrase lands. We are doing it when a book rotates a field we were already carrying. We are doing it when language arrives late, but true.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

Today’s episode introduces a conceptual shift in communication by prioritising the needs of Gestalt Language Processors and others with field-first minds. The author of the source article, Dr. Jaime Hoerricks, advocates for moving away from interrogative extraction toward an atmosphere where truth and inquiry are invited through relationship. By imagining rooms designed for connection rather than compliance, Dr. Hoerricks challenges traditional styles of questioning that can feel restrictive or harmful. Readers are encouraged to engage with these alternative possibilities gently, acknowledging the emotional weight of past exclusionary experiences. Ultimately, her article serves as a visionary guide for creating more inclusive and supportive spaces for diverse cognitive styles.Here’s the link to the source article: https://open.substack.com/pub/autside/p/wh-questions-and-the-cost-of-compression-05cLet 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

Today’s episode introduces an exploration into the social scripts and linguistic rituals that often mask the true internal experiences of neurodivergent individuals. The author of the source article, Dr. Jaime Hoerricks, examines how common inquiries like "How are you?" frequently prioritise social convenience over genuine emotional connection. Through the lens of masking and alexithymia, her article addresses the exhaustion that comes from performing emotional fluency to satisfy societal expectations. It serves as an invitation for readers to reflect on the emotional labor of appearing "fine" when they are actually struggling. Ultimately, her writing offers a gentle space for those who have historically used scripts as a survival mechanism to prioritise their own nervous system over performance.Here’s the link to the source article: https://open.substack.com/pub/autside/p/wh-questions-and-the-cost-of-compression-4c3Let 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

Today’s episode introduces a thoughtful exploration of how neurodivergent individuals experience the psychological strain of making seemingly minor decisions. The author of the source article, Dr. Jaime Hoerricks, suggests that questions about personal preferences or simple choices are often far more complex than they appear, requiring a “compression” of one’s identity that can feel deeply overwhelming. By addressing the hidden emotional labour involved in navigating everyday demands, Dr. Hoerricks seeks to validate those who have been unfairly labeled as difficult or indecisive. Her piece serves as a compassionate framework for understanding why standard social interactions can trigger feelings of inadequacy or grief. Ultimately, her writing offers a supportive space for readers to examine the intricate ways their minds process desire and meaning without the pressure to conform.Here’s the link to the source article: https://open.substack.com/pub/autside/p/wh-questions-and-the-cost-of-compression-17dLet 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

Today’s episode explores the psychological burden placed on individuals when they are forced to explain their identities or actions under pressure. The author of the source article, Dr. Jaime Hoerricks, argues that the question “why?” often functions as a form of coercive interrogation rather than a genuine inquiry, especially for those experiencing trauma or delayed processing. By demanding a linear narrative from someone still navigating a crisis, society often mistakes fragmented memories for dishonesty. Ultimately, her piece serves as a protective guide, reminding readers that they do not owe the world an immediate or polished explanation of their lived experiences. She emphasises that personal truth frequently arrives in pieces and should not be used as a tool for social cross-examination.Here’s the link to the source article: https://open.substack.com/pub/autside/p/wh-questions-and-the-cost-of-compression-997Let 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

Today’s episode highlights how ordinary questions can trigger an intense internal load for unsupported adults, requiring significant mental labor to process. By analysing the hidden mechanics of conversation, the author of the source article, Dr. Jaime Hoerricks, explains why simple prompts often feel like overwhelming demands rather than casual interactions. Readers are encouraged to view their nervous system responses, such as dissociation or alertness, as biological data rather than personal shortcomings. Ultimately, Dr. Hoerricks aims to validate the survival labor involved in navigating a world that often ignores the complex architecture of neurodivergent processing.Here’s the link to the source article: https://open.substack.com/pub/autside/p/wh-questions-and-the-cost-of-compression-ccfLet 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

Today’s episode introduces a specialised series by Dr. Jaime Hoerricks titled “WH- Questions and the Cost of Compression,” which investigates the psychological and physical distress caused by basic inquiries. The new series serves as a supportive guide specifically for unsupported adults who experience intense anxiety, paralysis, or confusion when faced with common questions. By prioritising somatic language, Dr. Hoerricks aims to connect the reader's bodily sensations to their mental responses during these moments of emotional flooding. The introduction functions as a gentle warning, encouraging vulnerable individuals to prioritise their own safety and physical comfort whilst engaging with the material. Ultimately, she seeks to reframe these challenges not as personal failures, but as valid reactions to the structural limitations of direct questioning.Here’s the link to the source article: https://open.substack.com/pub/autside/p/wh-questions-and-the-cost-of-compressionLet 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

A dawn reflection on why this next turn is not a detour but a continuation—moving from collapse, precarity, and autistic futurity into the hostile “simple questions” that demand impossible answers from gestalt minds.This morning’s video sits in that strange in-between place—the liminal edge between one body of work ending and another beginning. I recorded it at dawn, with rain outside and that particular quiet that sometimes makes truth easier to hear. After the weight of When the Future Won’t Hold, The Collapse of Futurity, and Priced Out of Personhood, I felt the need to pause long enough to explain the turn that comes next—because from the outside, it may look abrupt. From the inside, it is anything but.April is always difficult for me. “Autism awareness” season tends to bring a flood of flattened narratives, market-friendly scripts, and social media performances that describe autistic life in ways that may be true for someone, somewhere, but rarely hold the full weather system. And for gestalt processors in particular, so much of what gets circulated still misses the interiority. It notices the structure, perhaps. It offers scaffolds. But it does not always capture what it feels like to live inside the arrival of language, panic, context, memory, and meaning all at once. That gap—between representation and reality—has been pressing on me all month.The recent series were not separate from that pressure. They were, in many ways, my answer to it. I wanted to name what so many of us are living under: not simply the emotional experience of uncertainty, but the material conditions that make futurity collapse in the first place. For many autistic people, the future is not something we fail to imagine because we are deficient. It is something structurally withheld. Some are made palatable enough to be folded into capital on acceptable terms. Others are left in precarity, made legible only as surplus, burden, or reserve labour. I know that terrain personally. I’ve lived too close to the edge not to recognise it.And that is precisely why the next turn matters. The coming pieces move toward those so-called “simple questions”—the what, the why, the favourite colour, the seemingly harmless prompts that so often function as tiny gates of legibility. I want to write from inside the weather system of those moments: what it means to be asked for a clean, linear answer when your mind is anchoring in five-dimensional space; what it means when the person asking does not really mean the words they have used; what happens in the body when language arrives as field before part. This next arc is still autotheory. It is still autoethnography. But it is also about the politics of being forced to translate yourself for systems that mistake simplification for truth.There is no disconnect between these themes. Employment, therapy, education, diagnosis, interviews, institutional life—so much of modern survival depends on answering hostile questions in acceptable forms. Every autistic person trying to stay employed is haunted by the possibility of losing that tenuous foothold. Every autistic person shut out of work is haunted by the machinery required to get back in. This next series sits exactly at that threshold. I am not offering neat solutions. I am offering mirrors, windows, and language for an experience too often misread as confusion when it is, in fact, an encounter with systems that demand a false kind of coherence. 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

A rich chat with Cathy on my new paper, category error, echolalia as meaning, and the lifelong cost of being misread. We also touched on The AutSide as script library—and ended with an invitation to her new podcast.This morning’s chat with Cathy felt like a warm, generous pause inside a very full week—a chance not just to mark the publication of my new journal article, When Delay Is Category Error: Gestalt Processing and Misreading Autistic Development, but to name what the piece is really trying to do. We spent time unpacking the phrase category error in grounded, practical terms: what happens when a system uses the wrong tools, the wrong assumptions, or the wrong frame, and then mistakes that mismatch for defect. I found myself reaching for the everyday analogies that make the point plain—a mechanic using the wrong tools, a market that was never built for certain bodies, an assessment battery that was never normed for minds like mine. The through-line was simple: too often, autistic and gestalt-oriented people are not being read incorrectly because we are incoherent, but because the instruments were never fit for purpose in the first place.From there, the conversation moved into language—especially the way scripted or echolalic communication is so often dismissed as empty, rote, or non-communicative when, in fact, it may be densely meaningful. Cathy spoke beautifully about what changes when someone gets curious instead of dismissive: when a repeated phrase is treated not as noise, but as signal. That opened a rich exchange about how behaviourist and functionalist models still shape so much of speech and language practice, reducing communication to an input-output machine. I found myself naming how often the real question is never asked: what does this mean? Not in the narrow sense of literal correspondence, but in the deeper sense of function, pattern, power, and threat. That is where the PTMF keeps returning for me—not as an abstraction, but as a way of understanding why a child might flee into a bathroom request, a script, or a familiar phrase under pressure. The issue is rarely refusal. More often, it is response to threat in a system that has mistaken escalation for readiness.What I appreciated most is that we were able to widen the frame beyond child language alone. We touched on motor planning, developmental timing, the false siloing of autistic traits into separate therapies, and the lifelong cost of being continuously misread. I spoke a bit about my own body—being labelled clumsy, struggling in sports that others assumed should come naturally, and later finding out that what looked chaotic from the outside was often just a different route to coherence. We also landed, as we often do, on the role of my writing itself. The AutSide came up not just as a publication, but as a kind of external script library—a place where I can park long-form meaning so it doesn’t vanish under the demand for immediate speech. That felt important. It named something true about why I write the way I do, and why the long form is not indulgence for me, but access.And then, in the loveliest turn, Cathy invited me to be a guest on her new podcast, Gimme Five. I was genuinely delighted—and immensely flattered. It felt like a natural extension of the conversation we’ve been building across these weeks: themes folding back into one another, each chat opening onto the next. There was something quietly affirming in the way the conversation ended—not with closure, exactly, but with continuity. The paper is out in the world now. The book is still coming. And the work, as ever, keeps weaving.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

Today’s episode explores the unsettling transition autistic individuals face when they reach adulthood. The author of the source article, Dr. Jaime Hoerricks, highlights a shift in the commercial and clinical perspective of neurodivergence, moving from a child-focused investment in potential to a focus on managing liability. Whilst childhood is characterised by expensive interventions and the pursuit of “normalcy,” turning eighteen often marks a change where hope is replaced by bureaucratic sorting. Dr. Hoerricks suggests that the extensive documentation collected during youth can ultimately be weaponised against the individual once they are no longer viewed as profitable. This transition reveals the cold reality of a market-driven healthcare system that prioritises potential returns over the long-term well-being of adults.Here’s the link to the source article: https://open.substack.com/pub/autside/p/priced-out-of-personhood-when-theLet 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

Today’s episode explores how autistic visibility has been transformed into a marketable aesthetic that prioritises profit over genuine inclusion. The author of the source article, Dr. Jaime Hoerricks, argues that society only embraces neurodivergence when it is socially desirable, “edgy,” or visually appealing, effectively turning a medical and social identity into a branded performance. This selective acceptance creates a new hierarchy where those who do not fit a profitable image are further marginalised and ignored. By filtering personhood through the lens of commercial appeal, the market sanitises the lived experience of autism to make it more palatable for consumption. Ultimately, Dr. Hoerricks questions who is left behind when authenticity is reduced to a mere content strategy or a stylish trend.Here’s the link to the source article: https://open.substack.com/pub/autside/p/priced-out-of-personhood-autism-asLet 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

Today’s episode explores the necessity of defining autistic liberation outside the restrictive framework of economic value. The author of the source article, Dr. Jaime Hoerricks, argues that current societal structures only view neurodivergent individuals as financial burdens, projects in need of fixing, or specialised tools for productivity. By moving beyond this “market imagination,” the writing seeks to establish a worldview where human personhood is not tied to a ledger. Instead of merely criticising existing harms, Dr. Hoerricks advocates for creating new social spaces rooted in authentic connection and self-defined meaning. Ultimately, she challenges readers to envision a life where dignity is inherent rather than something that must be earned through utility.Here’s the link to the source article: https://open.substack.com/pub/autside/p/priced-out-of-personhood-beyond-theLet 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

Today’s episode critiques the modern support industry for neurodivergent individuals, arguing that many services prioritise institutional conformity over genuine well-being. The author of the source article, Dr. Jaime Hoerricks, suggests that programs labeled as therapy or education often function as tools for norm enforcement, masking their demand for compliance behind a veneer of care. By using gentle language like “skills” and “readiness,” these systems can obscure their true goal of making autistic people more tolerable to society rather than helping them flourish. Whilst acknowledging that some practitioners do authentic and humane work, Dr. Hoerricks warns that much of the available assistance is actually a mechanism of control. This perspective highlights the dangerous disconnect between superficial clinical goals and the actual needs of the person receiving help.Here’s the link to the source article: https://open.substack.com/pub/autside/p/priced-out-of-personhood-the-industryLet 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

Today’s episode critiques how the phrase “no evidence” is weaponised within institutional systems to silence marginalised perspectives and maintain the status quo. The author of the source article, Dr. Jaime Hoerricks, argues that scientific or academic absence is rarely a neutral discovery, but rather a result of deliberate choices regarding what receives funding and which metrics are valued. By prioritising specific hierarchies of knowledge, these systems effectively manufacture a lack of data to dismiss lived experiences as mere anecdote. Ultimately, Dr. Hoerricks suggests that what is labeled as rigorous truth is often just the byproduct of organised omission. This process serves to protect existing structures by ignoring realities that the current methodologies are not designed to see.Here’s the link to the source article: https://open.substack.com/pub/autside/p/priced-out-of-personhood-no-evidenceLet 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

Today’s episode explores how modern institutions and markets struggle to accommodate individuals who process information through gestalt or holistic thinking. The author of the source article, Dr. Jaime Hoerricks, argues that systems like education and healthcare are designed to segment human development into measurable parts, small tasks, and billable interventions. This structural preference favours minds that follow a linear, predictable path, effectively marginalising those who perceive the world as a unified whole rather than a collection of fragments. Consequently, people whose cognitive styles prioritise integration and circular learning are often labeled as inconsistent because they cannot be easily quantified or invoiced. Ultimately, Dr. Hoerricks critiques a society that values mechanical progress over the complex reality of diverse neurological experiences.Here’s the link to the source article: https://open.substack.com/pub/autside/p/priced-out-of-personhood-the-mindsLet 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

Today’s episode marks a return to the NotebookLM summaries. It explores how economic logic often supersedes the human experience of autism. The author of the source article, Dr. Jaime Hoerricks, argues that society tends to view autistic individuals through the lens of financial cost and social burden rather than seeking to understand their true identity. This perspective shifts the focus toward measuring potential expenses and the labour required for management instead of fostering genuine connection. By prioritising market-driven metrics, the current system treats neurodivergence as a disruption to efficiency that must be optimised or mitigated. Ultimately, Dr. Hoerricks highlights how the dehumanising process of pricing a person’s existence replaces the recognition of their inherent personhood.Here’s the link to the source article: https://open.substack.com/pub/autside/p/priced-out-of-personhood-openingLet 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

In this week’s conversation with Cathy, I unpack why “developmental delay” is often a category error—less a truth about the child than a reflection of assessment systems built to misread autistic gestalt development.Today’s conversation with Cathy centred on the core question behind my forthcoming paper, When Delay Is a Category Error: what do we really mean when we call a child “delayed?” I wanted to make clear that developmental delay is not a neutral label. It is a judgment produced inside a system built around normative timelines, behavioural expectations, and assessment tools that were never designed with autistic gestalt processors in mind. We talked through how children are so often misread by that system—first labelled with developmental delay, then autism, then later reclassified again as speech-language impaired or specific learning disabled—not because their cognition has changed, but because the system keeps changing the story it tells about what it sees.I also spoke from the vantage point of my work in special education, where I get to look longitudinally across years of data and begin to see patterns that shorter, more fragmented systems miss. By the time many of these students reach me in high school, the paperwork may say one thing, but the pattern says another. I see scripting, echolalia, panic around WH-questions, and all the familiar signs of gestalt processing that were missed, dismissed, or explained away years earlier. That is part of why this paper matters so much to me. It is not simply an academic exercise. It is an attempt to speak directly to the people who design and validate the assessment instruments themselves, and to ask a very basic question of validity: does this tool actually do what it claims to do?We also moved into something even broader—my argument that gestalt processing is not just a language issue, but an architecture of being. I talked about Stage 0 not as a one-time childhood phase, but as something that recurs throughout life whenever a new context demands new scripts: a new job, a new role, a public office, a courtroom, a relationship, a profession. The real question, then, is not simply how long Stage 0 should take in a child. The real question is whether our systems allow for Stage 0 at all—especially in adulthood. How much time does a workplace give you to gather language? How much grace does a profession give you before it pathologises your quietness as incompetence, avoidance, or failure?By the end of the conversation, we widened the lens further still. These assessments, these norms, these so-called evidence-based systems are not merely flawed. They are historical sorting mechanisms. They were built to classify, rank, exclude, and decide who belongs where. That is why this work has never been just about autism diagnosis in the narrow sense. It is about the politics of legibility—who gets to count as developing correctly, who gets marked as deviant, and who gets forced to live under categories that were never made to describe them. And as always, I returned to the practice that matters most to me as a teacher: whatever label sits at the top of the paperwork, I want to support the child in front of me as they actually are. Not as a category. Not as a deficit. As themselves.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

A threshold before Priced Out of Personhood—bridging When the Future Won’t Hold into the systems beneath it. If the last series named collapsed futurity, this one asks what made it material, and who profits when life becomes cost.Before this next series begins, I wanted to stop here for a moment at the threshold between what I’ve just finished and what I’m about to begin.Because I don’t think I’m done with When the Future Won’t Hold.That series was never only about despair. It was about collapsed futurity—what it means to live in a world where the future no longer arrives as shelter, invitation, or recognisable shape. It was about what happens when there are no mirrors in which to see yourself becoming, and no windows through which to imagine a life that can actually hold.But when I reached the end of that series, one question was still standing there waiting for me:Not just what does this collapse feel like?But what produces it?This video is a prelude to Priced Out of Personhood, the series that follows that question deeper.If When the Future Won’t Hold explored the lived experience of withheld futurity, Priced Out of Personhood turns toward the machinery underneath it—the policies, institutions, economic logics, and moral vocabularies that make continuity increasingly fragile for so many of us. Housing, healthcare, education, disability support, debt, labour, and the broader cost of survival do not sit outside that collapse. They are often the conditions that produce it.For autistic people, disabled people, poor people, trans people, carers, students, and anyone living inside permanent precarity, the future does not always fail to hold because we are pessimistic. Sometimes it fails to hold because the structures around us have been organised in ways that make continuity materially difficult. When care becomes conditional, support becomes negotiable, and human need is constantly translated into overhead, burden, or liability, the future contracts.This next series begins there.It asks what happens when a world becomes so organised around extraction that it can no longer recognise life outside the ledger. It asks how personhood itself becomes conditional on profitability, legibility, and compliance. And it asks what it means to refuse a system that counts us before it knows us.If you’ve been with me through When the Future Won’t Hold, this is not a departure. It is the next layer of the same question.We are not leaving the grief behind.We are following it into structure. 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

A closing reflection on collapse, grief, autistic futurity, and the lies we were sold about planning, stability, and success—ending not in despair, but in the stubborn work of building smaller, truer futures together.This video closes When the Future Won’t Hold by naming what the series was really trying to do. I was never writing about uncertainty in the abstract. I was trying to speak to a condition many of us already live inside—especially autistic people, especially gestalt processors, especially those of us whose minds, bodies, and ways of knowing were never fully reflected by the world around us. What happens when the promises we were handed stop working? What happens when the future we were told to build cannot actually hold our labour, our needs, our truth, or our lives? This series has been my attempt to sit with those questions honestly—not to manufacture reassurance, but to clear enough space for a more honest kind of possibility.Across these pieces, I have been trying to name something larger than personal anxiety. The collapse I am describing is not only emotional or internal. It is material, political, economic, and infrastructural. Wages stagnate whilst purchasing power collapses. The cost of reaching work becomes its own form of extraction. Housing, transport, insurance, food, schooling, medical care—every threshold now charges admission. Even the road becomes a toll booth. For autistic people, and particularly for those of us asked to survive inside systems that already misread us, this is not simply stress. It is the lived reality of being told to plan for futures that were never designed to include us in the first place.There is also a deeper autistic grief running underneath the whole series. Not just that the future becomes hard to imagine, but that many of us were never given enough mirrors or windows to know what kind of future would actually fit. When the sanctioned script collapses, there may be no reliable replacement—no culturally approved pathway, no stable script, no inherited map. That absence has consequences. It leaves behind grief for lost timelines, for deferred recognition, for careers built on self-erasure, for institutions that promised safety and delivered sorting instead. Part of what these essays and recordings have been doing is making room for that grief without pretending it is the end of the story. We cannot build honestly on top of false promises and call it hope.And yet this series is not about despair. It is about refusing counterfeit hope. It is about seeing clearly, naming clearly, and asking what remains when institutional promises fail. If the official future will not hold, then perhaps the task is not to keep begging entry into it. Perhaps the task is to build smaller and truer—to make room for relational, local, communal forms of life that can actually sustain us. For me, that has meant writing as a form of delayed echolalia, as self-support, as script-making in a time without reliable scripts. It has also meant recognising the people who meet me there. When there are no mirrors and no windows, sometimes the work is to become one for each other—to make enough shared light that something livable can finally be seen.If the future they sold us will not hold, then let it fail. We were never meant to survive by forcing ourselves into a shape built by systems that do not know us and do not love us. We survive by recognising one another, by telling the truth about what is happening, and by building what can actually hold. 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 this solo episode, I explore why “developmental delay” is often less a neutral description than a category error—one that misreads autistic gestalt processors through analytic tools that were never built to see them.This week’s episode is a solo one. No Cathy, no squirrel, no familiar back-and-forth before the camera starts rolling. And in some ways, as much as I miss my friend and usual co-host, that feels right for what I’m trying to name here, because this is one of those recognitions that has been building quietly in the background of my work for a long time—something I have been noticing as a special educator, IEP case manager, and autistic gestalt processor, until the pattern became too clear to ignore.What I’ve been seeing in longitudinal student data is not just a series of individual cases, but a recurring pathway. Many children are first identified under developmental delay, then later reclassified as autistic, and then—especially in girls—reclassified again as having a specific learning disability once they become more socially legible to the adults around them. They make a friend. They begin chatting. They look less obviously autistic to people trained to see only one kind of autism. By the time I meet many of them in high school, the paperwork is settled. But what I often find beneath that record is not simple delay. I find gestalt processing.That is the core of this episode: the idea that delay is not a neutral term. It sounds objective, but it is built on assumptions—assumptions about sequence, about timing, about what counts as evidence, and about what language is supposed to look like when it develops “properly.” If the assessment framework assumes language must move from part to whole, then a child whose language develops from whole to part will almost always be misread. What looks like absence may actually be architecture. What gets called deficit may be coherence the system was never trained to see.In this video, I talk through the thinking behind a new paper I’ve just written, When Delay Is a Category Error. The question underneath it is both clinical and ethical: what if many of the things we call developmental delay are not delays at all, but category errors—misreadings produced by instruments that are measuring the wrong thing, in the wrong way, under the wrong conditions? What if the diagnosis is telling us more about the framework than it is about the child?I also spend time with what happens when schools and clinicians mistake performance under pressure for actual capacity. Gestalt processors can be full of meaning long before they are test-friendly. Language may be present in scripts, in affective anchors, in stored phrases, in atmospheres, in delayed retrieval, in forms that do not reveal themselves on command. When a child cannot show what they know in a stripped-down, decontextualised testing moment, that does not automatically mean the knowledge is not there. Sometimes it means the environment has made it inaccessible.And that matters because the harm is not just descriptive. Once a child is named as delayed, the system often proceeds as though the interpretive work is finished. Their scripts are treated as noise. Their actual meaning gets interrupted. Their way of organising language is rendered illegible unless it can imitate the preferred form. Over time, that does not just distort assessment. It teaches the child that their own coherence does not count.So this episode is part field note, part argument, and part threshold into the paper itself. It is about the limits of our instruments, the politics of what gets counted as development, and the cost of forcing autistic and gestalt-organised children into frameworks that were never built to recognise them. Sometimes delay is real. But sometimes what is being named is not the child’s absence. Sometimes it is the system’s failure to perceive the mind in front of it. 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

A video introduction to When the Future Won’t Hold—why this series is arriving now, why it must be poem-first and auto-theoretical, and what it means to name the collapse of futurity without flattening it into crisis.This video is a threshold piece—an opening hand before the series begins in earnest. I wanted to speak directly, in my own voice, because When the Future Won’t Hold enters difficult terrain, and I did not want that terrain flattened by automation, sanitised by summary tools, or mistaken for melodrama. This series moves through states that psychiatry often names poorly—burnout, collapse, passive suicidality, the collapse of futurity—but it does so from inside lived experience, not from the outside language of compliance, surveillance, or forced optimism. It is not a performance of crisis. It is an act of witness.At the heart of the video is a simple but devastating question: what happens when the future stops functioning as a believable structure? I speak about this both personally and professionally—as an autistic educator holding space for students whose lives have been reorganised in real time by political and economic decisions beyond their control. The promises they were handed at the start of secondary school—college, loans, deferment, a workable path forward—have been quietly revoked. And when the terms of survival change this abruptly, the damage is not only financial. It is existential. It alters meaning itself. This series names that rupture as a collapse of futurity: the moment when planning no longer feels like hope, but like contact with a door that has been bricked up whilst you were still walking toward it.The video also explains the form of the series. These pieces are arriving poem-first because that is how they came to me—whole, lyrical, fielded before they were analysable. As a gestalt processor, I often receive meaning before I can dissect it. So the poem comes to me first, then the field notes, then the analysis, then the introduction. That is not an aesthetic gimmick. It is the architecture of the mind doing the work honestly. There is very little formal research for what I am trying to name here, so this series sits in the space of autotheory: lived experience in dialogue with frameworks like PTMF, Glasser’s Choice Theory, kairos and chronos, and the political conditions shaping our nervous systems in real time.And perhaps most importantly, the video makes clear what the series is for. Not to romanticise despair. Not to produce inspiration porn. Not to turn difficult inner states into evidence against the people living them. Its purpose is to create language where there has been silence—to offer scripts for states that many autistic and gestalt-processing people know intimately, but rarely see named without punishment or pathologisation. It is an offering of company. A way of saying: if the thread between now and later has gone slack for you, too, you are not the only one. And until we build the fuller commons we need, this is one small place to begin. 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

Today’s episode advocates for a broader understanding of gestalt language processing that extends beyond early childhood intervention. Whilst identifying these unique linguistic patterns in youth has helped families move away from deficit-based models, Dr. Jaime Hoerricks argues in the source article that the medical field often neglects the adult experience. Individuals who process information in this holistic manner continue to navigate employment, relationships, and burnout long after they outgrow pediatric services. Therefore, the professional community must evolve to support the entire lifespan of gestalt processors rather than focusing solely on developmental delays. By acknowledging that these cognitive architectures persist into maturity, society can better respect the diverse ways adults continue to make meaning in the world.Here’s the link to the source article: https://open.substack.com/pub/autside/p/reading-between-worlds-gestalt-growsLet 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

Today’s episode challenges the conventional view of personal development as a linear progression or a series of measurable milestones. The author of the source article, Dr. Jaime Hoerricks, argues that traditional metaphors for success, such as ladders and rubrics, fail to capture the complex reality of how individuals actually grow. Instead of focusing on upward mobility and quantifiable goals, Dr. Hoerricks proposes a “Meaning Map” that prioritises internal patterns and relational insights. This perspective suggests that true maturity is found in the changing shape of understanding rather than standardised performance metrics. Ultimately, she advocates for a spatial and recursive approach to self-discovery that honors the messy, non-linear nature of the human experience.Here’s the link to the source article: https://open.substack.com/pub/autside/p/reading-between-worlds-the-meaningLet 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

A conversation with Cathy on masking as survival architecture—voice, burnout, safety, and the long cost of becoming legible. For gestalt processors, the child who scripts grows up. The field must learn to recognise the adult.This morning’s conversation with Cathy felt like a continuation of the week’s deeper current—a spoken companion to the pieces I’ve been writing about masking, burnout, and the long cost of surviving in systems that never really wanted minds like ours. We began with masking, but what emerged was not the tidy, flattened version people often mean by that word. What surfaced instead was the gestalt mask: not just social performance, but the accumulated architecture of tone, rhythm, language, and self-suppression. For many of us, especially as adult gestalt processors, masking is not a childhood relic. It grows up with us. It becomes more sophisticated, more situational, more expensive.I found myself naming what autistic burnout actually feels like from inside that reality. Not a sudden crash after one bad week, but a slow, structural depletion—a lifetime of borrowing against the future to get through the present. The metaphor that came out in the conversation felt painfully true: many autistic adults of my generation are borrowing spoons from the next century just to survive today. That is part of why burnout in autistic and gestalt lives does not resolve in the neat neurotypical way people often imagine. It is not simply a matter of taking a break or having a holiday. The strain is cumulative, embedded in memory, in threat, in the body’s long history of learning what it costs to be visibly different.We also moved into something more personal and more revealing: voice. I spoke about how I learned very early that it was not enough to mask behaviour—I had to mask what I sounded like. In a childhood where being heard was not welcomed, and in school where difference was quickly punished, I learned to go quiet first. I listened. I gathered scripts. I studied tone, pace, and intonation before speaking. That became part of the script garden—an adaptive repertoire built not out of vanity, but necessity. I learned to sound less Scottish, less marked, less targetable. And later, in professional and media contexts, that same pattern reappeared: the pressure to sound neutral, acceptable, employable, legible. Not because it was more true, but because it was safer.What mattered in that part of the conversation was being able to name this without collapsing into shame. I do not experience those adaptations as fraud. I experience them as survival. As responses to power, threat, and material reality. I wanted to eat. I wanted to keep a roof over my family’s head. I wanted to move through institutions that tie dignity, healthcare, and security to performance. In that context, the mask is not a moral failing. It is often the least-worst choice available.And from there we widened the frame into what I think is one of the most important truths running through all of this work: if you are a whole-to-part person, you are whole-to-part everywhere. Gestalt processing does not stop at language acquisition. It is not something that ends once a child reaches “functional speech” or fluent grammar. It shapes how we enter new environments, how we learn professional cultures, how we write, how we teach, how we fall in love, how we sense incoherence, how we leave. I talked about that Stage Zero I know so well—the initial silence in any new context, the period of gathering scripts, listening for the language of the room, mapping the field before I can fully move inside it. That is not hesitation. It is architecture.By the end, what the conversation really became was a refusal of the field’s narrowness. Too much of the conversation around GLP still treats it as a childhood language phenomenon, as though the child who scripts disappears once the grammar looks polished enough. But the adult remains. The architecture remains. The whole-to-part orientation remains—in speech, in work, in love, in art, in survival. And if the field continues to recognise gestalt only in children, it will keep misunderstanding the adults those children become, especially when we have become eloquent enough to hide in plain sight.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

Today’s episode explores the complexities of returning to a former life or career after experiencing a significant personal break. The author of the source article, Dr. Jaime Hoerricks, critiques society’s preference for neat, redemptive narratives that frame recovery as a simple journey back to the status quo. In reality, what is often labeled as healing or reintegration serves merely as a way for institutions to regain access to an individual’s productivity without making meaningful changes. Dr. Hoerricks suggests that true self-preservation may require a total refusal to return, especially when re-entry demands the loss of one's identity. Ultimately, she challenges the idea that a courageous comeback is always the healthiest or most coherent path forward.Here’s the link to the source article: https://open.substack.com/pub/autside/p/reading-between-worlds-return-orLet 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

Today’s episode examines the diagnostic nature of personal collapse, arguing that a breakdown is often a response to an unsustainable life arrangement. Rather than viewing a rupture as a spontaneous failure, the author of the source article, Dr. Jaime Hoerricks, suggests it marks the moment when a person can no longer falsify their own reality to fit societal expectations. Whilst acknowledging the profound grief and practical loss associated with burnout, Dr. Hoerricks warns against merely pathologising these moments. Instead, she positions these crises as vital signals that occur when a social narrative stops aligning with an individual's internal truth. Ultimately, she highlights how a system’s failure reveals the hidden costs of maintaining a facade that has become self-destructive.Here’s the link to the source article: https://open.substack.com/pub/autside/p/reading-between-worlds-rupture-isLet 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

Today’s episode examines how modern institutions often mistake an individual’s internal suppression of their needs for genuine personal resilience. The author of the source article, Dr. Jaime Hoerricks, argues that schools and workplaces prioritise neurodivergent people who are easy to manage and least disruptive to the established status quo. Consequently, common professional praise regarding a person’s “high level of functioning” often acts as a mask for the exhaustion and adaptation occurring beneath the surface. Dr. Hoerricks suggests that being labeled as low-maintenance is frequently a sign of institutional relief rather than a reflection of an individual’s actual well-being. Ultimately, she highlights the dangerous disconnect between outward professional success and the internal collapse experienced by those forced to minimise their own identities.Here’s the link to the source article: https://open.substack.com/pub/autside/p/reading-between-worlds-the-socialLet 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

Today’s episode explores the exhausting labour of navigating cultural and linguistic differences within professional and personal spheres. The author of the source article, Dr. Jaime Hoerricks, argues that true translation involves much more than swapping words; it is a complex act of bridging worlds that can often feel like a forced performance. When individuals are pressured to soften their reality to suit the comfort of dominant groups, communication transforms from a tool for clarity into a method of social control. Consequently, professional success is frequently measured by how much a person is willing to edit their identity for others. Ultimately, Dr. Hoerricks challenges the simplified view of translation, highlighting the hidden emotional burden of constant mediation.Here’s the link to the source article: https://open.substack.com/pub/autside/p/reading-between-worlds-teaching-inLet 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

Today’s episode explores the common misconception that verbal eloquence is synonymous with immediate self-awareness. The author of the source article, Dr. Jaime Hoerricks, argues that so-called “high-functioning adults” often perform a false transparency, leading others to believe that their internal emotions are as easily accessed as their spoken words. Instead of viewing “delayed processing” or unconventional communication as a medical issue, we should recognise these indirect routes as legitimate ways to achieve personal coherence. By accepting non-linear reactions and bodily signals without shame, individuals can foster deeper self-trust rather than conforming to rigid societal expectations of transparency. Ultimately, Dr. Hoerricks challenges the narrow definition of fluency by highlighting that the most profound truths often emerge through metaphor and solitude rather than instant analysis.Here’s the link to the source article: https://autside.substack.com/publish/post/191405001Let 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

Today’s episode explores how traditional reflective practices often fail neurodivergent individuals by forcing them to translate complex internal states into standardised language. These conventional systems frequently prioritise institutional productivity and emotional self-regulation, rewarding those who can package their distress in palatable, professional ways. The author of the source article, Dr. Jaime Hoerricks, argues that such expectations ignore the nonlinear sensory experiences of autistic adults and act as a hidden demand for neurotypical behaviour. Consequently, she advocates for the Power Threat Meaning Framework as a more supportive alternative. This approach shifts the focus from internal management to understanding how external power dynamics and survival strategies shape a person’s lived experience.Here’s the link to the source article: https://open.substack.com/pub/autside/p/reading-between-worlds-this-is-notLet 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

Today’s episode concludes a series that reinterprets autistic diagnostic criteria through the framework of gestalt processing. The author of the source article and poem, Dr. Jaime Hoerricks, explains that the writing style intentionally uses a recursive structure rather than a traditional linear argument. By frequently revisiting core concepts and metaphors, Dr. Hoerricks aims to stabilise meaning for readers who process information through pattern recognition and synthesis. This unconventional approach reflects the internal architecture of a gestalt mind, where coherence is achieved through multiple perspectives rather than a single progression. Ultimately, her piece serves as a transition from theoretical mapping to a practical Field Guide for understanding neurodivergent cognition.Here’s the link to the source article: https://open.substack.com/pub/autside/p/internal-architecture-preparing-theLet 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

The DSM records autistic behaviour like field notes, but mistakes surface for source. In this conversation, I trace how gestalt processing hides in plain sight—and why translation, not correction, is the work that comes next.This morning’s conversation with Cathy began, as good conversations often do, with a joke about time. Holidays, time zones, daylight saving, the usual petty tyrannies of chronology. I briefly proposed a better system: that the world abandon Greenwich and adopt Jamie Mean Time instead—based upon my house’s location in the world. It was playful, but also accidentally apt. So much of what I am writing right now is about exactly that collision—between institutional time and lived time, between systems that demand synchrony and minds that arrive by ripening. Even the banter landed inside the work. It usually does.From there, we went straight into the week’s real subject: the DSM, autism, and the way gestalt language processing sits inside diagnostic language like a ghost in the machinery. I found myself returning to a question I have been asked before—how I could once have been diagnosed under DSM-IV in a category defined partly by “intact” language, and later be folded into DSM-5 ASD with language support needs. On the surface, that sounds contradictory. But only if you mistake output for architecture. My outward “fluency” was never evidence of simple or effortless language. It was adaptation. It was scripting. It was compensation. It was decades of building enough bridges to appear articulate in public. The system saw the performance and called it capacity. Later, the category changed, and suddenly the same underlying reality could be named differently. Not because I changed—but because the filing cabinet did.That became the real centre of the conversation. I am less interested in saying the DSM is wholly wrong than in pointing out what it accidentally reveals. What psychiatry has produced, over decades, is a vast archive of behavioural field notes. Repetitive speech. Echolalia. Unusual prosody. Pragmatic delay. Context-skewed responses. Processing pauses. Social misfires. They have described the smoke in extraordinary detail whilst refusing to ask what kind of fire makes it. The DSM documents what comes out of the body. It does not meaningfully interrogate the cognition that produces it. And that is precisely where my current writing is trying to intervene. Not by discarding the observations, but by translating them. The manual says repetitive behaviour. I say captured language, gestalt retrieval, meaning under load. The manual says pragmatic impairment. I say a mind building the bridge before it can cross. Same event. Different lens. Different politics.We talked about what this looks like in lived life, which is where the theory always matters most. I spoke about childhood scripts—the lines that surfaced when I did not yet have a “right” answer of my own, the borrowed fragments that adults treated as evasive or inappropriate rather than meaningful. Cathy brought in the clinician’s version of what attunement can look like when it is done properly: not merely labelling a child’s speech as repetitive, but listening for melody, provenance, pattern, source. Where did that line come from? Whose voice is it carrying? What meaning is the child attempting to reach with the material they have? That distinction matters more than most people realise. It is the difference between surveillance and curiosity. Between classification and relationship. Between being studied and being understood.I also found myself returning to one of the analogies that has been organising this whole series for me: trolley versus cart. If you are looking for the wrong word, you will conclude the object is missing. If you enter a culture, a classroom, or a neurotype without the translation key, you will misread what is right in front of you and then call the other person deficient for failing to match your assumptions. That is what I am trying to do with this work. Not defend the DSM. Not redeem psychiatry. But translate. They say this. I say that. They call it repetitive behaviour. I call it echolalia in plain sight. They call it pragmatic difficulty. I call it a processing ecology they have never bothered to map. They are not always describing the wrong thing. They are often describing the right thing in the wrong language.By the end of the conversation, the horizon widened. We were no longer only talking about children, or speech, or diagnostic criteria. We were talking about what happens when gestalt grows up. That remains one of the most urgent absences in the field. The child who scripts is legible to clinicians. The adult who has become eloquent is often treated as if the underlying architecture has vanished. But eloquence does not erase architecture. The adult who appears articulate may still be translating in real time, still paying a processing tax, still requiring the right relational field before language can safely arrive. I said it plainly because it remains true: it took me fifty-five years—and the right host, the right pace, the right sense of safety—to be able to have conversations like this in public. That is not evidence of brokenness. It is evidence of what becomes possible when demand lowers and trust rises.That is where the work is heading now. The current DSM writing is becoming less a standalone critique and more a threshold—a bridge into the larger project. Into Reading Between Worlds. Into the field guide. Into the Power Threat Meaning Framework as a way of understanding not only how gestalt minds process language, but how we make meaning under pressure, how rupture becomes data, how burnout becomes a map, how years of surviving analytic systems leave behind whole geographies of caution and adaptation. If the field only studies the child’s scripts and never the adult’s meaning maps, it will continue to misunderstand both. And if we keep treating rupture as failure rather than information, we will keep sending people back into the same scene of injury without translation, without preparation, and without care.What I felt most strongly by the end of the call was that the shape is there now. Not finished, not tidy, not market-ready in the silly way that word is usually meant. But present. Organic. Coherent. The conversation confirmed what this week’s writing has already been telling me: this is no longer just a series of essays about diagnostic language. It is becoming a method. A way of reading across worlds. A way of showing that what institutions record as deficit often begins as signal. A way of insisting that the child’s gestalt, the adult’s burnout, the delayed response, the strange phrase, the sideways answer, the need for more time—all of it is data. All of it has architecture. All of it belongs in the record.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

Today’s episode explores the tension between external observations and internal cognition within the context of autism. The author of the source article, Dr. Jaime Hoerricks, argues that traditional diagnostic standards primarily document visible behavioural patterns rather than the underlying neurological architecture of the individual. By examining the concept of gestalt language processing, Dr. Hoerricks suggests that what clinicians label as social or linguistic deficits are actually reflections of distinct cognitive structures. She posits that modern institutions fail to understand neurodivergence when they treat communication styles as mere behaviours to be corrected. Ultimately, her writing advocates for a shift toward valuing the deeper mental frameworks that define how autistic individuals perceive and interact with the world.Here’s the link to the source article: https://autside.substack.com/publish/post/190541069Let 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

Today’s episode explores the internal cognitive labour experienced by gestalt processors when they attempt to communicate with those who use analytic language systems. Whilst analytic thinkers develop ideas through linear steps, gestalt processors perceive information as a unified, whole pattern that requires a complex process of translation to be shared. This translation involves breaking down a complete mental image into a sequential narrative, which imposes a heavy cognitive load on the speaker. Despite the resulting speech appearing fluent and coherent to the listener, the mental effort required to bridge these two different architectures of thought remains entirely hidden. Consequently, the source article highlights a diagnostic blind spot where successful outward communication masks the intense invisible work performed by the processor.Here’s the link to the source article: https://open.substack.com/pub/autside/p/internal-architecture-when-speechLet 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

Today’s episode examines how some autistic individuals process language, specifically challenging the traditional view of ‘literal thinking.’ Rather than a permanent deficit, the author of the source article, Dr. Jaime Hoerricks, suggests that ‘literalism’ is an initial phase of a complex cognitive process that requires time to build associative patterns. Using the example of a common idiom, her essay illustrates the disconnect that occurs when a child encounters figurative speech without an established mental bridge to its intended meaning. This perspective frames the struggle with metaphors as a byproduct of a gestalt system still organizing information. Ultimately, her essay explores the internal architecture of the mind and why non-literal concepts often arrive at a later stage of development.Here’s the link to the source article: https://open.substack.com/pub/autside/p/internal-architecture-literal-thinkingLet 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

Today’s episode explores the concept of echolalia, challenging the common clinical view that it is merely a form of meaningless repetition. The author of the source article, Dr. Jaime Hoerricks, suggests that these vocal echoes represent internal architecture for gestalt processors, who use preserved phrases as foundational units of communication. Instead of viewing repeated dialogue as a behavioural quirk of autism, Dr. Hoerricks argues that these words carry deep emotional context and historical memory. By analysing how children and adults utilise stored language, she highlights a transition from using rigid, whole patterns toward achieving future linguistic flexibility. Ultimately, her essay suggests that repetitive speech serves as a vital tool for navigating and expressing complex meaning.Here’s the link to the source article: https://open.substack.com/pub/autside/p/internal-architecture-echolalia-isLet 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

Today’s episode examines the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) through a linguistic framework to offer a fresh perspective on autistic communication. Rather than viewing these specific speech patterns as inherent flaws, the author of the source article, Dr. Jaime Hoerricks, interprets them as indicators of a gestalt processing system. Dr. Hoerricks compares the process of medical diagnosis to cartography, noting that clinicians have historically mapped out visible behaviours from an external viewpoint. By analysing recurring “traits” like literal interpretations and formal speech, she suggests that these markers reveal the internal architecture of how meaning is constructed. Ultimately, her essay encourages readers to move beyond a deficit-based model to understand the structural logic behind neurodivergent language.Here’s the link to the source article: https://autside.substack.com/publish/post/190430971Let 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

Today’s episode explores the fundamental disconnect between clinical observations and the internal reality of neurodivergent individuals. The author of the source article, Dr. Jaime Hoerricks argues that current diagnostic frameworks focus strictly on external behaviours, such as social skills or specific interests, rather than the underlying cognitive architecture. By using the metaphor of a map and territory, Dr. Hoerricks suggests that medical labels often fail to capture the actual language processing and structural depth of an autistic person’s experience. The setting of a sterile clinic serves to highlight how standardised criteria can reduce a complex life to a simple checklist of symptoms. Ultimately, she advocates for a deeper understanding of gestalt processing to reveal the invisible structures that drive human language.Here’s the link to the source article: https://autside.substack.com/publish/post/190426255?r=1d2z7x&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=trueLet 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

Today’s episode serves as an introduction to a collection of essays by Dr. Jaime Hoerricks, which explores the unique internal landscape of gestalt cognition. Dr. Hoerricks utilises a blend of autotheory and autoethnography to lay the intellectual foundation for a future field guide centered on pattern-first thinking. By rejecting traditional academic boundaries, her piece seeks to validate lived experiences that do not fit into rigid, analytical categories. Ultimately, her work functions as a preliminary mapping of a mind that prioritises holistic connections over linear logic. This approach ensures the forthcoming guide is rooted in a genuine understanding of the cognitive terrain it intends to describe.Here’s the link to the source article: https://open.substack.com/pub/autside/p/before-the-field-guide-notes-fromLet 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

My first test of Substack’s Recording Studio—a little rough at the start, but useful. A quick preview of Interior Architecture: reading the DSM not as deficit inventory, but as a record of gestalt traces hidden in plain sight.From Asperger’s to Architecture: Rethinking Language, Severity, and Self. (A reflection on diagnosis, gestalt processing, and the limits of psychiatric description)This was my first experiment with Substack’s new Recording Studio—a quick solo check-in, a little field test before the real work begins. I discovered almost immediately that it has one mildly maddening flaw: there is no visible countdown timer, so there is not really a clear way to know exactly when the recording starts. As a result, the very beginning of what I said was clipped. A fittingly chaotic little introduction, perhaps, for a piece about systems that never quite tell you when the real thing has already begun.Still, there was something useful in the roughness of it. This was not Sunday Mornings with Jaime & Cathy, nor a polished audio companion, nor one of my more deliberately staged readings. It was simply me, in the cold wilds of the California mountains, trying out a new bit of tech and using that small opening to sketch the shape of what is coming next. Sometimes that is enough. Sometimes the preview is its own kind of text.What emerged, in that brief unscripted window, was less a formal argument than a declaration of intent. I wanted to mark the beginning of a new series—Interior Architecture—and to say plainly what I think I am doing there. I am not moving away from autism. I am moving inward through it. Not toward behaviour, but toward structure. Not toward the surface description of what autistic people do, but toward the architecture of how meaning forms.At the heart of the video is a distinction I have been circling for some time, and now want to make more explicit. The DSM describes behaviour. It catalogues observable traits, communication differences, repetitive actions, social impacts, and all the externally legible things a system can count. But it does not tell us how meaning is built. It does not describe the architecture of language. It does not tell us what kind of cognitive terrain might produce those patterns. Gestalt processing, by contrast, offers not merely a language theory but a deeper model of organisation—whole to part, pattern before fragment, meaning before analysis. That is the seam I want to pry open.The video also makes clear that this series is, in part, a shift in stance. I note that I have previously described myself as self-identified as a gestalt processor, but I now want to press further than that. My argument here is not simply autobiographical intuition. It is that the diagnostic record itself may already contain the traces. The system has been gathering the evidence all along, but reading it through the wrong lens. What gets filed under “repetition,” “literalness,” or “communication deficit” may in fact be evidence of a different language architecture entirely. In that sense, this new series becomes a kind of forensic reading—an attempt to show that what was marked as symptom may also be trace.That is where the project becomes especially interesting to me. In the video, I sketch examples that many autistic readers will recognise immediately: echolalia, often treated in clinical writing as mere repetition, and so-called “literal thinking,” often treated as a failure of inference. Read through a gestalt lens, both begin to look different. Echolalia becomes stored meaning—language carrying context, emotion, and memory. Literal interpretation becomes not deficiency but developmental position: a system still building the bridges between lived experience and flexible abstraction. The same data are there. The question is whether we are willing to read them differently.I also wanted the video to name something political, though only briefly. My reflections begin from the recent churn in autistic spaces around behaviourism and calls to ban ABA outright. I remain deeply critical of behaviourism, and of its treatment of language as behaviour. That has not changed. But I also note that listening to families has complicated the field in ways slogans do not. Some people are navigating impossible conditions, including the brutal realities of American policing and public life, and their choices emerge inside that coercive terrain. So the series is not interested in easy purity. It is interested in what becomes visible when we stop flattening the question.And perhaps most importantly, the video situates this whole project inside the larger one that has been quietly approaching for some time: the field guide. I say, more than once, that titles come last for me—that naming too early can foreclose direction. That feels true here. The book is still becoming. The outline exists, the terrain is opening, and as ever I suspect the thing may grow beyond its supposed borders. But Interior Architecture feels like the right threshold text: a way of entering the diagnostic archive not as passive subject, but as interpreter. The DSM says this. I say—wait. Read it again. 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

Today’s episode explores the invisible cognitive labour required of individuals who process information through holistic patterns rather than linear steps—gestalt processors. The author of the source article, Dr. Jaime Hoerricks, describes the exhausting process of translating internal insights into a fragmented format that professional institutions can easily digest. By securing preliminary materials like meeting slides, Dr. Hoerricks illustrates a self-negotiated strategy to bridge the gap between gestalt thinking and conventional workplace communication. This preparation acts as a crucial accommodation that allows her to convert complex, interconnected ideas into “standardised” language. Ultimately, her narrative highlights how those with differing processing styles must perform extra, uncompensated work just to participate in normative environments.Here’s the link to the source article: https://open.substack.com/pub/autside/p/translation-labour-the-work-of-translatingLet 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

Today’s episode examines how analytic reasoning has become the unchallenged, invisible standard within modern educational and psychological institutions. The author of the source article, Dr. Jaime Hoerricks, utilises a metaphor involving fish and water to illustrate that dominant cultural assumptions about thought are often so pervasive they go completely unnoticed. Whilst traditional systems prioritise a step-by-step cognitive process, Dr. Hoerricks suggests that such a framework is merely one cultural default rather than a universal truth. Consequently, individuals whose systems utilise gestalt or whole-first cognition are frequently mislabeled as having errors or deficiencies in their thinking styles. By identifying these hidden biases, she advocates for viewing different modes of perception as legitimate variations rather than mistakes. This shift in perspective allows for a more inclusive understanding of human intelligence and cultural diversity in mental processing.Here’s the link to the source article: https://open.substack.com/pub/autside/p/the-invisible-water-analytic-thoughtLet 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

Today’s episode explores the concept of gestalt processing, where the human mind prioritises recognising whole patterns before analysing their individual components. The author of the source article, Dr. Jaime Hoerricks, explains that this phenomenon has been observed by researchers for over a century, though its various forms in perception and language are only recently being unified under a single name. Her writing highlights how meaning often matures over time, specifically through the use of repeated phrases or echoes that stabilise within the nervous system. By comparing this discovery to the eventual naming of Pluto, she emphasises that these cognitive patterns have always existed even when they lacked a formal label. Ultimately, she suggests that human understanding is often built upon holistic impressions that gradually become clear through repetition and neurological integration.Here’s the link to the source article: https://open.substack.com/pub/autside/p/gestalt-processing-the-long-roadLet 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