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My First Employment Experience Working for Autism Spectrum News
I graduated from Marist College in May of 2018. While I was on hiatus as I enjoyed free time for the summer, I was thinking about getting a job, but I needed help with planning my next steps. When January came, I started out at Shrub Oak International School, where I would receive help with career...
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Neurodiversity and Sibling Relationships
Having a child with an autism spectrum disorder has a transformative effect on the entire family. Typically, when a child is diagnosed with autism, parents embark on a mission to find effective treatments and support systems. However, during treatment planning neurotypical siblings are often...
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How to Recover Financially From a Crisis When You Are Autistic
Being an autistic adult has many challenges and, obviously by this point, we are well aware of them. We constantly talk about the high unemployment rate for autistic adults and how a majority of Americans are unable to cover one month of living expenses. [caption id="attachment_4803"...
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Life in the Time of COVID-19: An Autistic Perspective
Like many autistics, I have been drawn to science fiction as far back as I can remember. The idea of an epidemic infecting the human race has always been a common theme in science fiction and is probably as old as the genre itself. As such, I have seen and read more stories about pandemics than I...
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How We’ve Always Done It
I remember the day exactly. It was an unspectacular Sunday and I was headed to the last job I would ever take working for somebody else. It was a low-paying, hourly, management position for an animal nonprofit and just about the only benefit of the job was that I was in charge of making the...
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What Do Change in Schedules, Virtual Meetings, and Face Masks Have in Common?
The Coronavirus pandemic has disrupted daily life for almost every person around the world; especially daily routines. Routines are a good thing, since the predictability can be comforting. For many, changes to routines are frustrating; but are usually seen as positive, creating novel changes. But...
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Different is My Identifier
I was eight years old the first time I remember being aware of my difference. It didn’t have a name yet, that was still decades away, but nonetheless, suddenly at the ripe old age of eight, I was cognizant of that I was indeed different. For the seven years of life prior to that, I happily lived...
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Dating and Relationships: A Perennial Challenge for Many Autistics
This is one area about which, like so many on the autism spectrum, I can hardly be considered an expert. Nevertheless, because of its importance to so many in the autistic community, I feel the need to share what little I have learned on the basis of meeting and talking to others who have faced...
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Be Mindful, Be Present, Be You: How to Handle Crisis Anxiety
With the world around us a chaotic mess, it is getting harder and harder to avoid becoming a giant, swirling, ball of anxiety. The current pandemic has disrupted our lives and the world as we know it is on hold for the foreseeable future. It has interrupted routines, forced schools to close, and...
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Stuck Between Two Worlds: Having a Brain that is Half Autistic and Half Neurotypical
We often talk of Neurodiversity in terms of a binary between Autistic and Neurotypical when in reality it is much more complicated. We all know Autism exists on a spectrum but commonly assume if someone is on the spectrum, they are one side of a binary line, regardless of where they fall on the...
