Understanding Mother’s experience is important. It helps us not personalize it so much, for one thing. We can more easily slip out of feeling unlovable, for example, when we see that Mother had limitations in expressing love. Rather than simply feeling lost and unshepherded, you can see that Mother had absolutely no experience guiding anyone, and p

From there, we can learn how to heal from our past and integrate new (and healthier) ways of dealing with our problems.

First, I believe that autistic stories, both my own and those of others, resist the cultural inscriptions that autism as a diagnosis suggests. As Irene Rose contends in her work on autistic life writing, such “narratives work at a connective emotional level to resist the pathologisation of difference.”