Sublime

The alternative story is possible when a realisation is co-constructed that reality is fluid, that it can be challenged and changed, and transformed and lived into.

Where or from what in this problem story do you take your identity? • What is the story you have lived into so far? • Given this constellation, what conclusions did you draw or what decisions did it lead to? • What occurs in your life that confirms these conclusions?

I engage the autobiographical, the autistethnographic. If we consider Jay Dolmage’s conception of rhetoric—the

We are creating a narrative that is but one of many possible narratives. To heighten your awareness, you might even want to rewrite the story another time.

It’s a human need to be told stories. The more we’re governed by idiots and have no control over our destinies, the more we need to tell stories to each other about who we are, why we are, where we come from, and what might be possible. — Alan Rickman

Autistic narrative persists. It persists in the face of discourses that would render us arhetorical and tragically inhuman. It persists across genre and mode, much of it ephemeral and embodied in form. Autistic people persist and insist in the narrativity of their tics, their stims, their echoed words and phrases, their relations with objects and

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.”

As one point is proved, we link it to the next, striving for meaning, and in so doing story is born.