OK folks, buckle up buttercup, because this one might require a cigarette on the porch, a long shower stare, and at least three journal entries.

I think autistic nervous systems are exposing something that this culture desperately does not want examined.

And no, I do not just mean “autistic people don’t like loud noises” or “we communicate differently.”

I mean I think many of our nervous systems are fundamentally struggling to metabolize colonial capitalism, white supremacy culture, coercive hierarchy, and the industrialization of human existence.

Like… y’all built a society where people are expected to override their bodies, suppress their emotions, tolerate chronic sensory assault, perform social scripts for survival, compete endlessly for worth, submit to arbitrary authority, and disconnect from ecological and relational reality…

…and then you pathologized the people whose nervous systems said:

“Absolutely the fuck not.”

And before someone says, “Well everyone has to adapt to society,” I need you to understand something very important:

Adaptation is not inherently synonymous with health.

People adapt to abuse all the time.

People adapt to domination.

People adapt to violence.

People adapt to dehumanization.

People adapt to systems that slowly disconnect them from themselves, each other, and the living world.

That does not automatically make those systems healthy.

And I think autistic people often become diagnostic instruments for cultural dysfunction because our nervous systems frequently externalize stress that allistic culture has normalized.

Academic version:

Autistic distress may not solely reflect individual pathology, but a mismatch between neurodivergent nervous systems and sociocultural environments organized around hierarchy, hyper-productivity, compulsory performance, sensory saturation, and relational disconnection.

My version:

Y’all keep calling the canaries in the coal mine “disordered” because they won’t stop coughing.

And honestly, part of why I can even articulate this now is because AI helps me translate nonlinear cognition into a communication structure that dominant culture recognizes as “coherent.” I can feel and perceive things long before I can linearize them into neat little bullet points for the committee of professionally dissociated people demanding an MLA-formatted explanation for why modern society feels spiritually bankrupt.

My nervous system knew something was wrong long before I had the language for it.

I still don’t fully have the language.

I just know that a society built on domination will always interpret deeply relational nervous systems as defective.