Autism Quotes

“There's a scene in The Matrix where Neo is programmed with every fighting technique in the world before opening his eyes and saying, 'I know Kung Fu.' There's a similar thing with autistic girls and literature. I had no idea what people were saying. I struggled with socializing, so by reading as widely as possible, I was arming myself with knowledge about people, about how they spoke to each other, learning turns of phrase and metaphor that others - even Erin - recognized.”
― Fern Brady, Strong Female Character

“For how much autism is discussed, far too many people don’t have a good working definition of what it is.”
― Sol Smith, The Autistic's Guide to Self-Discovery: Flourishing as a Neurodivergent Adult

“We are expected to function, to go on with our lives, to carry on and repeat the exact same behaviours that got us into this rainbow-loading screen in the first place because 'everyone else can--so suck it up!' And we'll fall. And we'll crash. And we'll keep on crashing. We'll crash again and again and again as we're forced into these scenarios to be washed, rinsed, repeated and spat back out again.

Until we can't anymore.

Our bodies can only take so much, and after too long of too much, we can't continue anymore. We go into safe mode.”
― Chloé Hayden, Different, Not Less: A Neurodivergent's Guide to Embracing Your True Self and Finding Your Happily Ever After

“some people think being autistic means you’re unable to perceive the thoughts and emotions of others. Actually, based on my experiences and from talking to other people on the spectrum, it’s quite the opposite: you feel every possible emotion and see every possible outcome of a social situation at once. It’s kind of like being Doctor Manhattan from the comic Watchmen: you’re seeing several timelines happening simultaneously. But unlike Doctor Manhattan, you can’t teleport to Mars every time you feel overwhelmed, so you shut down and remove yourself socially. People are exhausting, and when your brain is working overtime to try to understand them, it can suck the joy out of socializing.”
― Michael McCreary, Funny, You Don't Look Autistic: A Comedian's Guide to Life on the Spectrum

“People used to think the brain’s primary function was to take in the world around us and perceive stimuli. While that’s something it does, the brain spends a lot more energy filtering stimuli out, allowing us to discern the important ones from the unimportant ones.”
― Sol Smith, The Autistic's Guide to Self-Discovery: Flourishing as a Neurodivergent Adult

“It’s a common quality of autistic thinking that we aren’t sure which details are considered necessary by others when making a point or telling a story. What’s funny about that — and we will dig into this later — is the certainty that the reader or listener has a better idea of what these details are than the person doing the explaining and that it just so happens that the correlation between the included details and the patience of the listener is one to one. This raises no red flags at all. It just “is what it is.” This makes sense because their attention has to be engaged — but it also seems unfair.”
― Sol Smith, The Autistic's Guide to Self-Discovery: Flourishing as a Neurodivergent Adult

“People with so-called "female autism" may be able to make eye contact, carry on a conversation, or hide their tics and sensory sensitivities. They might spend the first few decades of their lives with no idea they're autistic at all, believing instead that they're just shy, or highly sensitive.”
― Devon Price, Unmasking for Life: The Autistic Person's Guide to Connecting, Loving, and Living Authentically

“What was the point when life was a constant circle of forcing a broken mask onto yourself to survive, only to rip it off at the end of the day to reveal a girl who was just as broken? I had no energy left to be the me I once was--and should still have been. Simply living was a chore.”
― Chloé Hayden, Different, Not Less: A Neurodivergent's Guide to Embracing Your True Self and Finding Your Happily Ever After

“We are socialized to hide key parts of our identity to avoid being seen as too bossy, too much, too little, or too [insert misogynistic term that only applies to women]. Women learn to be more reserved, shy and quiet in order to be the picture-perfect face of femininity and to avoid abuse and misogyny.”
― Chloé Hayden, Different, Not Less: A Neurodivergent's Guide to Embracing Your True Self and Finding Your Happily Ever After

“You can't use a new word to replace an old one without it holding the exact same correlation, segregation and complacency that the original term was associated with. Instead of the 1930s mindset of 'People with Asperger's are worthy of survival, but those who have autism are not,' we now see a twenty-first century version of that: 'People who are high-functioning are worthy of survival, but those who are low functioning...' It's just a more modernised, accepted vocabulary. Instead of 'worthy of survival', our new language is being 'worthy' in capitalism and 'worthy' of support.”
― Chloé Hayden, Different, Not Less: A Neurodivergent's Guide to Embracing Your True Self and Finding Your Happily Ever After

“Functioning labels have never helped autistic people, and we need to call them out for what they are: Is this person capable of producing capitalistic value, or not? That's the real reason these labels are used, often hidden behind the idea of providing support, but it's false support.”
― Chloé Hayden, Different, Not Less: A Neurodivergent's Guide to Embracing Your True Self and Finding Your Happily Ever After

“One autistic person's 'level of functioning' will fluctuate throughout their day, week and life, depending upon circumstances, environment, mood and other factors. Someone who has been deemed 'high functioning' simply due to external factors (such as their home life, their support circle, or simply how well they have learned to mask themselves) may in fact need more resources and support than someone who has been deemed 'low functioning'.”
― Chloé Hayden, Different, Not Less: A Neurodivergent's Guide to Embracing Your True Self and Finding Your Happily Ever After

“Your child is neurodivergent. Nothing will ever change that (no, nothing). So, stop Googling it, stop asking your Facebook groups' opinions, stop trying fad diets and yoga stretches. What you can change is the way you perceive disability. These are the cards that you and your child have been dealt, so play them.”
― Chloé Hayden, Different, Not Less: A Neurodivergent's Guide to Embracing Your True Self and Finding Your Happily Ever After

“This may be incredibly difficult for some people to grasp, but your child's diagnosis is not about you. There is nothing more frustrating than seeing people wearing stereotypical puzzle-piece T-shirts and captioning their Facebook statuses with 'God gives the hardest battles to the strongest people.' Lord almighty; shut up.

I understand that it's difficult; parenting as a whole is difficult. But if you're struggling as a bystander, imagine how your child is feeling. Be a voice for your child, but do not be your child's voice.”
― Chloé Hayden

“Show them compassion, show them love, show them understanding. Protect them from the evils of the world, but don't hide them from it. Teach them to love and to be loved. Teach them to value and be valued. Teach them all that they are. Remind yourself and them that who they are is exactly who they're supposed to be.

It's not the child who needs to change, it's the world.”
― Chloé Hayden, Different, Not Less: A Neurodivergent's Guide to Embracing Your True Self and Finding Your Happily Ever After

“Daily, I get messages that invalidate me as a human because I'm autistic, with people asking me why I would ever be proud of something like that. Daily, I see, hear and experience people try to diminish my identity, and refuse to acknowledge the identity of their children, their patients, their students. When I look at the world around me, I'm reminded by the media, by politicians, by the very essence of our culture that my mind is wrong, that I'm not needed, that neurodivergence as a whole is indisputably delinquent, and that our identities are not considered important or whole.”
― Chloé Hayden, Different, Not Less: A Neurodivergent's Guide to Embracing Your True Self and Finding Your Happily Ever After

“After receiving a diagnosis, the minimal resources that we may be linked to (if we're lucky) are for the benefit of parents, carers and those who are third-party viewers, rather than for neurodivergent people. We're given books that have been created by doctors and psychologists and neurologists who may have studied our brains for a number of years and can spit out information until the cows come home. But, assuming they are neurotypical, they have never and will never experience or understand what it feels like to have our minds. We're given clinical books and clinical videos, and are taught as soon as the new label is attached to us that it's a cold, medical, distant thing, like our brains are no longer ours.

And, when we try to rid ourselves of these views and do our own research in an attempt to find things that feel closer to home and less analytical and impersonal, we are led to articles, sob stories, and posts that highlight the disappointment, fear and sorrow that surround all aspects of us, making us feel further invalidated, segregated and alienated.”
― Chloé Hayden, Different, Not Less: A Neurodivergent's Guide to Embracing Your True Self and Finding Your Happily Ever After

“There are so many things that people half my age have been doing for years now, and there are things that I know I will struggle with and need extra support with for the rest of my life. But, there are things that I can do better than just about anyone.”
― Chloé Hayden, Different, Not Less: A Neurodivergent's Guide to Embracing Your True Self and Finding Your Happily Ever After

“She doesn't care about social hierarchies, or social etiquette. If she disagrees with you, your friends or your family, you're likely to hear about it.”
― Chloé Hayden, Different, Not Less: A Neurodivergent's Guide to Embracing Your True Self and Finding Your Happily Ever After

“Society assumes that eventually we'll fade into an acceptance of what we should be, that we'll silence ourselves into a submission of the ideologies and expectations we've been taught. Divergent thoughts, ideas and emotions are pushed aside with the idea that eventually we'll learn to simply conform. We're taught that if a child thinks or acts out of the norm, don't worry, because they'll soon change their ways. Society often accepts difference in children, but it's not 'acceptance' so much as it is a confidence that those differences will fade.”
― Chloé Hayden, Different, Not Less: A Neurodivergent's Guide to Embracing Your True Self and Finding Your Happily Ever After

“What I learned is that it does not matter what you do, or where you go, schools are all organised around the same basic system. It's a system that will never work for a neurodivergent person, no matter how hard they try, because it's entire foundation is built against us.”
― Chloé Hayden, Different, Not Less: A Neurodivergent's Guide to Embracing Your True Self and Finding Your Happily Ever After

“However, it's not fair that the only options we currently have for children like me is to either have their parents give over their lives to homeschooling, or to suffer in an environment where every ounce of them is riduculed, ripped apart or forced to changed.”
― Chloé Hayden, Different, Not Less: A Neurodivergent's Guide to Embracing Your True Self and Finding Your Happily Ever After

“If we continue to feed a society that doesn't value individuality and human beings as they are, we begin to destroy them.”
― Chloé Hayden, Different, Not Less: A Neurodivergent's Guide to Embracing Your True Self and Finding Your Happily Ever After

“Our society has taught us that if we act in a way that is different to the social norm, we are considered low functioning, stupid, dumb, childish, loony. And the thing is, perhaps those fears are valid. No one wants to see their child ridiculed. But why are we then determined to change the child, rather than the world around them? Why do we validate the wrong just because it's normalised, and ostracise the right just because it's not?”
― Chloé Hayden, Different, Not Less: A Neurodivergent's Guide to Embracing Your True Self and Finding Your Happily Ever After

“Taking away a child's stims doesn't take away their need to self-regulate; instead, it forces them into new habits that can cause long-term side effects and harm, including severe anxiety disorder, depression and emotional dysregulation. In 50 per cent of cases where therapy is used to stop an autistic child from stimming, the child has come out with symptoms that meet the criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder.”
― Chloé Hayden, Different, Not Less: A Neurodivergent's Guide to Embracing Your True Self and Finding Your Happily Ever After

“As I've gotten older and realised that society's expectations are only as firm as we allow them to be, I've discovered that allowing myself to unmask and be my authentic autistic self--stims and all--has unleashed more ability than I ever had when I was locking myself away.”
― Chloé Hayden, Different, Not Less: A Neurodivergent's Guide to Embracing Your True Self and Finding Your Happily Ever After

“If things were up to you, if you were the ruler of the world, languages would be unspoken. Instead of speaking, people would carefully consider the thoughts they want to express and then write them down. That way, there would be no misunderstandings based on unintended tonal shifts, unintended emphasis, unintended facial expressions.”
― Alice Franklin, Life Hacks for a Little Alien

“It's new and uncharted territory. As a general rule, you don't mind new territory. But you tend to prefer when it's charted.”
― Alice Franklin, Life Hacks for a Little Alien

“Autism didn’t change my love—it deepened it.”
― Dr. Simbi Animashaun, Spectrum of Love: My Journey Through Autism: A Mother's Story of Love, Advocacy, and Awareness

“He didn’t need to be ‘fixed.’ He needed to be understood.”
― Dr. Simbi Animashaun, Spectrum of Love: My Journey Through Autism: A Mother's Story of Love, Advocacy, and Awareness