April ends tomorrow. The blue puzzle pieces come down. The awareness campaigns wrap up. People move on to whatever the next awareness month is.
And autistic people are still autistic.
I say that not to be cynical about awareness — awareness matters, visibility matters, conversation matters. I say it because acceptance is a different thing than awareness, and it’s harder, and it doesn’t fit neatly into a calendar.
Awareness says: this exists. Acceptance says: this belongs.
Those are not the same statement. A lot of organizations are very comfortable with the first and quietly resistant to the second. Especially when “belonging” means actually changing how you run meetings, how you design workspaces, how you define performance, how you measure contribution. Acceptance that costs nothing isn’t acceptance. It’s branding.
I spent decades in organizations that would have called themselves accepting. Most of them were aware. Fewer of them had done the harder work of asking what it would mean to actually build environments where people like me didn’t have to burn half their processing power on translation just to participate.
I’m not angry about that. Most of the time. But I think it’s worth saying plainly.
Here’s what acceptance actually looks like, from where I sit. It looks like a manager who doesn’t require eye contact as proof of engagement. It looks like an agenda that exists before the meeting starts. It looks like feedback that is direct and specific rather than wrapped in social softening that I have to decode. It looks like recognizing that the person who needs thirty minutes of quiet after a long day of collaboration isn’t antisocial — they’re recovering, and recovery is part of the work.
It also looks like something more personal. It looks like telling the truth about who you are — not the managed version, not the performance — even when the truth is complicated and doesn’t fit the narrative people have built around you.
That’s what this book is. That’s what this month of writing has been.
I wrote Thin Ice because I needed to tell a true story. Not an inspirational story — though I hope there’s something in it that helps people — but a true one. The kind where you don’t know if the ice is going to hold, and you keep going anyway, and you don’t find out until much later what was actually keeping you up.
What was keeping me up, it turns out, was a brain that was working extremely hard in ways I didn’t understand, in a world that wasn’t built for it, for a very long time. Understanding that doesn’t erase the cost. But it changes what you do next.
What I’m doing next is talking about it. Writing about it. Putting it into words that maybe help someone else recognize themselves — in a career, in a family, in a life — before it takes them fifty years to get there.
Acceptance isn’t a month. It’s a practice. It’s the daily choice to tell the truth about who you are and extend the same honesty to the people around you. It doesn’t end when April does.
Neither does this conversation.
Thin Ice: Survival, Identity, and Learning Who I Was All Along — available now. Thank you for reading this series. Get the book →