Until last year, I lived under the assumption that I was living an ordinary life. Undoubtedly, doing ordinary was a lot harder for me, and I was never sure if I quite pulled it off. But I never thought there was anything that marked my life as significantly different from everyone else’s.

Then I realised I was autistic and I got diagnosed. The wave that washed over me carried validation, self-compassion and clarity. A feeling that I was failing at ordinary life gave way to a feeling of pride that I had managed to live one. …

I was running late to the airport after a four-day regional escape. It’s not a scenario I’d recommend for an autistic person with Generalised Anxiety Disorder. Needless to say, I was highly stressed about whether I would get on that plane.

Instead of losing my shit as I entered Departures, I decided to come clean, telling airport ground staff: “I’m really anxious about being late and I’m not thinking clearly and it would really help if you could tell me exactly what I need to do”. Or something to that effect.

It worked like a charm.

I didn’t even need…

When you discover that you are autistic as an adult, you realise that certain things have to change in your life. There’s no turning back: you can’t go on living your life in a way that is more about fitting into a neurotypical world than meeting your own needs.

No-one tells you how to self-advocate as a newly diagnosed autistic adult. You have to figure it out yourself. You have to examine every area of your life and work out what needs to change.

I had never seen myself as someone who had needs over and above those of the…

When the Australian parliament legislated marriage equality in 2017, there was cause for celebration among the LGBTQ and broader communities.

But under the rainbow confetti lurked the ugly truth of homophobia that had been exposed during the campaign.

Despite the sense of achievement, a niggling unease remained. A sector of the population that didn’t support the right of LGBTQ people to marry who they love didn’t go away.

The legalisation of same-sex marriage resulted from an awkward compromise between then Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, himself a supporter of marriage equality, and fringe right wing members of his party. …

It shapes your sense of who you are

In the autistic world, masking refers to the way in which we adjust the way we function in the world to conform to perceived neurotypical norms. It’s sometimes used interchangeably with camouflaging or mimicking. But it is so much more than that.

As children, we are trying to navigate a world in which we feel fundamentally different to our peers, often without knowing why. We respond by withdrawing or learning to fit in. Both come with a cost.

It is true that autistic children mimic others in an attempt to fit in…

I write because I need to. That need is always there. It’s my capacity to meet it that waivers. I seem to veer between having so many ideas that I just want to write all day, and struggling to finish a sentence only to abandon it.

I love those weekends. I have the house to myself, I have a few ideas floating around that I can’t wait to shape into a story. It flows freely, punctuated only by the odd kitchen flourish or urge to sort shelves.

But then there are weeks like this week. Pulled in every direction, each…

What is demisexuality?

Like many people, my introduction to the term demisexual was seeing it in someone’s social media post/dating profile/blog and googling it. For me, the search results were a revelation.

In essence, to be demisexual is to need a strong emotional connection with someone before experiencing sexual attraction to them. It’s about the mechanism of attraction rather than who you’re attracted to. It can sit alongside any sexual orientation: lesbian and demisexual in my case .

Do we need the demisexual label?

To be honest, it’s not something I feel the need to demonstrate outwardly to the world. It’s not unavoidably public in the same way as…

There’s the man on the train talking at a brain-addlingly loud volume on his mobile phone and the one who reaches in front of me to grab the hand rail. Then there’s the man with his legs stretched out in front of him blocking my path in an airport waiting area. My experience tells me he probably went on to claim the armrest on the plane; the spread of his legs spilling into the space of the passenger next to him.

The way men occupy public space is so pervasive that it can feel like an assault on the senses…