Sol Smith > Sol's Quotes

“Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“Wheresoever she was, there was Eden.”
― Mark Twain, The Diaries of Adam and Eve

“That curtain never came. The end credits should have run, but the days kept on happening, my alarm kept going off, and new challenges kept popping up. Furthermore, I had a sense that this “I finally did all the things, give me my American Dream award” moment wasn’t the final, dramatic crescendo of an orchestrated symphony. I knew this because I was a fake.”
― Sol Smith, The Autistic's Guide to Self-Discovery: Flourishing as a Neurodivergent Adult

“Now in my forties, often I look around a room of adults and wonder how many others are faking it. If so, who are we playacting for? Who would be offended if we didn’t wear the right clothes? Which person sees themselves as an actual grown-up, would judge our handshake, comment sincerely on a wine, and expect a sense of achievement and pride to blossom within them for proving their adulthood? Who is motivated by power, believes that money is real, and insists the social structure is a meritocracy that sprouted from the ground when George Washington chopped down a cherry tree to ratify the New Deal at Gettysburg, accompanied by his Rough Riders? Which people are we trying to fit in for? In any given room, it could be everyone but me, or it could be no one.”
― Sol Smith, The Autistic's Guide to Self-Discovery: Flourishing as a Neurodivergent Adult

“A game began so long ago that we forgot it was a game at all. We can only see the game and its rules. We can’t see the room where we are playing, nor can we stop playing. Everyone is born into it. We spend the first few years learning the rules, and we know that to win the game, we must become an amorphous, perfect person. If we just follow the right steps, read the right things, and behave in the right ways, we’re certain to become this person. We’ve built pipelines and institutions to encourage this, complete with pre- made goals, graded feedback, moral guidance, an armory of cosmetic solutions, and anything else you can imagine. We are all-in, dead-set on this belief that we can and will become the perfect person. Even though no one has done this before. Ever. It has never happened.”
― Sol Smith, The Autistic's Guide to Self-Discovery: Flourishing as a Neurodivergent Adult

“for me and tens of thousands of others like me, a huge shock came when people started literally protesting because they wanted to “go back to normal.”
― Sol Smith

“Despite the fact that the world didn’t cater to its style, I saw advantages in my thinking.”
― Sol Smith, The Autistic's Guide to Self-Discovery: Flourishing as a Neurodivergent Adult

“I’ve learned to only express my opinion when I absolutely have to, and even then, it comes out so direct, frustrated, and self-righteous that I’ll have to apologize for it within a week or so.”
― Sol Smith, The Autistic's Guide to Self-Discovery: Flourishing as a Neurodivergent Adult

“Maybe the most surprising thing is that the proficiency of so many autism experts ends at diagnosis. Once that diagnosis is made, especially for adults, the expert’s job is over, and they have no idea how to guide you in handling that information.”
― Sol Smith, The Autistic's Guide to Self-Discovery: Flourishing as a Neurodivergent Adult

“We did our best to fit in, be typical, or control the narrative, and kept this ruse up for years and then decades, usually developing some really unhealthy coping skills to deal with the resulting anxiety. Expectations were always high, and we worked harder and harder to meet them, exhausting ourselves and deteriorating our quality of life.”
― Sol Smith, The Autistic's Guide to Self-Discovery: Flourishing as a Neurodivergent Adult

“The normal pipeline for an adult autistic is being overwhelmed, tired, then reaching burnout, depression, and guilt. But change is possible. These are systemic problems that we encounter, and the solutions we bring are going to be individual. Autistic people are wildly diverse, and what strengths you have won’t look like someone else’s.”
― Sol Smith, The Autistic's Guide to Self-Discovery: Flourishing as a Neurodivergent Adult

“I want to make something clear: I’m autistic. I don’t have autism.”
― Sol Smith, The Autistic's Guide to Self-Discovery: Flourishing as a Neurodivergent Adult

“autism is a description of who I am and who other autistics are and not at all an affliction that haunts us.”
― Sol Smith, The Autistic's Guide to Self-Discovery: Flourishing as a Neurodivergent Adult

“Again, you’re most likely to be diagnosed if you’re a white male, as your opinion of yourself will be taken more seriously by doctors. I wish I were joking.”
― Sol Smith, The Autistic's Guide to Self-Discovery: Flourishing as a Neurodivergent Adult

“They’ll explain why you can’t be autistic by producing the very evidence you would use to prove that you are — how smart you are, how social you are, your expert and intense eye contact, your terrific grades and amazing knowledge about niche subjects, your charm during social events. All things that were hard-fought parts of your masked identity.”
― Sol Smith, The Autistic's Guide to Self-Discovery: Flourishing as a Neurodivergent Adult

“One of the most maddening things you’re going to hear is “Well, we’re all on the spectrum.” Usually, this will be someone close to you, and you’ll have just disclosed to them that you are autistic. Their reply takes this disclosure and — seemingly — integrates it into their worldview while actually dump- ing it in the garbage.”
― Sol Smith, The Autistic's Guide to Self-Discovery: Flourishing as a Neurodivergent Adult

“After all, simply saying “We’re all on the spectrum” is a cognitive roadblock. It’s absolutely efficient, in an energy consumptive way. We see this method used all the time when people use thought-terminating clichés to end a problem-solving process and settle their thinking: It is what it is. Don’t rock the boat. That’s not how we do things here. It’s above your pay grade. Let’s agree to disagree. YOLO.”
― Sol Smith, The Autistic's Guide to Self-Discovery: Flourishing as a Neurodivergent Adult

“As we move forward into different thinking styles, it’ll become more and more apparent why being understood and listened to is especially enticing to autistic people who are coming to an awareness of themselves.”
― Sol Smith, The Autistic's Guide to Self-Discovery: Flourishing as a Neurodivergent Adult

“We should also address this term neurotypical, as it is too often used as a substitute for the word normal, even though this was not the original intention. Simply stated, it refers to someone whose neurological structure developed in a way that is typical of the field of study.”
― Sol Smith, The Autistic's Guide to Self-Discovery: Flourishing as a Neurodivergent Adult

“These other people have diverged from our expectations of neurological development, and from this we get the term neurodivergent. But this is a broad label that is not synonymous with autistic, the way that rectangle is descriptive of but not synonymous with square.”
― Sol Smith, The Autistic's Guide to Self-Discovery: Flourishing as a Neurodivergent Adult

“If coming out as autistic as an adult is hard, it’s only because of the resistance of those around you. It doesn’t change the actual challenges you have in your job, your relationships, or your perception. Which is just such a perfect fact because the challenges you’ve always faced haven’t been due to the autism either — not really. They’ve been due to the way the world has been structured based on neurotypical thinking and socialization. In most cases, autism is a social disability, not a medical one.”
― Sol Smith, The Autistic's Guide to Self-Discovery: Flourishing as a Neurodivergent Adult

“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

“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