Knowing Why Quotes

“These are examples, however, of how we can sometimes be taken advantage of. Our loyalty and strong work ethic, combined with not always being able to read people, mean that we can end up in situations where we get saddled with more than our fair share and are overworked and underpaid.”
― Autistic Self Advocacy Network, Knowing Why: Adult-Diagnosed Autistic People on Life and Autism

“We construct systems, whether entirely of thought or by using some combination of thought and external manifestation, that help us to interpret data the world throws at us and also to find our place in relation to it.”
― Autistic Self Advocacy Network, Knowing Why: Adult-Diagnosed Autistic People on Life and Autism

“What are your interests, and why do you take pride in them? Why do they bring you pleasure, or a sense of security, or whatever benefit it is that they happen to bring you? How do these pursuits help you to feel more secure in who you are, and how do you feel about yourself when you have the chance to share them with others?”
― Autistic Self Advocacy Network, Knowing Why: Adult-Diagnosed Autistic People on Life and Autism

“What I’ve come to realize is that most people seem to like an exhausting array of things in a general sense, whereas I love a specific and carefully-curated array of things with all my heart.”
― Autistic Self Advocacy Network, Knowing Why: Adult-Diagnosed Autistic People on Life and Autism

“Not everyone is prepared for exchanges as intense and earnest as the ones I prefer. Not everyone sees hyperfocus to the exclusion of nearly all else as a strength. Not everyone considers encyclopedic memory an advantage, and not everyone regards passion for forms of writing that aren’t guaranteed to earn a fortune as admirable.”
― Autistic Self Advocacy Network, Knowing Why: Adult-Diagnosed Autistic People on Life and Autism

“I still preferred the company of names, of fascinating things in the world, of words. I learned with the advent of universal internet access that my ideal medium for communication, for initial connection, was through written correspondence and chat interfaces.”
― Autistic Self Advocacy Network, Knowing Why: Adult-Diagnosed Autistic People on Life and Autism

“You spend a lot of time wondering what’s wrong without ever knowing why—and, for someone who values specificity? It produces the worst anxiety you can imagine.”
― Autistic Self Advocacy Network, Knowing Why: Adult-Diagnosed Autistic People on Life and Autism

“The names of things, specificity, mattered to me more than it seemed to matter to most other people I knew, and it was puzzling.”
― Autistic Self Advocacy Network, Knowing Why: Adult-Diagnosed Autistic People on Life and Autism

“My interest in learning the names of things in the world has been with me for as long as I can remember.”
― Autistic Self Advocacy Network, Knowing Why: Adult-Diagnosed Autistic People on Life and Autism

“When I’m not “productive” (according to my own harsh standards), I struggle with guilt and a wilting sense of self worth. I often have to remind myself that this attitude is actually ableism, embedded deep in my thoughts—that I would never be so hard on an autistic friend as I am on myself.”
― Autistic Self Advocacy Network, Knowing Why: Adult-Diagnosed Autistic People on Life and Autism

“often have somewhat delayed interoception, meaning that I may not realize I am hungry or tired or cold or hot until I am so hungry/tired/cold/hot that I am on the very brink of a breakdown.”
― Autistic Self Advocacy Network, Knowing Why: Adult-Diagnosed Autistic People on Life and Autism

“I’ve been surprised at how many autistic people I’ve chatted with who have had similar experiences with meditation, and I wonder if this is because of the way the autistic mind experiences the sensory world. Perhaps for us, to focus our attention on the present moment means that we let in a rush of unfiltered sensory information that is simply too much to endure...”
― Autistic Self Advocacy Network, Knowing Why: Adult-Diagnosed Autistic People on Life and Autism

“And that’s when we will finally seek the answer to a question that’s been at the back of our minds for most of our lives: exactly why am I different from those other people?”
― Autistic Self Advocacy Network, Knowing Why: Adult-Diagnosed Autistic People on Life and Autism

“People often wonder what the point is of identifying oneself as autistic in adulthood. The way they see it is, you’ve made it this far, what difference does it make now? What they don’t understand is how autistic people like me have only made it that far by clawing our way there, by struggling in silence, by turning ourselves inside out, and we can’t do it anymore.”
― Autistic Self Advocacy Network, Knowing Why: Adult-Diagnosed Autistic People on Life and Autism

“Many autistic people have differences in sensory perception. Noises, sounds, textures, or other sensory input unremarkable to others can be painful or aversive to us.”
― Autistic Self Advocacy Network, Knowing Why: Adult-Diagnosed Autistic People on Life and Autism

“Many adult autistic people come to a diagnosis or self-diagnosis due to burnout—a period when, after many years of struggling to cope, the demands of everyday life become increasingly difficult or impossible.”
― Autistic Self Advocacy Network, Knowing Why: Adult-Diagnosed Autistic People on Life and Autism

“You spend a lot of time wondering what’s wrong without ever knowing why.”
― Autistic Self Advocacy Network, Knowing Why: Adult-Diagnosed Autistic People on Life and Autism

“To avert some of that mistreatment, we often spend major effort to appear more superficially “normal,” which can be necessary, but passing (or attempting to pass) as neurotypical in this way carries its own kind of damage.”
― Autistic Self Advocacy Network, Knowing Why: Adult-Diagnosed Autistic People on Life and Autism

“our difficulty interpreting social cues as maliciousness, our sensory sensitivities as pickiness, or our difficulty with eye contact as disrespect, they are likely to mistreat us—especially if our explanations are then treated as evidence that we can’t be trusted to report accurately on our own experiences.”
― Autistic Self Advocacy Network, Knowing Why: Adult-Diagnosed Autistic People on Life and Autism