NEURODIVERGENT NARRATIVES - INTRODUCTION
The Autistic Culture Institute Presents… An Anthology of Late-Identifying Autistic Voices
INTRODUCTION
There’s a moment, right before a culture shifts, when the stories people tell about a group no longer match the stories that group tells about itself. That’s where we are with autism today. You can see it everywhere if you look close enough.
A celebrity announces a late diagnosis, maybe someone you’ve watched for years, someone whose quirks were always explained away as genius or eccentricity, and suddenly the news cycle explodes. Commentators debate whether autism is being “overused.” Podcasters wonder out loud if this is an exercise in victimhood or the exploitation of public benefits. Toxic politicians invoke the old, ableist narratives about vaccines and bad mothers. And meanwhile, millions of Autistic adults sit at home thinking, “This doesn’t even remotely represent my experience with autism.”
The Lost Generation sees these headlines differently. We look at someone famous discovering they’re Autistic at 40 or 50 or 60, and it doesn’t surprise us at all. It feels familiar. It feels inevitable. Because we know what it’s like to live an entire biography without the language that finally makes your life make sense. We know what it’s like to be misread by a society that doesn’t want to make room for us unless we are filled with self-hate and willing to agree to at least try to act like someone we aren’t. Only then is there a tiny bit of (uncomfortable) room made for us.
In this moment, autism has become a cultural Rorschach test. RFK Jr. and his merry band of MAHA moms spin conspiracies like spiders spin webs. Social media has turned our actual lived experience into debate fodder. News outlets are framing well-documented late diagnosis experiences as a question marks instead of periods. And in all of that noise, voices that should be centered, Autistic adults speaking about our own lives, are among the voices often missing.
That’s one of the reasons I wanted to put this Annual Anthology featuring the voices of late-identifying Autistics together.
It gathers work from people who grew up through the diagnostic blind spots of the 70s, 80s, 90s, and early 2000s—people who learned to survive without recognition, who built identities out of fragments, who carried their lives quietly until the culture finally caught up. In a world that still tells our story from the outside, these pieces speak from the inside. They show what it looks like when autistic adults tell the truth of our lives without translation, without interruption, without asking permission to exist.
And let me be clear: this isn’t a counterargument to conspiracy theorists or politicians or commentators. It’s something far more grounded. It’s a record. A cultural record of a generation that lived most of its life unnamed and is only now stepping into visibility. A record of the sensory worlds, moral instincts, miscommunications, private joys, and lifelong puzzles that only make sense once someone finally hands you the right map.
I wrote Am I Actually Autistic? to give shape to that map—to offer language, context, and coherence to people discovering their autism late in life. But this anthology holds something different. It holds the raw material: the interior worlds, the day-to-day truths, the small revelations that make the diagnosis meaningful. If my book traced the outline, these writers fill it in with color and texture and contrast.
We are living through a moment when autism is being claimed by people who do not live it, weaponized by people who fear it, and debated by people who don’t understand it. The Lost Generation has something those debates don’t: lived memory. Whole lives shaped in the absence of recognition. Entire identities forged in the dark. And now, finally, a chance to be heard.
This anthology exists because the moment demands it. Because the culture is shifting and we refuse to be talked about more than we are listened to. Because there has never been a better, or more necessary time for Autistic adults to speak in our own voices.
If you want to understand autism in this new era, start here. With the people who lived it long before the world had the vocabulary. With the generation that was never seen and is no longer willing to be invisible.
This anthology is not meant to explain autism to the world. It’s meant to let Autistic people speak in our own cadence. These pages carry grief, humor, clarity, sensory truth, moral outrage, tenderness, and the strange electricity that runs through a room when people finally stop translating themselves.
I hope, as you read, you’ll hear what we heard in our first year: not just stories, but the sound of a generation resurfacing. The sound of people who grew up voiceless finally speaking in their own voices.
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DEDICATION
Here’s To The Early Adopters Of Autistic Culture!
💛 Our First 1,000 Substack Members. 💛
💛 Our First 1,000 Podcast Listeners. 💛
💛 And Our First 1,000 Anthology Readers. 💛
Thank You For Believing In Our Mission. We Are Delighted To Be On This Journey To Neurotype Liberation Together.
Published by Autistic Culture Press
Bristol, England, UK
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