On the relief of finding your people, the grief of finding them too late, and the quietly radical act of building identity together.
NeuroHub Community | Embracing Our Autistic Selves | Module 2 | Lesson 3
In the second module of our Embracing Our Autistic Selves course, we sat together and asked a deceptively simple question: what do you feel when you think about other autistic people? What followed was one of the most moving conversations I have had the privilege of being part of.
Relief. That was the first word offered. Then safety. Then straightforwardness; the luxury of not needing to explain yourself from the beginning. Then someone described the particular comfort of recognising, in another person, the same wavelength, and not having to perform the adjustment you carry everywhere else.
These weren’t academic answers. They were instinctive ones. The kind that emerge when you ask someone to describe something they’ve never quite had the words for before, and they reach for them anyway. And they told us something important: that for many of us, the experience of being around other autistic people isn’t just pleasant, it’s genuinely restorative in a way that other social experiences rarely are.
This post is an attempt to draw out the themes from that conversation, because I think they matter well beyond the room we were in.
The ADAR And The Feeling Of Being Found
Some of you will be familiar with the concept of the autistic radar; the ADAR. That phenomenon where you meet someone and something just clicks, before you can explain quite why. You know. And increasingly, looking back, so many of us can identify the people in our earlier lives who we now understand to have been autistic, even if neither of us had the language for it then.
For me, one person comes to mind clearly from childhood. At the time, I remember feeling something close to pity, the kind of response I had absorbed uncritically from the environment around me. He was always last to be picked for things. He stood apart, and I perceived the difference, embarrassingly, responding to it in the most normative way possible. Reflecting back over a decade of advocacy work, I feel something like guilt about that. And yet, I also think I have to let it go, because carrying shame about who we were before we knew better serves no real purpose. We learn, and then we do better. That’s what matters.
What that boy actually taught me (though I couldn’t have articulated it at the time) was something about being unapologetically yourself. Even when the world responds to that with confusion or exclusion, there is something quietly dignified about simply being what you are.
So many of us discover our Autistic selves through Autistic children; as if we are able to reparent ourselves, just a little, through what we learn from them.
This came up powerfully in our discussion; how many of us, as Autistic adults, first encountered autism clearly through a child. A son or daughter whose assessment process sent us down a rabbit hole of reading and recognition. A child we worked with professionally, in whose behaviour we saw something too familiar. In a previous generation, autism was so consistently framed through a normative lens that we could stand right next to it in our own families and never see it clearly. Now, with marginally more affirming frameworks available, we encounter Autistic children who are living, with difficulty and unevenly, in a world that at least sometimes names their experience. And in watching them, we find ourselves.
The Grief Of Finding Out Too Late
Not everyone finds out in time to have the conversation they needed to have.
Several people in our group described recognising autism retrospectively in parents, grandparents, and siblings, people who had shaped their lives profoundly, without either party having the words for what they shared. Post-it notes left on the kitchen counter instead of conversations. The same meal eaten every single night for years. A particular intensity, a particular kind of intelligence, a particular way of being in the world that made total sense once you knew what you were looking at; and broke your heart a little, once you did.
There is a specific kind of grief in this. Not just the loss of the person, but the loss of the conversation you never got to have. The years of miscommunication and distance and mutual incomprehension that might have been different (not necessarily easy, but different) if the language had existed earlier. If someone, somewhere along the line, had known what to look for.
One person described it as the feeling of years that have been lost, of alienation from family members who were, in a sense, your own people all along, and never knowing it. Another described looking back at a parent’s struggles with a completely different understanding now; seeing the outbursts not as inexplicable, but as sensory experiences without a framework. Seeing the self-medication not as weakness, but as what happens when someone spends a lifetime trying to manage a nervous system nobody helped them understand.
This is one of the most quietly devastating things about the previous generation’s relationship with autism: not just that they were undiagnosed, but that the absence of language meant that even the people closest to them couldn’t offer the right kind of understanding. And we, their Autistic children, internalised their struggles without understanding them. We promised ourselves we wouldn’t become them, and in doing so, we were often fighting the very thing that might have finally connected us.
Community spaces like this become places we seek out, perhaps because they act as a surrogate for the autism-affirming family that many of us needed growing up and are only now discovering through connection to others outside our blood families.
Not All Autistic People Are Our People; And That’s Okay
An important moment in our session came when we acknowledged something that can feel uncomfortable to say out loud: not every Autistic person is going to be safe for us, not every Autistic person is our neurokin.
“Neurokin” is a term that emerged partly as a decolonial replacement for “neurotribes”, a word that had been widely used after Steve Silberman’s important book of the same name, before Indigenous communities raised concerns about the cultural appropriation of the word “tribes”. Neurokin (your chosen neurodivergent family), the people you feel most fundamentally connected to, is what we were reaching for when we used that earlier term.
The honest truth is: not all Autistic people are that. Being Autistic doesn’t automatically make someone safe, any more than sharing any other identity characteristic guarantees alignment of values. We discussed what used to be called “Aspie supremacy”, the use of the Asperger’s label as a kind of social delineator, where people with significant internalised ableism would place themselves on one side of an imaginary line and look down on everyone on the other side. It was, and remains, an expression of the same logic that drives all supremacist thinking: the anxious need to establish hierarchy when your own position in the world feels precarious. It was never lost on me that a lot of it was closely entangled with other forms of supremacy too.
The more interesting question, one of our group raised it beautifully, is not whether to exclude such people from the community, but to ask what happened. What was absent in their lives that led them to reach for hierarchy rather than solidarity? Research on radicalisation in Autistic communities points consistently toward the same answer; a lack of connection. A lack of community. When Autistic people don’t find affirming community, they become vulnerable to spaces that offer belonging at the cost of ideology. The antidote to supremacist thinking isn’t exclusion. It’s building the kinds of communities where people don’t need hierarchy to feel they belong.
How We Recognise Our Neurokin
So how do we identify who our neurokin are? The answers our group gave were consistent and illuminating. It isn’t about diagnostic category. It isn’t about presentation type or communication style. It’s about values. About safety. About the particular quality of connection where your nervous system settles rather than braces.
Someone described it as a kind of gentle connection, a resonance rather than a forced alignment. Another said they could feel connection with any Autistic person on a deeper, underlying level; the shared knowledge of what it is to move through the world in this particular way. But neurokin specifically were the people with whom values aligned. Where the ego didn’t take up all the space. Where difference was held with curiosity rather than judgment.
I’ve come to think that who we identify as our neurokin is, in part, a reflection of how we identify ourselves. The people we feel most drawn to in autistic community tend to hold their autistic identity in a way that resonates with how we hold our own. This matters for community building, because it means that autistic people who are still struggling with their identity, who haven’t yet found a way to hold it with any degree of affirmation, can sometimes find it harder to feel that sense of connection even within Autistic spaces. Part of what we are doing in spaces like this is helping to build the positive sense of self from which that connection becomes possible.
The Autistic Social Style: AuSociality
One thing that came up clearly in our conversation was how many of us find deeper connection online than in most in-person settings. This isn’t a failure of in-person life. It’s a reflection of what I’ve written about elsewhere as AuSociality; the idea that Autistic people have their own distinctive style of social being, and that online communication often fits that style better than conventional social settings do.
The asynchronous quality., the ability to take time to compose a thought before responding, and the absence of the sensory complexity of shared physical space. The chat function that allows someone to contribute without interrupting. These aren’t just accommodations that make things slightly more manageable, for many of us, they’re the conditions under which genuine connection becomes possible in the first place.
Someone in our group described having had more authentic emotional connection with people in this online community than with people they had known in person for thirty years; that didn’t surprise me. What we experience in spaces like this, where the shared reference point is neurotype alignment rather than geographical proximity, is something different in kind, not just degree. It’s connection by recognition.
Without community such as this, I would be an incredibly isolated and lonely person. For me, it is like being amongst family, a place where I feel connected and safe.
Identity Is Built Together
The session ended with something I want to sit with for a while, and that I hope you’ll sit with too.
If part of how we identify our neurokin is through our own sense of Autistic identity, and if part of our own Autistic identity is shaped by the people we’re surrounded by, then identity building is not a solo project, it is a collective effort. We build who we are, in part, through being witnessed and understood by others who are building who they are alongside us.
This doesn’t mean our identities have to match. Two people can be deeply connected as neurokin while having entirely different presentations, histories, special interests, and sensory profiles. What they share is not uniformity but resonance, the experience of being understood at a level that has nothing to do with whether they happen to be interested in the same things.
We discussed a beautiful metaphor near the end of our session: the mycelial network. The underground system through which fungi and plants exchange nutrients, communicate stress signals, and share resources across vast distances. It works not through similarity of surface form but through connection at the root level. Each node is distinct, but the network is what enables each distinct thing to flourish.
That, I think, is what Autistic community can be, at its best. Not a place where everyone is the same; a place where the connections between different things make each thing more possible than it would have been alone.
Some Questions To Carry With You
We ended the session with these questions. You don’t need to answer them now. Some of them might take time. But they’re worth sitting with.
- What parts of your Autistic identity are for sharing, and what parts are just for you?
- What is unique about your Autistic identity? What makes it distinctly yours?
That last question is harder than it looks. Our group discovered that too; identity isn’t a destination.Identity is an ongoing process of noticing, naming, and being changed by what we find.
We don’t have to share our entire selves all the time. It’s okay to have parts of ourselves that are just for us. The parts we do bring into connection with others (the parts we offer to this community) are part of what makes this community what it is.
Thank you for being here. Thank you for what you bring.
