April is autism awareness month. Yesterday, I posted a comic strip about navigating social situations as an autistic person. I want to spend this month going deeper, with regular posts on experiencing autism.
A good place to start is the difference between a psychological trait and a neurological one.
A lot of autistic experiences look like personality traits from the outside. Introversion. Shyness. Social awkwardness. These are things many people relate to, and that relatability is both a bridge and a trap. It creates the impression we're talking about the same thing, just more so. They are also not helped by the common misconception that 'spectrum' means a "vertical" scale from normal to autistic, rather than a "horizontal" one within the neurological condition of autism.
My wife has transverse myelitis, a condition where the myelin sheath around the spinal cord degrades, disrupting nerve signals. The result: both motor and sensory pathways are affected, and the automatic reflex arc that normally catches you when you stumble overreacts and causes her to fall. Everybody trips. Most people catch themselves without thinking. She doesn't have that fallback. She can scan the ground, plan every step, and still fall, because the pebble she didn't see hits a system that can no longer compensate automatically. The effort is real, the safety net is not present, and the fall unavoidable.
Autism works on a different system — social cognition rather than motor control — but the structure is the same. Everybody has awkward social moments. Most people recover instinctively, the automatic social circuitry recalibrates. That fallback is what I don't have reliably. I can prepare, study the signals, pay close attention, and still miss something obvious to everyone else, because it happened in a channel I'm not wired to process automatically.
The exhaustion isn't from interacting. It's from running manual what most people run on autopilot.
And here's the point that matters: my wife's myelin isn't going to grow back. Physiotherapy helps. A cane helps with balance. But they're compensations for something that isn't there, not a cure for something that went wrong. Autism is the same. You can learn strategies, build workarounds, develop compensations, and many of us do, invisibly, for decades. But you're not fixing the wiring. You're working around it.
When relating to autistic people, don't assume similar external signs mean the same internal experience and causes. Ask, and be surprised by what you'll find.
This is part of my April 2026 autism awareness month series. First published on LinkedIn on 2026-04-03.
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