Recommended Reads: Early July 2025

Some more articles on the autistic experience worth reading

Hello, my friends. I haven’t been feeling as creatively generative as I usually do, what with… everything going on in the world these days… but have still been doing plenty of reading, so this issue is packed full of recommended neurodiversity-related reads from across the Substack universe.

Enjoy!

Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

I’ve been beating the “autistic assessments are broken” drum for a while, and I love hearing other people’s thoughts on why that is and why it matters:

Autistic Assessment is broken. We need to fix it. Fast.

Here’s my piece on the subject, in case you missed it:

If you’ve ever been told you’re “too much” (too loud, too talkative, too serious, too anything) then this next piece from

IFS & Neurodiversity

will probably resonate with you.

If you’re not familiar with IFS, here’s some helpful context for this next read: IFS stands for “Internal Family Systems,” which is a psychotherapy approach that views someone’s mental system or self as made up of a “family” of distinct sub-selves or parts)

The Parts that Loved Too Brightly

Here’s another great piece to combat the “too much” accusations. This piece is quite a long read, but it’s a detailed exploration and celebration of autistic joy and euphoria in such a refreshing way:

Autistic Joy is Our Birthright

I loved this piece from

David Gray-Hammond

, and especially loved this quote from the intro:

In the face of a world that has long pathologized, misunderstood, and silenced us, Autistic people are forging new ways of producing and disseminating knowledge. We are building something deeper than a support network or advocacy movement. We are growing a rhizome; a decentralized, perpetually expanding, anti-hierarchical web of community-driven knowledge that refuses to be contained by academic journals, diagnostic manuals, or institutional gatekeeping.

The Autistic Rhizome: Reclaiming Knowledge, Rewriting Reality

If you’re still in the early phases of self-discovery or late-diagnosis, you could use this piece as an inspiration list for ways to accommodate yourself and better honoring your sensory limits:

my autistic support kit

The below quick read from

Autistic Ang

is a great complement to the above as well, and if you’re a paid subscriber to Ang’s substack you should also check out their awesome script guide.

When You Stop Explaining Your Quirks and Start Decorating with Them