I took my son to a pain clinic and every parent there was autistic

Two years into Z’s head injury we went to a pain clinic. The program was for families with a teenager in chronic pain, and people flew in from all over the country. Z was the only musician who couldn’t play music anymore. But there was an all-state field hockey player who hadn’t played in years but still went to every practice. There was a girl who’d been a ballerina her whole life and then suddenly couldn’t dance: she’d grown half a foot, and now her body was built for basketball. Her proprioception was off and now movement felt like violence. Read more

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You don’t care about your weakness

Once you know your personality type, you read what you’re bad at and you think: so what? That’s how you know it’s your type. The thing other people think is your weakness is, indeed, your weakness. In their eyes. Because it’s important to them. It’s not important to you. Read more

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Oldest daughter syndrome is a parenting choice

When I was a kid my parents divided the house into rooms for cleaning. Two kids, two parents, twelve rooms: three rooms each. Nobody did their rooms, so I did them all. With no parents home between 8am and 8pm, I had to do something remarkable to get their attention. Read more

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I have data showing only autistic women are as competitive as men. No one would publish it.

I ran a study at Harvard and published a paper. But my best finding is sitting on Harvard’s server, unpublished. So I’m embarking on a furtive rescue mission. To start, here’s the finding: Read more

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In my neighborhood the Scots started the party at 10:30am. Every day.

The World Cup is in Boston, and I live in the middle of the city, so I spent two weeks surrounded by Scottish people. Boston has a literal law against happy hour and a nightlife notorious for being lame. So it made sense that the Scots, who go to bars the way we go to Starbucks, drank all the beer in the city. There were beer delivery trucks lining the streets to keep up. Read more

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Is that your personality or your ADHD?

Personality type is especially valuable for neurodivergent people because it systematizes things we find difficult to understand intuitively. The problem is that autism and ADHD make us nearly impossible to type correctly — including ourselves. Read more

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Personality type posts + how autism breaks the test

Quilts from Gees Bend

People email me their result from my personality test, and I can tell from the way they write the email that the test result is wrong. Finally, I realized that a huge percentage of the people who find their way to me are autistic, and autism breaks the Myers Briggs test. It’s like I accidentally ran a fifteen year study on autism and personality type. Read more

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My dad hired Penelope to coach me. Here’s what happened.

Chairs (1970) Tom Berg 

This is a guest post from a college senior I coached.

When my parents divorced, my mom more or less kept my younger brother and my dad more or less kept me. We each saw the other parent, but never very much and never for very long. My brother and I only saw one another every other weekend for the better part of four years. Read more

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Boundary setting for people who hate boundaries

Z tells me the list of things I can never write about — just to be sure I don’t forget. I am surprised he’s doing it at our local coffee shop where anyone could hear. The last one is, “Don’t tell people Nino left us because he didn’t want to raise two autistic kids.”

“Wait. What? You’ve never said that to me before.”

“Forget it. Everyone already knows. I just thought the list needed more things or you wouldn’t remember.” Read more

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The career killer for Gen Z isn’t AI. It’s remote work.

My first sense that recent college grads are in hell is when I realized the job hunt process is totally broken. Kids use AI to write their resumes, screen ads, and fill out applications. Meanwhile, AI is sorting resumes for companies, and the AI sorters prefer AI-written resumes, so kids are sending out thousands of applications before getting a single interview. Read more

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