A brief re-introduction: an autistic gestalt processor, late to language and diagnosis, writing from a script garden of delayed echolalia. Fifteen short points to orient new readers entering the work midstream. Opening — Welcome / Re-introduction With Cathy off enjoying a jazz festival this weekend, I wanted to take this time to do something a little different. There have been a lot of new people arriving—through conferences, through quotes shared on Instagram and Threads, through someone passing a piece along—and I’ve realised that many of you are stepping into the middle of something that’s already been moving for quite a while. So, this is a kind of re-introduction. Not a summary, not a “best of,” but a way of placing myself—so you have a sense of what you’re stepping into. I’ve written over 2000 pieces on The AutSide, and over 200 on Sensual Residue. That’s not because I set out to build something that large. It’s because this is how my mind works. Language accumulates. Patterns return. Things get placed, and then re-placed, and then seen differently over time. So, if you’re new, you’re not arriving at the beginning. You’re arriving somewhere in the middle of an ongoing process. And I don’t expect you to catch up. I don’t expect you to read everything, or even most things. What I do want to offer is a kind of orientation. A way of saying: this is how this space works. This is how I work. Because what I’m doing here doesn’t always map cleanly onto what people expect writing—or teaching, or theory—to look like. So instead of trying to explain it all at once, I’m going to give you fifteen short points. Not as rules, not as claims—but as places you can stand for a moment. And from there, you can decide how close you want to come. And before I move into those fifteen points, I think it’s important to place something more personal. I’m an autistic adult. A gestalt processor—and I mean that in the whole sense, not just language. It’s how I organise experience, memory, meaning. It’s the architecture underneath everything I do. I also live with ADHD, with alexithymia, with sensory processing and integration differences. All of that shapes how I move through the world—what I notice, what overwhelms, what holds. I came to literacy quite late. Language, as it’s typically understood, wasn’t something I “acquired” in childhood. It’s something that formed over time, differently, and often outside the structures that were meant to support it. And I was diagnosed late. Which meant that for most of my life, I didn’t have the frameworks for any of this. I had to figure it out from the inside—through pattern, through experience, through returning to things again and again until they made sense in a way I could hold. So, what you’re encountering here isn’t just writing. It’s the result of that process. 1. I’m not a content creator. First things first. I think it’s important to say that plainly, because it frames everything else. I’m not here producing content to meet a schedule, or to grow something, or to keep an algorithm fed. That’s not the relationship I have with writing. What I’m doing is much closer to needing somewhere for language to go—somewhere for things to land when they arrive. There are days where nothing comes. There are days where something arrives fully formed and I just have to get it down before it moves again. And there are long stretches where I’m circling something without quite knowing what it is yet. So, if you’re here expecting a consistent product, that’s not what this is. What this is…is a record. A living one. Of how something moves through me over time. And if people are here for that, I’m grateful. But I’m not shaping it to hold them. I’m shaping it so I can stay with it. 2. The Substacks are my script garden. The phrase that makes the most sense to me is “script garden.” Not archive. Not portfolio. Not platform. A garden is a place where things are placed, but not finished. Where something can sit, and change, and sometimes come back in a different form entirely. Some things grow. Some things don’t. Some things come back years later and suddenly make sense. That’s what these spaces are for me. I park language there. Phrases, patterns, fragments—things that feel like they matter, but aren’t fully understood yet. And over time, I start to see how they relate to each other. So, if you read across pieces, you’ll notice repetition. Return. Slight shifts. That’s not redundancy. That’s how the meaning forms. 3. Much of what I write is delayed echolalia. This is something that often gets misunderstood. Echolalia is usually framed as repetition without meaning. But for many of us, it’s actually how meaning is processed. Language comes in, sits, and then returns later—changed, layered, carrying something new. That’s what I mean by delayed echolalia. A phrase I heard years ago might reappear in a piece, but now it’s holding something entirely different. Or a memory will come back, not as a memory, but as a pattern that suddenly connects to something I’m writing now. So, when you see repetition in my work, it’s not because I’ve run out of things to say. It’s because something has come back, and this time I can hear it differently. 4. I’m a gestalt processor, and this is what that looks like in the open. A lot of descriptions of gestalt processing stop at childhood. They describe how language is acquired, how scripts are used, how things are pieced together over time. But they don’t often show what it looks like when that process continues into adulthood. This is that. You’re not hearing something that’s been translated into analytic steps. You’re hearing the pattern as it forms—sometimes mid-formation. That means it won’t always be linear. It won’t always resolve cleanly. Sometimes it will circle, or return, or layer. But it will hold together. And part of what I’m doing here is making that visible—so that it’s not only recognised in children, but understood as a lifelong way of being. 5. I don’t start with ideas—I start with something felt. Most pieces don’t begin with a concept. They begin with a sensation. A pull. Something that doesn’t quite have words yet, but insists on being followed. And I don’t always know where it’s going. The writing is the process of finding out what that thing was. Of staying with it long enough that it reveals its structure. Sometimes that becomes something recognisable as theory. Sometimes it stays closer to the original feeling. But the direction is always the same: Not from idea to expression. From experience to understanding. 6. Recursion isn’t a quirk of my work. It’s the method. I come back to things. Not once or twice—but over and over, across months, across years. The same moment, the same phrase, the same question. And each time, something different becomes visible. That’s recursion. It’s not going backwards. It’s not being stuck. It’s a way of turning something, slowly, until you can see more of it. And for me, that’s how depth happens. Not by moving on quickly—but by staying long enough that the thing begins to open. 7. My past isn’t behind me. There’s a strong expectation, culturally, that we move on. That we leave things behind. That the past becomes something resolved, or at least contained. That’s not how this works for me. My past is active. It’s material. It’s something I return to—not to relive it, but to understand it differently as I change. So, when I write about earlier parts of my life, I’m not stepping away from the present. I’m bringing those parts into relation with now. And that’s where a lot of the meaning emerges. 8. The split between my Substacks isn’t a split in me. I know some people encounter The AutSide and Sensual Residue as two different spaces—and they are, in terms of tone and entry point. But they’re not two different selves. They’re two ways of approaching the same underlying pattern. One might feel more recognisable as “theory,” the other more obviously embodied. But the coherence—the thing that holds them together—is the same. And if you read them in relation to each other, that becomes clearer. 9. I’m not trying to make this legible on demand. There’s often an expectation that writing should be immediately clear, immediately accessible, immediately useful. That’s not always how this works. Some pieces take time to land. Some don’t land at all until something else comes along later. And I’m okay with that. Because forcing immediate legibility would mean simplifying something that isn’t simple. So, if something doesn’t make full sense right away, that doesn’t mean it’s failed. It might just not be ready yet. 10. I live in a place and time that is openly hostile to people like me. That’s part of the context for all of this. I’m not writing from a neutral position. I’m writing as someone who exists in a system that doesn’t readily make space for the way I am. That affects what I write, how I write, and why I write. This isn’t just exploration—it’s also a way of staying intact. Of maintaining coherence in an environment that would prefer fragmentation. 11. I don’t separate intellect from body. For me, understanding doesn’t come from abstraction alone. It comes from how something is felt, remembered, carried physically as well as cognitively. So, when I write, those things aren’t separate streams. They’re part of the same process. And that’s why some pieces move between registers—between analysis and sensation. They’re not switching modes. They’re following the same thread through different forms. 12. I’m not interested in presenting a cleaned-up self. There’s a version of writing—especially in academic or professional spaces—that involves presenting only the pa
