What Does Overwhelm Feel Like For Autistic People?

Pathological Demand Avoidance and the Inability to Get Anything Done Ever

I'm reading NeuroTribes about the history of autism and neurodivergence and the current chapter is talking about Asperger and the clinic he worked at, and their depictions of children they worked with. Every single child is max relatable, but this one especially has me in fucking stitches:

“When nonautistic people do it [stimming], it’s called fidgeting and it’s rarely considered pathological.”

"Obviously, fandom was a community that was unusually accepting of individual quirks and differences. The term fanzine was coined in 1940 by a deaf fan named Louis Russell Chauvenet, who was also a tournament-winning chess player and a computer technician for the Defense Department. Another fan who became a star writing for Gernsback, David Keller, was diagnosed as feebleminded as a child and spoke a private language understood only by his sister until he was six years old. One of Degler's companions on the road was a physically disabled man named Jim Kepner, who became one of the first openly gay journalists, encouraged by "reading and conjecturing about worlds in which customs might differ from ours". He went from obsessively hoarding issues of Amazing Stories and Galaxy to hunting down newsletters from pioneering gay groups like the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis. Kepner's personal library now forms the core of ONE, the largest archive of gay history in the world, housed at the University of Southern California."

FU Leo Kanner