Autism is trending. I am done waiting.

You can’t set people on fire and then call them hot.

That is what I want to say every time someone tells me autism is not an excuse. As if the system that excluded me, exhausted me, and then assessed me as non-compliant had nothing to do with the outcome. As if I arrived here on my own.

I was diagnosed six years ago. In autistic years, that is a lifetime. The learning curve is vertical, the gaslighting is constant, and the rollercoaster does not stop. It just becomes more legible. You start to see the machinery behind what used to feel like personal failure.

I am not a vulnerable person. I want to be precise about that, because the distinction matters. There are times the system makes me vulnerable, through exclusion, through inaccessibility, through processes designed for a version of human that was never me.

That is a design problem, not a personal one. Design problems can be fixed. And when they are not fixed, everyone pays for it; in lost talent, in broken processes, in problems that did not need to exist.

Yesterday the Prime Minister addressed the nation. People are stretched. The cost of living is real, the world feels unstable, and in moments like this, conversations about inclusion get quietly shelved. They become nice to haves. I understand why. When you are focused on the basics, improving your rights feels like a distant priority. But here is what I also know.

Those of us who have any privilege at all, any platform, any capacity to keep going, have a responsibility to keep the fight alive. Because the people who cannot afford to stop and advocate for themselves need someone who will not stop either. Excluding autistic people from workplaces and economic participation is not a side conversation for better times. It is part of the crisis. The cost of designing systems badly is carried by everyone.

Today is Autism Awareness Day. That matters. Visibility is not nothing. But awareness without action is a holding pattern. And I have spent enough time waiting for society to come to us.

So I am not waiting anymore. And I want to invite every autistic person reading this to consider doing the same.

I have borrowed a significant amount of money to keep an autistic-led campaign alive because I believe the work matters and I was not willing to let it die waiting for someone else to fund it. And this week I am lodging a disability discrimination complaint against an organisation I am not naming yet, using the formal mechanisms we are told to trust, to find out whether they actually work for people like me.

I am not going to pretend either of those things was straightforward. But I was not willing to do nothing.

I am done being gaslit by a system that sets the conditions for my distress and then uses that distress as evidence of my limitations.

These are the two things I want to ask you to consider. Pressure test the system. Use the complaints mechanisms, the tribunals, the formal processes. They exist. They are slow and they are imperfect but they are how we find out what the system actually does when you hold it to account. Lodge the complaint. Name what happened. Do not let anyone convince you that your experience of a broken system is a character flaw.

And invest in what you believe in, even when it costs you. There is a cost to doing this. There always is. But there is also a cost to doing nothing, and most of us have already paid it.

The autistic-led organisations, the platforms, the community infrastructure that exists because someone decided not to wait. That is where it starts.

You are not the problem. You are not fragile. You are not an excuse. You are navigating a world that was not built for you, with a nervous system that processes that world differently, and you are doing it without acknowledgement, often without support, and almost always without being paid for the labour of translation.

That changes when we stop asking to be included and start acting as though we already belong. Because we do.

Autism is trending. Now do something about it.

First published on Substack, 10 April 2026.