Mistaking Reflection for Reality
Normativity, poetry, and the structural misreading of autistic experience
I love poetry.
I read it and write it because it gives me a way to stay close to what matters to me. Relatable experiences need to be embodied by language, not merely expressed, flattened, or resolved by it. Poetry lets me do that. When I’m trying to express something that feels alive, in motion, poetry is often where I end up.
That’s why it shows up here from time to time. As a reader, I recognize myself in it. As a writer, it feels less like performance and more like orientation—like I’m gravitationally anchored to the thing that matters instead of just orbiting it from a distance.
I’ve spent a lot of time in spaces where poetry circulates—journals, publishers, workshops, conversations about craft and legitimacy. Long enough to notice a recurring tension.
I started noticing which poems seem to move easily and which ones don’t. Certain voices gain more institutional traction. Certain emotional registers feel safer, more acceptable. There’s a recognizable way a “successful” poem often sounds.
A lot of these poems are well made. You can tell care went into them. But there’s often a strange distance too, like the poem knows what it’s supposed to be doing and does it competently, without ever quite settling into the thing that made it want to exist in the first place.
That friction bothers me more than it probably should.
Don’t get me wrong. Poetry matters to me, and I don’t think the discomfort I have with this friction is unjustified. But there is a particular reason why it matters so much to me.
I’ve spent much of my disabled and neurodivergent life being misread by systems that treat familiarity as a proxy for correctness. So, when I see that same narrowing quietly undermining and distorting an art form built on individual expression, it hits a nerve.
What’s being rewarded there isn’t disingenuous motivation, to be clear. People work hard on their poems. Publication matters to them, and that’s absolutely valid. The tension exists in the slow drift from writing that’s anchored in whatever initially sparked it to writing that starts to shape itself around what’s known to land well. Less about following a line of feeling or thought, more about staying inside a set of expectations that already make sense to the system reading it.
What I keep noticing is how easily that shift can happen. Systems tend to reward what can be recognized quickly, categorized cleanly, and affirmed without much friction. Over time those incentives start to influence what gets written, what gets praised, and what gets held up as exemplary. The result isn’t necessarily bad poetry. But it is poetry that’s systemically rewarded for how well it fits in, how comfortably it aligns with the status quo. You see it in both casual and professional takes that arbitrarily and hypocritically categorize the same stylistic choice as “distracting” from a novice or unknown poet and “innovative” from an established talent. You get advice and courses and seminars that tell you what “good poetry” is supposed to look like while simultaneously praising the classics whose fame is derived from work that defiantly does the exact opposite.
You may already recognize this kind of thing in other areas of society or your own life. Consider high-end cuisine, where the skill and discipline involved are undeniably real and consequential. But of course, no one needs a rating system to explain why a meal matters to them. Your grandma’s homemade biscuits and gravy, a “steak on a stake” at the Renaissance Fair, a heaping double order of Waffle House hash browns (scattered, smothered, covered, and chunked) at 1AM—those experiences don’t require hierarchy. They just mean what they mean for you.
Things get strange when excellence stops being a way of describing craft and starts turning into a way of deciding what objectively counts. When a framework meant to recognize skill subtly narrows the range of experiences it’s willing to take seriously. Anything not built to register within that framework can start to look lesser—not because it fails to work, but because it wasn’t designed to be legible to the apparatus doing the judging.
That narrowing isn’t just a problem for artistic expression. It’s deeply systemic.
Modern psychology carries the same structural flaw, just with far higher stakes.
At its core, clinical psychology is deficit-based. It treats normativity as a proxy for truth. A statistical center—how most people think, communicate, regulate, relate—is effectively elevated into a functional ideal. Difference no longer needs to be understood on its own terms. It only needs to be measured against the norm it deviates from.
That move is rarely framed as ideological, but it is. It’s a value judgment disguised as objectivity.
The professional field of psychology, especially as formalized through diagnostic frameworks like the DSM, does not start by asking how different cognitive structures work from the inside. It starts from observable behavior, compares it to a normative baseline, and interprets divergence as deficit unless proven otherwise. The framework isn’t neutral—it’s asymmetric by design. The norm explains itself. Difference has to justify its existence.
Autistic people live squarely inside the consequences of that asymmetry.
Patterns of inside-out cognition—sustained focus, precision, coherence-checking, sensitivity to inconsistency—don’t register as alternate structures within this model. They register as failures to perform flexibility as it’s externally defined. The diagnostic language reflects that: rigidity, black-and-white thinking, rumination, obsession, stubbornness. Even distress is framed as evidence of internal malfunction, rather than as a predictable response to navigating systems built around incompatible assumptions.
Normative bias effectively initiates and compounds that harm.
Once difference is framed as deficit, every friction becomes self-confirming. Difficulty communicating is treated as a social impairment. Resistance to incoherent rules is treated as oppositionality. The need to resolve contradictions is treated as obsession. Over time, the person stops being seen as someone encountering structural mismatch and starts being seen as the source of the problem itself.
None of this requires malice. It just requires a framework that confuses familiarity with correctness and then refuses to interrogate that confusion.
The result is a system that doesn’t merely misinterpret autistic experience, but actively trains everyone involved—clinicians, educators, families, autistic people themselves—to distrust autistic perception. Pattern recognition becomes pathology. Insistence on coherence becomes inflexibility. The very traits that allow someone to see where a system is breaking down are used to discredit their seeing.
That’s not an accident. It’s what happens when a field builds itself around surface correlation instead of internal structure.
So when autistic people express frustration, exhaustion, or fear, that response doesn’t land as information. It lands as further evidence of dysfunction. The system has no category for “you are responding appropriately to something that is misaligned.” It only has categories for “symptoms” and “traits.”
That’s why autistic frustration so often gets reframed as self-absorption or obsession. Not because it is, but because deficit-based psychology doesn’t have the conceptual tools to recognize coherence-driven resistance as anything other than a problem to be managed.
This has real consequences. It shapes treatment, education, and how people are spoken to and spoken about. And over time, it shapes how autistic people come to understand themselves—often as too much, too rigid, too intense, too difficult—rather than as people whose cognition simply doesn’t collapse neatly into a normative mold.
So yes—autistic people are just as human and just as valid as non-autistic people. Most people are willing to agree with that. Agreement is easy.
What’s harder is understanding what that actually commits us to.
It commits us to questioning the frameworks we use to define health, flexibility, and intelligence. To recognizing that coherence doesn’t always look like adaptability as currently measured, and that depth doesn’t always present as ease. It commits us to treating unfamiliar experience as something to be understood, not corrected.
It’s okay not to fully understand what it means to be autistic. That gap isn’t a moral failure. But uncertainty calls for humility, not authority. Lived experience shouldn’t be overwritten simply because it doesn’t resemble what feels normal.
When normativity becomes the yardstick for reality, difference stops being descriptive and starts becoming disciplinary.
And the people who feel that pressure most acutely aren’t broken. They’re responding—often with remarkable clarity—to systems that keep mistaking their own reflection for the full range of what it means to be human. ∞