You Don’t Recognize Autism. You Recognize Discomfort.
The traits you associate with autism aren’t autism at all.
This isn’t a new revelation.
We’ve been having this conversation for years. In support groups, in private conversations, in posts and videos that go viral only to be misunderstood in the comments. We’ve explained—again and again—that saying someone “doesn’t seem autistic” isn’t a compliment. It’s a misunderstanding. A red flag. A reminder that the person speaking doesn’t know what autism actually is—only what they’ve been taught to notice.
And what they’ve been taught to notice has very little to do with structure.
It has everything to do with disruption.
The truth is, this isn’t just a social misunderstanding. It’s not just awkward phrasing.
It’s systemic.
And worse—it’s symptomatic of something even more deeply systemic: a psychology that defines autism not by how it works, but by how it bothers people.
Most people don’t recognize autism. They recognize discomfort.
What they’ve internalized as “autism” is really just a pattern of surface traits—noticeable behaviors, social friction points, sensory disruptions, affective mismatches. Things that stand out. Things that get labeled. Things that are easier to observe than to understand.
And tragically, this misrecognition doesn’t stop at behavior. It becomes conflated—quietly, insidiously—with intellectual expectation.
If someone doesn’t “seem” autistic, people assume they’re capable.
If they do seem autistic, they’re often presumed incapable—of reasoning, learning, adapting, understanding, strategizing.
As if cognition itself were performative.
As if comprehension had an accent.
That’s the problem. The aesthetic of difference becomes a substitute for structure.
And that substitute hardens into a false belief about intelligence.
The DSM doesn’t describe autism. It describes discomfort.
When you look at the diagnostic criteria for autism in the DSM, what you find isn’t a model of cognition. What you find is a mirror—reflecting neurotypical expectations back at themselves.
Struggles with “social reciprocity.” Unusual “interests.” Sensory “reactivity.” Difficulty “developing and maintaining relationships.”
That’s not a framework for understanding how autistic minds actually work. That’s a list of things neurotypical people have found confusing, frustrating, or hard to accommodate. That’s deficit-based psychology at work—starting from the assumption of normal, and measuring everything else by how far it deviates.
This is how autism became pathology:
Not through understanding, but through observation of difference.
But autism isn’t defined by difference. It’s defined by structure.
And the structure is something most people—clinicians included—have never been taught to see.
Autism is monotropism. Everything else is life.
Monotropism is the core pattern behind autistic cognition.
It’s a tendency toward deep, sustained focus—attention that narrows rather than scatters, resists switching rather than shifting easily, and builds intensity over time. It's not a behavioral style. It’s a cognitive architecture.
Monotropic minds don’t process multiple unrelated inputs well. They don’t jump in and out of context without cost. They’re tuned for depth, not breadth. For relative convergence, not constant reorientation.
And from that one structural trait, everything else flows.
Sensory overload. Social burnout. Special interests. Emotional delay. Pattern synthesis. Meltdowns. Stimming. All of it—all the so-called “autistic traits”—are not autism. They’re what happen when a monotropic mind encounters the world.
Autism doesn’t manifest the same way in every person because people don’t manifest the same way.
The structure is shared. The lives are not.
Monotropism anchors us. Expression differentiates us.
Some autistic people experience their monotropic focus as entrapment—stuck loops, burnout spirals, difficulty escaping emotional inertia. Others experience it as something different: recursive, generative, expanding.
That’s a distinction I’ve spent years trying to articulate. I began developing a model of autistic cognition—originally as an extension of monotropism itself—to capture one common subtype of this structure: a pattern where monotropic focus builds not into stasis, but into internal synthesis. I call it Monotropic Expansion.
More recently, I’ve started to suspect it may be better understood not as an extension, but as a subset of monotropism—a specific way that structure unfolds under certain cognitive and developmental conditions. It’s work I’m still developing. I don’t claim to have the answers. But I’m doing my best to find what I can—to build, to test, to learn, and to grow.
It describes how some autistic minds don’t just fixate—they evolve recursively. Thoughts layer. Meaning deepens. Connections form not because of multitasking, but because of prolonged cognitive immersion. These aren’t tangents—they’re spirals. Each layer growing from the last. Internal structure built through recursive motion.
This isn’t a “better” form of autism. It’s not a badge or a brag.
It’s just one way this shared architecture unfolds.
One that often gets missed because it’s quiet, or abstract, or simply unfamiliar to those looking for the wrong signs.
Misrecognition hardens into certainty. Certainty becomes clinical.
When someone says, “You don’t seem autistic,” they’re not identifying a truth. They’re revealing what they’ve absorbed from a system that taught them to recognize traits, not people. To pathologize difference instead of understanding structure. To believe that what can’t be seen must not be real.
And that belief—reinforced by clinicians, institutions, diagnostic frameworks—becomes certainty.
Certainty built on misrecognition isn’t knowledge.
It’s bias, codified.
Autism isn’t what people think it is.
It’s not a checklist. It’s not a vibe. It’s not how someone seems.
Autism is a cognitive structure. And once you actually understand that, a lot of things stop being confusing—not just about autism, but about the system that’s been misreading it all along. ∞
This makes a whole lot of sense, and resonates deeply with my lived experience. For me, the disruption of an anchor point - something in my life that I took as almost axiomatic - is horribly disturbing and requires a massive amount of processing. For a future post, could you come up with some concrete examples of anchor points, how people circle round them and develop them into a coherent view and use them in their lives? I love what you're doing here, I think it's genuinely ground-breaking.
This is a great way of describing what autism actually is versus what is being described. I wrote about my own „from the inside out“ perspective on autism here:
https://open.substack.com/pub/ulfindingmywayhome/p/my-passion-for-patterns?r=2kh3qp&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=post-publish