Late Vocabulary
I came to a lot of this language late.
Not because it didn’t exist — it did, somewhere — but because the conditions that would have sent me looking for it didn’t arrive until recently. A daughter’s offhand observation. An essay that described something I’d spent years calling a personality trait. A word that fit something I’d only ever called the way I am.
This is a running glossary. I add a term when I encounter one that names something I already knew but didn’t have language for. The format is simple: what the field means by it, and what I mean by it. Those two things are sometimes the same and sometimes not.
I’m not an authority on any of this. I’m someone learning new words for old experiences, which is its own kind of strange.
Ableism
Discrimination or prejudice against people with disabilities, expressed through individual attitudes, institutional structures, or cultural norms that treat disabled experience as inherently inferior to non-disabled experience.
The version I'm still untangling is the internal one. The years I spent calling my own difficulties character failures. The standard I held myself to that was built for a different kind of nervous system entirely. Ableism doesn't always arrive from outside. Sometimes it's just the voice that says you should be able to do this by now.
Accommodations
Adjustments to an environment or task that remove disabling barriers — flexible hours, written instructions, quiet space, reduced sensory load. Framed legally as exceptions; experienced as the conditions under which the work actually gets done.
The word makes it sound like a favour granted to someone who can't keep up. What it describes is the set of conditions in which I do my best work — early hours, unbroken blocks, low sensory load, written over verbal. I built most of mine myself, quietly, before I had the word. I just called it how I work.
ADHD Paralysis
A state in which the volume or ambiguity of a task list becomes overwhelming enough to prevent starting anything at all — distinct from procrastination, which usually involves avoiding one specific thing rather than freezing in front of all of them.
The inertia entry covers the gravity of staying still. This is what happens before that — too many possible next actions, none of them sorted, so none of them get chosen. The fix isn't willpower. It's cutting the list down to one visible thing before I'm anywhere near the desk.
AuDHD
The co-occurrence of autism and ADHD in the same person — two neurological profiles that interact, sometimes amplifying and sometimes contradicting each other.
Two systems that were never designed to share the same hardware. One wants depth and predictability; the other wants novelty and forward motion. You can be intensely invested and still unable to start. You can care more than anyone in the room and still fail to produce evidence of that caring the room will recognise. The inconsistency isn’t character. It’s traffic.
Autistic Burnout
Chronic exhaustion resulting from sustained masking and navigating a neurotypical world without adequate support. Distinct from ordinary burnout — it accumulates slowly, often invisibly, and can take months to recover from. Characterized by a significant reduction in functioning, increased sensory sensitivity, and loss of previously held skills.
Not a bad week. Not the kind of tired a long weekend fixes. This is what happens when the coping systems that have been running quietly in the background — for years, maybe decades — finally run out of capacity. What’s left is the thing they were compensating for, with nothing left to manage it. The scaffolding didn’t fail. It just hit its limit.
Autistic Catatonia
A severe, under-recognised presentation in some autistic people involving marked slowing, freezing, or loss of purposeful movement and speech — distinct from psychiatric catatonia in cause, though overlapping in presentation. Can require specific medical intervention and is frequently missed or misattributed.
The Autistic Shutdown entry describes something milder and more familiar to me — a system going quiet, still reachable with time. This is further along a spectrum I haven't been to. I'm including it because the glossary should show the range, not just the part of it I can speak for.
Autistic Inertia
Difficulty starting, stopping, or changing activities — a tendency for the nervous system to stay in its current state, whether that's rest or deep engagement. The object at rest and the object in motion both resist the change.
It's not that I won't start. It's that the thing I'm currently doing — even nothing — has a gravity to it. Getting out of a chair and getting out of a project use the same broken mechanism. Once I'm moving I can move for hours. The cost is all in the transition.
Autistic Shutdown
A stress response in which the nervous system effectively goes offline — communication reduces, movement slows, social engagement becomes inaccessible. An inward withdrawal rather than an outward expression. The system protecting itself by becoming unreachable.
This is the one that gets misread as a mood. As withdrawal. As some kind of verdict being issued about the room or the people in it. The system isn’t gone — it’s just locked from the inside for a while. I’m still there. I’m just not available.
Camouflaging
A broader term than masking — includes masking but also encompasses actively imitating neurotypical social behaviours, compensating for difficulties, and assimilating social scripts through observation and imitation.
Masking is the suppression. Camouflaging is the whole performance — learning the lines, watching how other people move through rooms, building a library of appropriate responses. By the time I understood I’d been doing it, the library was enormous. I don’t know where I learned most of it. It just accumulated.
Cognitive Empathy vs. Affective Empathy
Two distinct components of empathy — cognitive empathy is the ability to understand another person's mental state; affective empathy is the capacity to feel what they're feeling. Autism research increasingly shows these can be dissociated: reduced cognitive empathy alongside intact or even heightened affective empathy.
The theory of mind entry covers the understanding side. This distinction explains something that used to confuse people about me — I can fail to predict how someone will react and still be hit hard by how they actually feel once I see it. The two systems aren't the same dial. Mine are set very differently from each other.
Demand Avoidance
A profile often associated with autism, characterised by an extreme avoidance of everyday demands and expectations — including demands the person would otherwise want to fulfil. Driven by anxiety, autonomy needs, or nervous system overwhelm.
The avoidance isn’t about the task. It’s about the demand. The same thing I would do freely, spontaneously, and with enthusiasm becomes impossible the moment it becomes something I have to do. The obligation changes the thing. I’ve spent years designing my work life to minimise this — which is a polite way of saying I’ve learned to make almost everything feel like it was my idea.
Disclosure
The act of telling others about one's neurodivergence — to an employer, colleague, friend, or partner. Carries genuine risk and benefit; not a neutral act, and rarely a one-time one.
There's no clean version. Say nothing and keep paying the full cost of being misread. Say something and watch the information rearrange how you're seen, sometimes in ways you can't take back. I disclose selectively, deliberately, and never without doing the arithmetic first. Each time is its own decision. It pretty much always feels good.
Double Empathy Problem
A theory proposed by Damian Milton arguing that the social difficulties autistic people experience aren't solely due to autistic deficits, but to a mutual breakdown in understanding between autistic and non-autistic people — each finds the other hard to read.
For a long time I assumed the difficulty was mine. That I was the one failing to understand, the one reading the room wrong. The double empathy problem reframes it: it's a mismatch between two different systems, not a failure of one. That's a different kind of problem. It doesn't have the same moral weight.
Dyspraxia
A neurodevelopmental condition affecting motor coordination and the planning of movement — also called Developmental Coordination Disorder. Frequently co-occurs with autism and ADHD; affects everything from handwriting to navigating physical space.
I was the child who was bad at sport in a way that looked like not trying. The body wouldn't sequence the movement the way the instruction asked. It surfaces still — the dropped thing, the spilled thing, the route that takes me three attempts to learn. Filed for years under clumsy. Clumsy was never the mechanism.
Dysregulation
A state in which the nervous system's capacity to manage emotional, sensory, or cognitive input is overwhelmed, resulting in heightened reactivity, difficulty functioning, or loss of emotional control.
It arrives as disproportionate. Too much reaction for the size of the thing. What I've learned is that the size of the thing is rarely the point — it's the load that was already there before the thing happened. The trigger is almost never the actual problem.
Emotional Permanence
Used colloquially in ADHD contexts to describe difficulty retaining the felt sense of an emotion or relationship when its source isn't present — knowing someone cares, but not feeling it once they're out of the room.
The object permanence entry is about tasks vanishing. This is about people. I know, intellectually, that I'm held in steady regard by people who aren't currently in front of me. The knowing doesn't always reach the feeling. Reassurance evaporates faster than it should. I need the evidence refreshed more often than I'd like to admit. It works on people the same way it works on tasks — out of sight, out of mind. I don't miss anyone. Other people mind that more than I do.
Executive Dysfunction
Difficulty with the cognitive processes that manage goal-directed behaviour — including planning, initiating tasks, organising, regulating emotions, and shifting attention. Common in both ADHD and autism.
The gap between knowing what needs to happen and being able to make it happen. That gap has a texture. It's not laziness and it's not avoidance, though from the outside it looks like both. There's a door that should open. You can see it. You just can't always find the handle.
Fawning
A stress response — alongside fight, flight, and freeze — in which threat is managed by appeasing, accommodating, or merging with the other person’s needs. Common in those who learned early that safety meant being agreeable.
This is the one I least wanted to recognise. The reflexive yes. The instant read of what the room wants and the quiet reorganising of myself to provide it. I called it being easy to work with for a long time. The cost showed up later, in not always knowing what I’d have wanted if no one had been watching.
Functioning Labels
Descriptors like "high-functioning" or "low-functioning" used to categorise autistic people by their apparent ability to meet neurotypical expectations. Widely criticised for obscuring actual support needs and being used to deny support to those labelled high-functioning. Many practitioners now use "support needs" language instead.
"High-functioning" was used about me — usually as a compliment, which is the problem. It meant: you don't cost anything. It meant: you're doing it right. What it didn't account for was the overhead of all that functioning. The energy required to appear capable in the ways that get labelled. The things that weren't happening while those things were.
Gestalt Language Processing
A language acquisition and processing style, common in autism, in which meaning is derived from whole phrases or chunks — gestalt units — rather than individual words assembled into sentences. Gestalt processors often develop language through borrowed scripts before building original language from the parts.
This is how I learn most things, not just language. The whole arrives before the parts. I understand the shape of something before I can name its components — and often better than I'll ever be able to explain it sequentially. The field calls it a processing style. I used to call it thinking in patterns. Same thing.
Hyperfocus
A state of intense, narrowly directed concentration common in ADHD, in which the person becomes deeply absorbed in a task to the exclusion of other awareness — including time, hunger, and external demands.
This is the one that confused people for years — including me. You can't focus, they said. And also: how did you do all of that in one sitting? Both things were true. The focus was real. It just couldn't be scheduled.
Hyper-Systemizing
A cognitive style characterised by an intense drive to analyse and construct systems — identifying rules, patterns, and underlying mechanisms. Common in autism. Proposed by Simon Baron-Cohen as the counterpart to, or source of, reduced social intuition.
This one I recognise without argument. The instinct to find the underlying rule, to map the structure, to understand how things fit together before I can work with them — it runs through everything. Products, writing, people, rooms. I'm always looking for the operating logic. It doesn't feel like a trait. It feels like how thinking works.
Info-dumping
The enthusiastic, detailed sharing of knowledge about a topic of deep interest — common in autism, often a primary mode of connection and a genuine expression of care.
I learned to ration it. To watch for the moment the other person's attention thins, and to stop before I'd said the half of it. What took longer to learn was that the impulse isn't a social failure — it's how I offer something. Here is the thing I love. I am handing it to you. The handing-over is the affection.
Interoception
The sense that communicates the internal state of the body — hunger, thirst, temperature, pain, heart rate. In many neurodivergent people, interoceptive signals are muted, delayed, or unreliable.
I've worked through lunch more times than I can count, not as discipline but as genuine unawareness. The signal didn't come, or came too quietly, or arrived as something that didn't read as hunger. The body was keeping score. I just wasn't getting the messages in real time.
Justice Sensitivity
A heightened perceptual and emotional response to unfairness — toward oneself or others — more pronounced in many autistic and ADHD people. Registers violations of fairness quickly and holds them strongly.
I feel the unfair thing in the body before I've finished reasoning about it. A broken rule, a moved goalpost, someone treated as less than the situation warranted — it lands hard and stays. It's made me difficult in some rooms and useful in others. I've stopped apologising for it. I haven't stopped feeling it.
Label
A categorical term applied to a cluster of traits, behaviours, or experiences — in neurodiversity contexts, the name attached to a neurological profile following identification. Labels carry embedded narratives: historical frameworks, clinical assumptions, and the dysfunction story the field has told about the category.
Taking one on imports more than the definition. You also import the history, the assumptions, the failure modes the field associated with the category before it understood it properly. Sometimes a label arrives just in time — late enough that the pattern has already formed without it, early enough to name what's already there. What you do with the name after that is the actual question. Mine came pre-loaded with the field's old assumptions. I've been unpacking it since — keeping what's useful, and setting the rest down.
Masking
The conscious or unconscious suppression of neurodivergent traits to appear neurotypical — adapting behavior, speech, or emotional expression to fit the expectations of a given environment.
I spent a long time calling this being professional, or being good in a room, or knowing how to read people. I was not wrong. Those things are also true. What I didn’t know was the cost — only that by evening, something was gone.
Mono-processing
The tendency to process one sensory channel or stream of information at a time rather than several in parallel — closely related to monotropism, but describing the perceptual bottleneck rather than the attention pattern itself.
The monotropism entry is about where attention goes. This is about how much can come in at once while it's there. Someone talking while music plays while a screen is on — I'm not choosing one. The others simply aren't landing. It looks like selective hearing. It's closer to a single door letting one thing through at a time.
Monotropism
A theory of autism proposing that autistic people tend to focus attention intensely on a small number of interests or tasks at a time, with limited available attention for anything outside that focus.
Not a deficit of attention. A different distribution of it. When something has mine, it really has it. The cost is everything outside the tunnel — which turns out to be most of the administrative surface of a life.
Neurodivergent
An umbrella term, coined by Kassiane Asasumasu, for people whose neurological development and functioning differ from the dominant societal standard — encompassing autism, ADHD, dyslexia, and more. Describes a difference, not a deficit.
I resisted the term at first. It sounded like a category I was joining rather than something I'd always been. What changed was realising the word doesn't make you anything. It just names the distance you were already covering.
Object Permanence
Used colloquially in ADHD contexts to describe the tendency for people, tasks, and obligations to feel non-existent when not immediately present — out of sight, genuinely out of mind.
I'm not avoiding you. You disappeared. This is why the systems have to be visible. A task in a list I can't see doesn't exist. A relationship without a next scheduled touchpoint drifts — not by choice, but by the mechanics of how attention works. I've lost more than I want to count to this.
Self-Diagnosis
The identification of one's own neurodivergence based on research, community knowledge, and lived experience, often preceding or substituting for formal clinical assessment. Increasingly recognised as valid given the cost, waitlists, and diagnostic bias of formal pathways.
The formal system wasn't built for adults who'd already spent decades compensating. By the time the question occurred to me, I'd done more honest observation of my own wiring than any one-hour appointment could. The certificate isn't the understanding. I'd had the understanding for a while before I had anything official to call it.
Unmasking
The active, often gradual process of reducing camouflaging and masking behaviours — letting suppressed traits surface, usually following identification or in spaces perceived as safe. Frequently accompanied by grief for years spent performing, and by a period of relearning what's actually native versus adopted.
The masking entry is about the cost of the performance. This is what happens when I stop running it in a given room — and it isn't instant relief. Some of it I don't remember how to put down. Some of it I'm still not sure was ever a performance at all, versus just who I turned out to be.
Window of Tolerance
The zone of nervous-system arousal in which a person can function, think, and engage — bordered by hyperarousal above and hypoarousal below. Trauma and neurodivergence can both narrow it.
Mine is narrower than the standard build, and I spent years not knowing that was a measurable thing rather than a character flaw. Outside the window, the higher functions go offline — the planning, the perspective, the words. Most of my systems exist to keep me inside it. I didn't know that's what I was doing until I had the term.