Show notes
After evacuation warnings during a California wildfire, I reflect on recursive memory, autistic overwhelm, voice notes as survival infrastructure, and why assistive technology is not cheating but a way back to coherence.The strange thing about catastrophe is that the body often understands it before the mind does. The alarms go off. The mobiles erupt. The message arrives in the flat administrative language of modern emergency systems—leave now, no one is coming for you—and suddenly the ordinary world collapses into triage. Not abstractly. Materially. Which objects. Which documents. Which memories. Which living beings. And because my daughter and I are both autistic gestalt processors, the panic does not arrive in neat linear thoughts. It arrives as flooding. Twenty nows at once. The fire approaching the house. The plushies on the bed. My grandmother’s voice. The smell of chaparral smoke. The possibility that entire emotional geographies could vanish in an afternoon.And even after the danger shifts—the wind changes, the fire stalls, the house remains standing—the nervous system does not recognise chronology as resolution. This is the part I keep trying to explain. For me, “now” is never singular. The evacuation is still happening whilst I am talking about it. The terror keeps arriving recursively through objects, rooms, smells, fragments of sound. That is part of why I use voice notes the way I do. Not because I am trying to produce polished speech, but because speech itself becomes flotation. I ramble into the phone because the alternative is drowning in simultaneous signal. There are no scripts for this kind of overwhelm. Only release valves.And that is where the conversation unexpectedly turned toward technology and writing and AI and all the strange moral panic surrounding assistance. Because when I am driving up the mountain in absolute terror, speaking into my phone in fragments, repetitions, associative leaps, emotional collisions—those notes make no sense to most people. But when I feed them into NotebookLM (Gemini), the system can separate the threads. Not replace my voice. Find it. Pull apart the different nows long enough that I can actually work with them. And I do not experience that as cheating any more than I experienced crutches as cheating when my knee was destroyed, or calculators as cheating when richer children had access to tools my family could not afford. Infrastructure is not fraud. Accommodation is not fraud. Support is not fraud.What sits underneath so much of the suspicion toward autistic communication is the demand that legitimacy must appear in approved formats before it counts as real. My daughter saying “enoughness” communicates something immediately and precisely to the people who know her. But outside relationship, outside attunement, the word becomes unintelligible noise. The same thing happens with echolalia, recursive speech, spelling, flooding, associative connection, non-linear storytelling. Systems trained to recognise only compressed linear output often cannot perceive communication that arrives globally first and sequentially later. And then the failure of recognition gets projected back onto the autistic person as deficit.At the same time, I keep thinking about how much of human communication has always been collective and recombinant. Mentor texts. Grandmothers. Public speaking coaches. Books read aloud in childhood. Substack writers feeding each other language across oceans without ever directly speaking. We absorb phrases, rhythms, gestures, atmospheres. We metabolise them. Reconfigure them. Return them changed. That is not artificiality. That is culture. That is how language itself survives. My writing exists because thousands of voices accumulated inside me before I had the literacy to unlock them. And when literacy finally arrived, all those stored scripts flooded forward at once.So much of this conversation was really about recognition. About who gets granted humanity when their communication does not conform to institutional expectations. About what happens during crisis when the polished adult performance falls away and cognition reveals its actual architecture. And perhaps that is why I am still shaken. Because the fire did not just threaten the house. It exposed how fragile legitimacy becomes when the systems around you only recognise one narrow way of being coherent.Here’s the link to the article we discussed: Let us know what you think.The AutSide is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit autside.substack.com/subscribe