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    Chronicles of an Atypical Mind — Unfiltered and Unapologetic

    Personal stories, science-based articles, and resources on autism, bipolar disorder, and atypical cognition.

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    AutismBipolar disorder

    I’m autistic, I have bipolar disorder: why the words matter

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    Should you say “I’m autistic” or “I have autism spectrum disorder”? And should you say “I’m bipolar” or “I have bipolar disorder”? These questions regularly spark debate. Yet over the years, the way I talk about both has changed completely. It evolved alongside the way I came to see them. For years, I said I was bipolar. Today, I say I have bipolar disorder. A subtle but important difference. Likewise, I rarely say I have autism spectrum disorder (ASD). I’m autistic. Another subtle distinction. Behind these different ways of speaking lies a fundamentally different way of viewing two realities: a psychiatric illness and a neurodevelopmental condition. For me, this shift happened gradually and almost naturally.

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    Autism

    Autistic Laughter: Why Does It Seem So Different?

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    People often told me my laugh was “strange” throughout my school years. Muffled, choppy, sometimes almost out of breath. Years later, during my autism assessment, I began to wonder whether my laughter might be atypical too. The answers I found were far more nuanced than I had imagined.

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    Autism

    Autistic Burnout: How Can You Recover?

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    Today, more and more definitions of autistic burnout can be found online. Researchers are beginning to take an interest in it as well. Yet the question most often asked by the people experiencing it is rarely addressed: how do you recover from it? I asked myself this question after my diagnosis, and I have seen it raised countless times on social media. It therefore seemed natural to explore it in detail.

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    Autism

    Autistic Masking: When the Mask Leads to Burnout

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    Many autistic people spend years appearing to function normally in the eyes of others. Yet this apparent normality often relies on an invisible effort: autistic masking, also known as social camouflaging. This mask can sometimes help a person adapt more easily to the outside world, but it comes with an often underestimated cost: chronic fatigue, overload, and sometimes autistic burnout. In this article, I explain what masking really is, why it appears so early for some people, and how it can eventually become a trap.

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    Double-edged creativity: when autism and bipolar disorder intertwine

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    This article follows the one describing graphorrhea. In August 2019, the manager of Nintendo-Master.com (which I had completely redesigned and then left five years earlier) calls me for help: the site is collapsing in terms of traffic, plagued by a whole range of bugs, and needs another overhaul. I have just been hospitalized for the first time and have developed a full manic episode. Out of love for the site, I jump at the opportunity: it’s time to put my skills to use again. En garde!

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    Autism

    Journey #3: The Diagnosis of Autism 

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    My autism diagnostic journey began relatively early: the first atypical signs were spotted by my mother’s doctor when I was 18 months old. Apparently, I was sorting and organizing toys instead of playing with them in his waiting room. He then told my mother to keep an eye on me. And then… nothing for 20 years, before I received my bipolar diagnosis, was identified as very highly gifted thinking it explained my atypicalities, and finally discovered the missing piece — autism — at age 25.

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    Journey #2: Identifying Giftedness

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    “What do you think about the outcome of these tests?” the neuropsychologist in charge of my IQ assessment asked me. I will always remember that moment. At that instant, I hoped that identifying giftedness would be enough to rule out the bipolar cause. So I answered, naturally, that I suspected a confirmation of giftedness. I was right. I was formally identified as very highly gifted by a neuropsychologist… and I believed it would resolve all my difficulties.

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    When love becomes sensory overload

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    A former friend once asked me how I perceived being in love. I replied that it was “a whole lot of unpleasant sensations in the body.” I had not yet been diagnosed, and it amused him a great deal. He had never heard that kind of description before, and my answer was instinctive. I myself think I had indeed never encountered this description elsewhere (I had even researched it thoroughly, like a diligent student, to break it down).

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