elizabitch 's review for:

But Everyone Feels This Way: How an Autism Diagnosis Saved My Life by Paige Layle

5.0

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I appreciated Paige walking us through her life as a kid and teen, highlighting all of her struggles and ways of living in the world as an autistic person, it made me reflect on my own childhood and clicked a lot of pieces together for me...and it is making me think about attempting to write my own history. The autism books I've read so far only ever talk about the socially observable traits of autism and not the neuroscience behind it, so I learned a lot when Paige walked us through the anatomy of it at the beginning, as well as her points about how diagnosis is unhelpfully dependent on how people view you. I'd love to do more reading on the biology side of it, not the sociological.

I wasn't expecting the undercurrent of child abuse and neglect from her parents (although it makes sense, most autistic folx are naturally traumatized by our ableist systems.) Her abuse is there to be observed but isn't delved into and I wonder if Paige will write a follow up on her child abuse, as it looks like she's been diving into that more in recent videos. Reading about her parents' treatment and neglect of her made me so angry and sad for her, she deserves better.