Today marks World Autism Acceptance Day and the beginning of Autism Acceptance Month.
In February of this year, I decided to announce and start speaking publicly about something that has always been part of who I am: I’m autistic.
For most of my life, this wasn’t something I talked about openly, and if I did, it was with people I trusted after getting to know them, or when circumstances required me to reveal my diagnosis.
Like many autistic people, I became very good at masking. Masking is exactly how it sounds: pretending to talk, act, and present yourself in an inauthentic way so that you “fit in”. You might say, that’s something everyone does. And you’re right, to a certain extent, everyone does it. The difference is the scope, scale, and energy in autistic people.
Growing up autistic, I spent a lot of time observing how other people operate, whether that was in person or by watching tons of movies and TV shows. I’d study patterns in conversation, workplace behavior, and social dynamics. I’d learn what responses people expect, when they expect them, and how they expect them to look.
That might sound like something everyone does, but as an autistic person, it took more energy. I had a very large floor-to-ceiling mirror in my bedroom growing up. I would spend hours practicing my facial expressions, how to smile properly, and act out pretend conversations so I would be prepared for any situation that required me to interact with another person.
So, from the outside, it often looks like autistic people like me are simply good at navigating systems, but the truth is that a lot of autistic people aren’t navigating those systems effortlessly; we’re analyzing them.
That analytical lens is something that has shaped almost every part of my professional life. Whether I’m looking at marketing operations, broken workflows, company processes, or growth strategy, my brain is constantly trying to understand the underlying system. How things connect. Where they break. Why people keep repeating the same problems. And what the actual root cause is beneath the surface.
It’s pattern recognition combined with systems thinking. It’s a very common autistic trait that is an incredible superpower in the workforce.
We notice inconsistencies quickly. We see connections between things that don’t initially look related. We ask questions about processes that other people have simply accepted as “the way things are”. We often have a very strong internal drive to fix things that don’t make sense.
This is one of the reasons we autistic people often excel in fields that involve analysis, engineering, research, operations, design, and strategy. Our brains are naturally wired to break complex systems down into components and figure out how they can function better.
Historically, however, autism has mostly been discussed through the lens of deficits. Things like difficulty with eye contact, communication, sensory sensitivities, and social processing differences.
Don’t get me wrong. Those experiences are real, and are challenges I deal with every day, especially when navigating environments that were designed around neurotypical expectations.
But when autism is framed only through what autistic people struggle with, it completely misses the other half of the picture. The same neurological differences that create challenges in certain environments often create extraordinary strengths in others.
Deep focus. Persistence. Pattern recognition. Systems thinking. Integrity. A strong sense of fairness. The ability to work through complex problems without losing interest.
These aren’t fringe traits. They’re superpowers.
One of the reasons I decided to speak more openly about my own autism is because representation matters. A lot of people still have a very narrow mental model of what autism looks like. It’s usually the stereotype of a white boy who is nonverbal, obsessed with trains or dinosaurs, gets easily overstimulated, and will have to be taken care of forever.
But autism is called a spectrum for a reason. That stereotype is just one part of the spectrum. It’s why someone like me, a black woman who is verbal and doesn’t need constant care, gets overlooked, and their autism isn’t diagnosed as early. (Don’t get me wrong, though. I, too, love trains and dinosaurs and get easily overstimulated.)
Autistic people exist across every profession, every industry, and every type of role. Many of us have built careers solving complicated problems because our brains are wired to approach those problems differently.
The challenge is that most workplaces were not designed with non-autistic thinking in mind. So, autistic professionals often spend years learning how to adapt to environments that don’t necessarily recognize the value of how we think.
That’s slowly starting to change, but education is still a big part of that process.
So, for the rest of this month, Cotton Corner will be dedicated to exploring autism more directly, especially in the context of work, systems, communication, and how autistic thinking shows up in professional environments.
Once you start to understand how autistic brains operate, something interesting becomes clear: many of the problems organizations struggle with, such as unclear processes, inefficient systems, misaligned communication, and fragile operational structures, are exactly the types of problems autistic people are often uniquely equipped to see and solve.
That’s a perspective worth making more visible.