📌 Need to Know: What’s Changing with Paid
Paid subscriptions are coming back and evolving! We want your investment to feel worth it and genuinely useful. Think of it as Autistic burnout and chronic illness support from a neurodivergent, chronically ill creator. See what paid subscribers get at the bottom of this post ↓
It started with Lord of the Rings. My wife was out of town, I dropped into deep monotropic focus, and I watched all three extended cuts back to back to back while I wrote. By the time I came up for air that night I had 50,000 words. I don’t think I got up to use the bathroom. I definitely didn’t eat dinner. I wasn’t writing a book. I was just doing what writing has always done for me: making sense of things, getting them out, putting words to an experience so somebody else might feel less alone.
In this video, I’m taking you behind the scenes of writing that book. It’s called So You’re Autistic… Now What?, it’s coming out with Balance, an imprint of Hachette, and the manuscript is due next March. I’ll say this plainly: I’ve talked about self-doubt and perfectionism and imposter syndrome my whole career, and this project has handed me more of all three than anything I’ve ever done, combined.
In this video diary I walk through how it actually happened, because almost none of it was a plan. I reached out to a friend who’d self-published, she sent me a laundry list of sequential steps, and my executive functioning said hell no and closed the tab. My brain doesn’t move in straight lines at all. It hops, it diverges, it goes from association to association…so those step-by-step guides just don’t work for me. In this video I tell you about what I did instead.
I’m honest about the privilege threaded through all of it. I know that being a white guy with a master’s degree, a therapist with a large following, made navigating a traditional contract more possible for me than for a lot of people who could run circles around me and are more deserving of the space.
I talk about the role publishers play and bust the myth that they do the marketing for you (they largely don’t). That part is mostly on you.
I talk about the learning and unlearning. I’ve been Autistic my whole life and only found out at 35, and the four and a half years since have been a long deconstruction, moving toward the neurodiversity paradigm and away from the pathology one — thanks to people like Dr. Nick Walker, Sonny Jane Wise, Dr. Megan Neff, and Tiffany Hammond.
And I get into the why, because that’s the thing I have to keep anchoring into when I contemplate bailing, which is basically every day. A woman in her mid-seventies came up to me after a keynote in Alaska and said it was the first time in her life she’d felt understood, and asked if it was worth pursuing a diagnosis at her age. Yes. A million times over. Discovery can be life-altering and life-saving, because living disconnected from yourself, feeling defective or broken or like you never got the manual, is a heavy, exhausting tax on a person.
This book, more than anything, feels like a love letter back to the kid I was. The one who felt lost and broken, who contemplated suicide, who got into alcohol and gambling, who was just trying to find his way. I think writing it will be some of the most healing work I’ve done.
This book is not the end-all of the Autistic experience. It can’t be. And this video diary isn’t a how-to video, though I do talk shop — self-publishing versus traditional, proposals, finding an agent who shares your values, building the plane as you fly it.
If you’ve got a book in you, the only real advice I have is: start writing. Not sequentially. Five minutes a day, and you’ll never actually stop at five. I hope you’ll watch or listen to the full episode, or bookmark it for your next walk or commute.
And if something in this one resonated for you, I’d love to hear about it. Whether you’re writing your own book, sitting on the idea of one, or you watched this and felt seen in a way you didn’t expect, share below. That’s what this space is for.
If you want to be on the wait list for the book, let us know in the comments. We’re building toward a lot more as we get closer.
And if you know someone who’s been sitting on a book they’re scared to write, send this their way.
As always…Doubt Yourself, Do It Anyway.
Until next time,
Patrick
📌 Going forward here is what paid subscribers get:
🔥 The Burnout Breakdown (monthly)
A casual, friendly monthly report on how I am caring for myself through burnout: comfort shows, comfort meals, sensory soothing activities, travel, restoration and regulation techniques, and what I’m learning from others in the field. The struggle gets highlighted too, not just the wins. You’re encouraged to join the conversation, share what you’re working through, and track your own burnout roadmap so we can move toward recovery together.
📓 The Journey Journal (weekly, aspirational)
A weekly journal prompt where I reflect on what I’m writing, processing, and giving mental space to. Paid subscribers only can comment and interact here.
🎞️ Interactive Photo Album Video
A casual, behind-the-scenes look at clips from my travels and day-to-day, made so you almost feel like you’re there. A space to swap stories about our own journeys and destinations and build community together.
A note on promises: the Burnout Breakdown is a monthly commitment. The Journey Journal and photo album are things I aim to deliver, but I won’t over-promise on frequency. What I can promise is care, honesty, and showing up.
Thank you for supporting this work. It’s not taken for granted. 💛
