Before I Step Back...
A pause, not a disappearance
There is no easy way to write this. But if Autism Answers Back is going to stay honest, then I need to be honest too.
I am stepping back from the project for now.
This is not a dramatic exit. It is not a crisis. It is not the result of backlash or pressure or some hidden conflict. It is something simpler and harder to name. A kind of completion. A recognition that the work I have been doing here has reached the end of its first shape, and that forcing it to continue in that same shape would turn clarity into repetition.
Over the past year I have written about patterns that appear so often in autism research that they start to feel inevitable. Burden framing. Compliance logic. Participation without influence. Silence dressed up as neutrality. I wrote about these patterns because they hurt people. I wrote because many of us grew up inside them without the words to say what felt wrong. I wrote because I wanted to hold the mirror still long enough for someone else to see what I saw.
But here is the truth I owe you: I know the pattern now. I can name it in my sleep. I can read the abstract of a new study and see the entire arc before I get to the methods section. That is not cynicism. It is fluency. And fluency has a cost. When critique stops being discovery and starts becoming a reflex, the writing loses something. So does the writer.
I do not want to spend the next year producing variations of the same post. You deserve more than that. I deserve more than that. AAB was never meant to be a content mill. It was meant to be a place where autistic clarity could be spoken without softening the edges for fundability or comfort. For that clarity to stay alive, it needs space. And right now, that means stepping back.
This pause is not an ending. Projects like this do not end. They change. They condense. They go quiet until the next shape arrives. I am leaving the door open to return when I have something new to say, something that stretches me instead of repeating me. When that happens, I will come back with the same commitment to precision and the same refusal to perform neutrality.
In the meantime, the posts here remain. Use them. Share them. Argue with them. Read them against your own experience. If you are a researcher, ask yourself what you still treat as neutral. If you are an autistic reader who found language here that made you feel less alone, hold onto that. It was written for you. It will stay up for you.
If you want to reach out, you can. I may be slower to respond, but I am still here. Still reading. Still paying attention to how power moves through the stories told about us. Still committed to the work even when I am not publishing.
What I am choosing now is not silence. It is rest. And rest is not withdrawal. It is a way of preserving the ability to speak with integrity when the next moment of clarity arrives.
Thank you for reading. Thank you for staying through the discomfort. Thank you for letting me write the things that could not always be written elsewhere.
I will see you again when the next chapter of this project makes itself known.
— Jaime