autism, disability and my time in taiwan
I have a lot of recommendations I'd like to share, and a lot of tips! my chinese is, I would hazard now, pretty good. reading certain books is still a challenge, but broadly speaking I have found living here a non-entity in terms of how difficult (or not) it is. fighting landlords on contracts with legal chinese, going to the hospital for cancer scan (negative! huzzah), therapy here in taiwan, teaching in chinese, all in chinese and with no issue.
but I also do feel the need to mark the end of this era in some way by giving a bit of context for any posts I make going back to the uk. if you follow my personal blog, you may have seen that a lot of personal things have happened in 2026, most notably my partner breaking up with me, that have thrown a proverbial spanner into the works and left me feeling a little, to quote from my own emo notes app message that I wrote a few days ago:
"the old self cannot survive. the crucible"
ominous! sleep-deprived! not entirely to be taken seriously! but nevertheless reflective of what this year has been.
for anyone who knows xie lian: this is the year of eye twitching smiles and remaining whimsical aggressively and in spite of everything.
so now, to back up to the studying portion of this. the past nine months I have been in taiwan studyign chinese full time at university on the huayu scholarship. this has required a return to full time study in a way that quite honestly hit me like a truck in the face. it is one thing entirely to preach respecting your limits and navigating disability with an equal awareness of your strengths and challenges - and another completely to be thrown in the deep-end after burnout and have to leave almost every classroom in tears.
last time I was in full time study I was able to mask, and hide what I needed, and it broke me. this time my body was not even able to begin. on the one hand that forced me to reckon with things that were probably overdue a decent examination, such as the vestiges of productivity culture and self-worth being based on achievement that has lingered despite my long efforts to live a more gentle, unhurried life, but on the other hand. there is a genuine privilege that comes with being able to be not seen as disabled, even if it mars your recovery and causes any number of issues down the line. being very autistic and in such distress by the classroom environment that I was forced to discuss accommodations from the very second class, this was an entirely different experience from any time I have had in the workplace or studying environment before.
the first five months, then, were not challenging because of the chinese - though in the beginning the classes were challenging, I was still (unfortunately, and I genuinely mean this because I wanted to learn) the best in the school from the moment I entered, going to the top class. and then I had nine months of study on top of that. the challenge was how to remain uhhhhh jovial in spite of flinching away daily from the uncomfortable and distressing realities of disability.
my biggest lesson from this year is: sometimes, there are genuinely things you cannot do. if this is the case, if you do not treat yourself with grace, it will EAT YOU. I mean this in the corrosive sense. it will eat at you and into you and through like like acid and you won't realise it because each time it's a flash of caustic thought, a searing splash of acid - and then it's gone. and many of these thoughts are so normal seeming and so rooted in trying to help yourself, trying to accept help from others, that you will not noticed you are hollowed out and dissolved by them until there is very little strength left.
I am so lonely. so I need friends. I need to make friends. I need to go out and meet people and make friends. I need to get to know people. I am so lonely. I am
the accompanying necessary lesson, therefore, and this comes in two parts: 1) disability means trade-offs, and 2) people will not always understand. starting from the second part: you have to be fortress enough in yourself that you commit to learning to tolerate this. I don't mean being okay with it. that's the goal, not the path. I mean: commit to choosing, everyday, to accepting a certain amount of disappointment or confusion in the eyes of others. only when they see your true capabilities will it become clear that what they were expecting from you was never possible without hurt in the first place. and if someone has known you for a long time, this process is slow and halting and stumbling and it will likely hurt both of you as you readjust expectations and a vision of you as someone who can [x]. well, sometimes. but not without pain.
the first part: when I say trade-offs, I think in the beginning I understood this as 'you can't have X but you can have Y'. you can go out late at night, but you will have to spend the next day resting. you can go for lunch, but not coworking later. you can cowork, but not go for lunch. X but not Y.
that's not all that disability means.
it's great that the focus of so much neurodivergent community is figuring out ways to live differently, not less. it turns the focus for perfection into a focus on internal work and figuring out, without masking even to yourself, what it means to be neurodivergent in the particular way that you are. but I have found, and it took me a very long time realise this, that this is the last and desperate layer of resisting disabled identity: that if you just make your life [autistic] enough, adapted enough, perfect enough - in a different way to the perfectionistic habits of before, but nevertheless perfect in some way - that is, OPTIMISED enough IN SPITE of all your challenges and quirks, then you can still do all the things you want to do.
this just becomes another quest for the perfect system. that'll help me. that'll fix me. that'll
disability means that your overall capacity is less.
I have been so focused on optimising and getting used to life as an autistic person with much more severe sensory challenges that I realised before, with periods of involuntary non-speaking, with periods of uncontrollable sobbing in class before having to leave. but that only got me so far. wearing headphones and staring instead of smiling and wearing sunglasses and letting myself stim and all of this is great, it's great, it's crucial actually, but NONE OF IT
NONE OF THIS WILL MAKE YOU NOT DISABLED
and that is the last veil of grief that I had to process this year. the last thin membrane between where I was and full acceptance of an autistic life. acceptance means grief. it likely means rage. if you are still looking for the solutions, excited and determined to help yourself, that's great. but I am warning you. there will come a time when you realise that the rest of the world, despite all of your individualistic and determined self-work and adaptation, is still not meant for you. and this last layer of snagging and sticky grief will swallow you and bury you until you come, exhausted, out of the other side.
we have heard of competing needs, competing accessibility requirements. you need to take this perspective and apply it to yourself too. you may need friends: but you also need to rest in the dark after a day of loud confusing conversation and lights and physical stabbing pain. you need both, and both of these needs operate on different timescales, and therefore achieving both will take much longer, maybe twice as long or if not more, as if there were only social deficits or struggles and that was the only problem you had to contend with. it's not.
it took me six months to realise this. and after that, I knew I had to focus on the basics, without which I couldn't function. competing needs for food and friendship and self-mastery and darkness and comfort and challenge. you are never, ever going to do this perfectly. there is no perfect balance. you will always, at some level, fail one part of yourself that wants something more. I was lonely and knew I would be happier if I had friends. that is a very real need and not difficult to fill on its own. but how does that measure against the sensory needs you also have to balance? the exhaustion of studying when it is something so foreign and new? the anger of being treated as stupid and not being able to explain yourself? the tiredness and frustration of knowing there are things that would help, but you are too exhausted to do them?
there is no perfect balance. and a disabled life means a life of joy, but it also means, every day, deciding which needs you meet today, and which you don't. it means accepting that you cannot help yourself in the way you were always taught, even by fellow neurodivergents, that you could. it means accepting the truth of your own limitations, and moving at a slower pace. you think that's okay and maybe it's okay in theory. but watching friendship groups slowly form without you, again and again, simply because you know that you cannot go with them - watching them walk away from you, not because they don't like you, not even considering the social difficulties, but simply because you cannot go with them to eat and also attend class, and also get on the subway, and also find food, and also wash, and also put your clothes away -
this is a hurtful and deeply bitter thing to learn.
all this is to say that: this blog going forwards will be focused on language learning. but it will also be a place and a haven for this side of disability. rather than the term neurodivergence, I am using the term disabled deliberately and in a more explicit way than I did in the past: I feel disabled by my difference in processing. it disables me in the world. the social model is useful and it's true that many things would make our lives easier. but it's also true that others, without trying and without thinking, can do more than me - effortlessly, easily. neurodivergent accommodations focus on saying that you can live life your own way if you just learn how. (I am not pitting these two against each other, but rather describing what I think of as a difference in focus that is important to me in the stage in my life that I am at.) disability rights say that you may never be able to live the life that you want to in all the ways that you want to.
you need to hold both with tenderness and grief to survive. a world for you is possible, but - thank you to my emo late-night self for this description - you need to pass through something of a crucible first.
I will continue to focus on language learning, and disabled and non-disabled people alike are very welcome, explicitly and without reservation, to talk to me, to say hello, to ask any questions. I love talking and I love exchanging views. but I can no longer hold this as a sometimes relevant, sometimes not fact about myself that flits in and out of view depending on the requirements of the post. it is the centre of my existence, and going forwards, it will inform my posts as such.
I hope you are well, and hello from sunny taiwan <3
