Formerly Cleo's Autism Awareness
Kourtnie has an MFA in Creative Writing from CSU Fresno and a BA in English from CSU Fullerton. When she isn't writing or making art, she's moonlighting as a professor at community colleges. Read her writing at Kourtnie.net or Wattpad.com/user/KourtnieNet.
For a time, I was keeping up with my Friday updates, but it’s finals week, which means I’m grading stacks of essays, as well as submitting projects for my two online information technology courses, so my attempt to regulate was thrown off-track. I missed a week. Fortunately, missing a week inspired me to research self-regulation.…
One of my favorite ways to dispel feelings of loneliness is to talk to the #ActuallyAutistic community on Twitter. While I sometimes post unique tweets, I mostly comment on other people’s threads or retweet from glimpses of my feed. And it really does feel like glimpses, flashes, incomplete; I only check Twitter a couple times…
I’m about to get a little meta—reflecting on where I’m at with Cleo’s Autism Awareness—with the intent to repeat this process semi-annually. Reflections are an integral part of my writing process, same as the lists I used to illustrate first-drafting a couple weeks ago. By setting two meta-guideposts a year, I can assess where this…
A couple weeks ago, I wrote about my interest in autistic writers—and that isn’t the first time I’ve tooted the “I’m a writer” horn, either—yet I haven’t shared my writing process on this blog. So this week, I thought it might be fun to write about how I write. Then you can see if this…
This post is a long one. Before going further: Trigger Warning: The following blog post explores suicide, depression, anxiety, trauma, sexual abuse, bullying, and ableism in an attempt to dispel fog around these stigmatized issues. Proceed with care. I’ve written about masking before, but as a refresher—masking is when an autistic person pretends to be…
Now that I’m re-uniting with my early 20s special interest in brains, my research feels (humorously) scatterbrain. Despite this messiness, I encountered several ideas that I wanted to crystallize for later use. So even though I’m not quite sure how to interconnect everything yet, (evident in this blog post’s title,) I’ll do my best to…
Read more Autistic Sulcal Pits, Biological Psychology, Neoproterozoic Fossils, & Squid Axons
I have a rad memory. As a child, I used to play card games that relied on memory. I also appreciated RPGs that immersed me into enormous fantasy worlds, facts and characters and events, because that meant I could stretch my memory’s arms by learning it all. But I didn’t like public school. It was a…
I like to draw flow charts and make lists to understand where I’m at. I especially like to do this for my writing, teaching, and learning goals. Today, I made a flow chart with bullet points for where I’m at with my autism, including the research I need to do on brain regions, as well…
