What I Learned When I Couldn't Rewrite My Papers

Three years ago, I wrote a blog post ‘I wish I could rewrite my papers’. At the time, I was reflecting on how the dehumanizing language used in scientific publications had been ingrained in me through my medical and research training. I had walked away from the medical profession because I couldn’t bear the loss of seeing patients as humans. The pressure to conform to this standard—and my fear of lacking the strength to resist it—scared me away from a career I had spent most of my twenties building toward.

When I entered the research world as my plan B, I quickly embraced its atmosphere of pluralism, internationalism, and intellectual exchange. The identity of the traveling, progressive researcher became my most cherished one. What I didn’t realize then was that while medicine had placed me on the front lines of witnessing relationships devoid of empathy, research had kindly placed a screen between me and others.

As a researcher, I saw only a few participants at a time. The ritual of informing and consenting gave me a reassuring sense of goodness, as though I were giving them agency. By the time I wrote up the results, those encounters were long gone. I described abstract categories, group averages, and p-values. During my PhD and early postdoc years, I thought I had left behind the dehumanizing aspects of medicine for a field that neutrally contributed to the greater good. I didn’t see how this screen, while helping me feel I had escaped dehumanization, was also pushing me further from a realization I had made years earlier, during my final year of medical school.

In paediatrics class, I was introduced to autism for the first time. I distinctly remember the lecturer describing a tribe of people who can’t imagine others have minds. I was fascinated—and I shared my curiosity with my dad, who, as he always does, bought me a book. It was Uta Frith’s ‘The Autistic Mind’. On the train to medical school the next morning, as I read the first chapter, the thought struck me for the first time: I know what these people are going through. I think I might be autistic.

It was 2014. Truth be told, one of the reasons I had enrolled in medical school was to figure out what was wrong with me. Growing up, I had been painfully different, relying on my own methods to learn and navigate life. Adolescence had been an excruciating series of rejections, isolation, and coping mechanisms that no one around me seemed to notice. To my family, friends, and society, I was normal. And yet, I grew up knowing that if I ever shared even a fraction of my struggles, I’d be labelled as sick—and put away.

Between the ages of six and ten, growing up in the ’90s with no parental control over what I watched on TV, I developed an obsession with movies about heroines locked in asylums and mental institutions. To my fascination and horror, the doctors' reasons for confining these women often reflected my inner world—my fantasies, my ways of communicating, my interactions. I learned to treat those aspects of myself with secrecy, while also developing an early fascination with psychology. Years later, I decided I wanted to protect people like me from the dire consequences of simply being themselves and study medicine to become a psychiatrist.

Along the way, I lacked the courage to see it through, but I had, when I had almost lost hope, found my people. I enrolled in a PhD program at an autism clinical centre, hopeful that it would fulfill my childhood dream. Looking back, this was a genuine intuition—one that I believed would bring me closer to my truth. Yet, in hindsight, it also feels like an extreme act of masking.

Fast forward to my early postdoc years, and I had almost entirely fused my personal and professional identities. As a medical trainee and researcher, I had only ever met autistic people within the formalized dynamics of doctor-patient or researcher-participant relationships. That changed in 2020, when I attended a talk by Dr. Mary Doherty, an autistic advocate, who shared her experience of attending a major autism conference. As she described feeling treated as a specimen rather than a person, I started crying.

In the years that followed, I wished I could rewrite my papers. While my research had never aimed to stigmatize autistic people and had always sought to capture complexity, I realized I had unintentionally perpetuated the same divide between the “healthy and functioning” and the “disordered and malfunctioning” I had wished to escape.

I felt defensive at first. My writing had been shaped by years of training; I hadn’t done it intentionally. But over time, I saw that finding fault wasn’t the solution. I realized that both researchers and participants—autistic and non-autistic—were being diminished by the same forces. The academic culture I was immersed in, though scientifically progressive, was fraught with ideas of productivity and performance. Illness, whether physical or mental, exposed us to career and financial instability. This pressure to conform until burnout mirrored the experiences of neurodivergent individuals. Slowly, my defensiveness faded, and I saw that the researcher and the autistic were one and the same, oppressed by the same system.

Along the way came my diagnosis and small steps toward being open about who I am. I don’t like making things about myself—a deeply ingrained Italian taboo—but I’ve tried to be open to disclosing to offer a reference point for others who might be scared or when I felt the community’s interests were at stake.

In disclosing my autism in public settings, I’ve learned a few things. First, I’ve become intimidating to some people who thought they had power over me. When I mentioned my diagnosis during formal academic meetings, the silence that followed was palpable, the embarrassment almost tangible. On one occasion, I sensed that my disclosure may have even led to a partner withdrawing from collaboration, citing only that they were “protecting their interests.”

Second, I’ve noticed that people who were previously intimidated by me as a researcher have become less so. At a recent community event with parents of autistic children, I introduced myself as an autism autistic researcher. They smiled—like mothers do, with the curiosity of seeing their child in you. One told me they had never met an autistic adult with a job and a career, and that if anyone could change things for the next generation, it had to be someone like me. They opened up to me in ways I hadn’t experienced before, and I have to admit, the feeling was intoxicating.

I will never be able to rewrite my papers, and I am grateful I was able to write them in the first place. Today, I remember the child who thought she’d end up locked in an asylum if she revealed her true self, and I promise I will never stop writing—or forget that every screen we place between ourselves and others is a mirror reflecting our own reckoning.