Hello. My name is Sarah Kurchak and I am a person with autism on the writing spectrum. About a month ago, I wrote about the Netflix series, Love on the Spectrum, for TIME. It was neither an endorsement nor a condemnation. I have complicated feelings about the show, and did…

She wrote a book and all she got was this lousy pandemic. Under normal circumstances, autistic author Sarah Kurchak wouldn’t mind staying at home. That’s where the freelance writer spends most of her time, anyway. But she had plans to occasionally leave the house this April. That’s because she was…

This story originally appeared on JetLi.com in March, 2018. Every mixed martial artist has their own pre-fight rituals, a mix of physical and mental preparations that uniquely prepare them for the task of stepping into a ring or cage and facing another human being in hand to hand combat. For…

Being a “high-functioning” autistic myself, I’ve seen firsthand how people can mistake austistic behavior for veiled narcissism — At one point in Douglas, the new stand-up special from Hannah Gadsby, the comedian addresses a common misconception about her recent autism diagnosis. “I have high-functioning autism and it’s a terrible thing to have,” she says, “in that it gives you the impression that you are functioning highly.”

The set of the 1960s Western was awash in toxic masculinity, fragile egos, and gastrointestinal distress — The Magnificent Seven was made the way so many things in our world are: (Predominantly white) men liked something that someone else had done, went somewhere that wasn’t theirs, fucked around a lot, and eventually made their own version of it, earning praise and a legendary status that was probably…

I saw In Dreams: Roy Orbison in Concert — The Hologram Tour at The Sony Centre last night, a show I was anticipating so highly that I completely forgot about it until my partner politely asked me to put some pants on ten minutes before we had to leave our…

When I’m feeling particularly frustrated with my career, I offer to ghostwrite a memoir for my mom. It’s a slightly bitter, semi-serious joke. I’m mostly taking a shot at the fact that the memoirs that non-autistic parents write about raising their autistic children have a much better shot at getting…

CW: suicide, suicidal ideation, murder, filicide, police brutality, dehumanization of autistic people On March 21, 2017, CNN published an article on a new study from the American Journal of Public Health that found that autistic people die at an average age of 36. I wasn’t shocked by this news. …

In a nondescript apartment building that will soon be torn down and replaced with condos in midtown Toronto, Sarah assesses herself in the bathroom mirror. She brushes her greasy hair and then decides to throw some baby powder into it, because she forgot to buy dry shampoo again and all…