This I Believe About Autism: Autistic Joy

An essay by Jessica Burylo

Every autistic person has a unique way of experiencing and making sense of the world. Through our This I Believe series, members of the Embrace Autism community share the beliefs, experiences, and moments that have shaped their lives.

In this essay, Jessica reflects on finding joy beyond survival, the freedom of belonging within the autistic community, and how choosing to live authentically can become a powerful expression of hope, connection, and resistance.

The Joy That Interrupts

The world often tells autistic people what we lack. Sometimes it feels like that’s their sole focus. We’re measured by how well we approximate their idea of a life worth living, spoken of in dehumanizing ways in research, and programs meant to train us into worthiness. For years, I practiced blending in. I almost disappeared into the noise of other people’s expectations. I didn’t yet know that exhaustion isn’t the same as living. It’s what happens when a body spends too long surviving on the margins of what the world recognizes as worthy life.

Philosophers like Lauren Berlant and Sara Ahmed have written about the harm of a culture that confuses worth with productivity and upholds only one way of being. Their ideas helped me recognize that autistic ways of being might not be flaws, but forms of resistance. We are living proof that there are other ways to move through the world. Other measures of aliveness.

I remember the first time I felt that truth in my body. I was with other autistic people shortly after my late diagnosis that was fought for out of desperation in a system that didn’t recognize me. It saved my life. Once I found my people, under the guise of our non-normative beauty, I felt peaceful and electric at once. We didn’t have to explain our worth to anyone. We just were.

That is joy, to me.

Autistic joy is the quiet radiance that rises when we live in alignment with our natural pulse. It’s a refusal to be defined by our deficits. It might come from a fascination that pulls us deep into research, the rhythm of a stim that calms our nervous system, or the delight of building systems that scaffold our lives. My systems are not cages; they are architecture. They are creative testaments to adaptation and care. For every moment the world tells me my way of being is wrong, I feel agency within constraint, proving that there is an unrecognized power in me.

I find joy in the way my mind devours information. I love tracing ideas through history, watching patterns form and dissolve, and discovering a thought that feels like home. I am, perhaps most of all, passionate about autistic joy itself. It insists that our lives are beautiful even when they are difficult. It is not naïve happiness. It’s a celebration of us as valid beings who are worthy. Joy doesn’t cancel pain; it coexists with it. As philosopher Nick Hopwood writes, lived experience, even in hardship, can reveal forms of beauty that might otherwise stay hidden. autistic joy emerges in those moments as transformation. When I choose joy, I am choosing life on my own terms. I am interrupting the story that says we are less valuable, less whole, and less human. I am proving, in small and radiant ways, that there are infinite versions of flourishing.

This I believe: autistic joy is real, and it’s political. It is a pulse of resistance that is gentle, sensory, and profound. It’s how we find one another. Even when we are apart, our shared joy connects us, like the language of trees underground communicating through their roots. And when the world finally listens to that hum beneath its feet, when we are no longer asked to be anything but ourselves, we will grow a forest so radiant with joy that it changes the light.

This I believe.

About

This essay was awarded Honourable Mention in the Embrace Autism This I Believe Essay Competition. Congratulations, Jessica!

Jessica Burylo is an autistic writer, researcher, and community advocate based in Edmonton, Alberta. By day, she works in outreach for Elections Canada, helping to reduce barrier to electoral participation for people with disabilities and other underrepresented communities. By night, she is a PhD student at the University of Alberta, where her research explores affirmative identity in late-diagnosed autistic women. Her work spans autism, accessibility, community engagement, and public policy, with a particular interest in bringing lived experience into research and practice.

Jessica’s Instagram is @autistic.lady.about.town