Sommersә, a manifesto

My name is Camilla, and I’ve spent my life feeling out of place and out of sync. Too sensitive, too introverted, too stubborn, too unstable, too impulsive. Labels that were stuck to my forehead without asking. Or that I stuck there myself, trying to make sense of the way I exist in the world. Labels I internalized so deeply that I ended up believing that maybe I was just not good enough.

For years, I tried to find an explanation for my recurring emotional crashes – sudden, often inexplicable. For the chronic exhaustion. For the struggle to hold down a full-time job or keep up with a social life rhythm that felt utterly unsustainable. I explored every possible diagnosis – anxiety, depression, burnout, mood disorders – except one: the one that finally made everything click. The thin line that connected all the dots.

I had never even considered the idea that I might be autistic. Like many, I was raised in a one-dimensional narrative about autism: stereotypical, infantilizing, pathologizing. A narrative that erases the experiences of women, queer and non-binary people, non-white people – and even many men who don’t fit the narrow, clinical checklists. A narrative that renders us invisible even to the psychiatric gaze, and strips us of the chance to understand ourselves.

So, we learn to mask. To adapt, to dissociate. We find ways to stay afloat, silently treading water. But the questions remain, and the exhaustion keeps piling up.

One day, I stumbled upon a story that described the experience of an autistic woman diagnosed late in life. It felt like I’d found a flashlight on the floor of a pitch-black room. The more I read, the more I listened to stories from late-diagnosed autistic people, the wider that beam of light grew.

Eventually, I decided to pursue a diagnosis. It was a jarring return to reality – like slamming into a wall and breaking my nose. I realized just how inaccessible diagnosis still is: expensive, and often conducted by professionals with little or no training in adult autism, especially in AFAB (assigned female at birth) people, queer and non-binary folks, and non-white people. Most of all, the diagnosis process remains trapped in a pathologizing framework that tells us we are defective outliers from a neurotypical norm.

This newsletter is born from that place. From a sense of isolation, from rage, from exhaustion. And from the urgent desire to stop holding my breath every day. Sommersə (from the Italian word sommerso, meaning “submerged”) is my way of surfacing, but it’s also an invitation to do it together.

Every two weeks, I’ll share thoughts, experiences, and reflections on discovering and navigating autism as an adult. I’ll start from my own story, but always with the aim of looking further, at the root causes: the social and economic structures that disable us. We’ll talk about work, masking, burnout, relationships. But also about neurotypical culture, paradigms that need to be overthrown, and the language we might still need to invent collectively to describe ourselves. There’ll be reading and listening recommendations, interviews, and useful resources. Because information is power, and shared knowledge is care.

This won’t be a neutral newsletter. It will be political. It will ask a lot of questions and offer plenty of space and insights to imagine a different, inclusive reality. A reality where we no longer need to sugarcoat or justify our existence – a reality where we can instead claim our sacred right to be in the world, just as we are.

Welcome to Sommersə. Here, no one is ever too much.