December 24, 2025
Last dusk
From my last evening walk in NYC for the year, right after the snowfall a few days ago.
December 17, 2025
Paging Dr. Mohan
HBO’s The Pitt is one of those shows that I think both demands and deserves a viewer’s full attention, not put on as background noise for folding laundry. And yet this past week I put it on in the background to rewatch while I folded laundry, and even so, find myself appreciating certain characterizations more deeply than I did on my first watch.
Most of the conversation around neurodivergent representation in the show has centered on Dr. Mel King—kind, even-tempered, and compassionate, but also blunt, literal-minded, and easily overloaded by conflict and chaos. She has an autistic sister who lives in a residential facility nearby, and who she speaks of often, leading many viewers to overlook that Mel herself is fairly obviously autistic. I could say a lot about why audiences fail to recognize autistic characters when they don’t conform to two-dimensional stereotypes or openly identify themselves as such in extremely circumscribed and clinical terms, but I think it’s one of the major ways in which the “autistic character as teaching tool” era of representation has failed.
And I think she’s great—possibly even the best-written intentionally autistic character since Holly Gibney of another HBO production, The Outsider.
(I maintain that among the best-written autistic characters ever on television was LOST’s abrasive, unexpectedly lovable con-man Sawyer, although I’m quite certain that was fully unintentional.)
I particularly appreciate that she’s allowed to be very noticeably autistic, and not just fully competent, but genuinely good with people—that the creators did not lean into the trope of autistic people as lacking empathy.
It’s very rare, and very enjoyable. She represents a staggering leap forward in the writing and representation of autistic characters on television.
But the deeper into this rewatch I get, the more I feel the character actually most important to me is Dr. Samira Mohan.
The very first character trait we’re given with which to associate Dr. Mohan, in the first act of the first episode, is that she’s too slow. She tells Dr. Robby that she knows other doctors call her “Slow-Mo,” that it hurt her feelings until she learned to embrace it. She doesn’t see enough patients per hour. She listens to entire life histories. She costs the hospital time and money. She has the highest patient satisfaction score of anyone in the ER.
Dr. Robby is on her case about it constantly; we don’t hear him compliment her work to her until the 12th episode: “Mohan’s on fire,” he exclaims in the adrenaline rush of the aftermath of a mass shooting.
I also work in a profession that values alacrity, though actual matters of life and death are thankfully very rare (though not non-existent), and which necessitates near-constant multitasking. I feel too slow for what’s going on in the room a lot. And I know it isn’t even necessarily true! The work gets done; the show goes on. I’ve developed a lot of strategies and efficiencies in my work flow. I know I’m not even unique in feeling this way, though I do occasionally feel uniquely targeted for it. In the course of a rehearsal process a couple of years ago, our director had gone to the general manager and production manager with a concern that my multitasking ability wasn’t up to snuff. Notwithstanding that it wasn’t true—not only was I doing a stellar job, I was being appropriately supported by an ASM who knew me well—it is a bigger challenge for me and something I’ve always had to work harder at than most people.
“Slow is smooth and smooth is fast,” said our fight choreographer for the same production (for whom I was constantly fighting with the director to get sufficient rehearsal time). I wrote that down on a Post-It note that I still keep stuck in my planner.
In a stage management community meeting about upcoming rule changes around overtime pay in some of our contracts, the question arose as to how claims for OT would be regarded if a stage manager were perceived as simply taking too long at things. Attempting to assure us that all stage managers have strengths and weaknesses and that’s just the cost of doing business, the presenter said “So for instance, someone who’s neurodivergent might take longer to write reports, because that’s what their weakness is.”
“I’m neurodivergent,” I commented, “and I take longer to write reports because I’m good at them, not because I’m not.” I could take less time to write less useful rehearsal reports and make more mistakes, but sometimes good work just takes the time that it takes.
Am I actually too slow, I’ve often wondered in a fast-paced process, or should there just be three of me here?
I’ve also always felt slower than my fellow stage managers as far as my career progression. I suffer constantly from trouble keeping good ASMs around, because I’ll get one show with a stellar assistant before their opportunities for career advancement quickly eclipse my own. Partly I know that I’m weak at networking, but I’ve also had to turn down offers of work because I simply couldn’t pivot fast enough to a new production without a break.
I’ve often felt that the time I take to listen to someone or to understand a problem is perceived as passivity or lack of urgency.
And I don’t get the impression that Mohan is autistic, or deliberately coded as neurodivergent in any particular way, in contrast to Dr. King—and that’s actually important to me, too, and says a lot about the kinds of representation we can and should be able to expect. Because autistic people aren’t experiential black boxes, fundamentally and irreparably incomprehensible and uncomprehending of the experiences we share in common with our non-autistic fellow humans.
Well-written autistic characters like Mel King are important and necessary. They also shouldn’t be the only way we can ever see ourselves in others.
I know there are higher-stakes story lines afoot this coming season, but I’m excited to see what’s in store for Dr. Mohan—whether she’ll decide that maybe emergency medicine actually isn’t for her, or find her niche in the ER with a case that demands her particular approach.
December 9, 2025
Neurophototherapy, art, unmasking and not masking
I’ve never really identified with the narrative around masking and unmasking in the autistic community. When I was just starting to encounter autistic writing seriously considering the possibility, and then the probability, that I was autistic, the community was more likely to talk about “passing” or “camouflaging,” terms which implied to me more ambiguity, more negotiation with an environment or with a social context, than mechanistically pretending to be non-autistic by relentlessly suppressing autistic traits in favor of constructing a neurotypical persona in the way I tend to hear younger and more recently diagnosed people describe now.
We often tell parents that autism isn’t a shell surrounding a “normal” child. There’s no non-autistic child hiding under an autistic mask.
In my case, there’s no authentic, autistic me hiding under a neurotypical mask. “Masking,” the way it seems to mostly be meant now, is not something I’ve ever had the bandwidth to do.
But I’ve enjoyed artist Sonia Boué’s work for a long time, and finally got around to reading Neurophototherapy: Playfully Unmasking with Photography and Collage this weekend.
One of the ideas Boué presents in the book that I found particularly resonant, though perhaps not entirely in the way she intended, is that of “working with safe things.”
I love collage art, and I struggle with it, in much the same way that many of us do with our sticker collections and actually putting stickers on things, with using up, cutting or gluing all the beautiful images and little scraps of things I find and save. I feel like if something doesn’t turn out the way I hoped it would, I’ve destroyed it.
It had never quite occurred to me to just use the color copier sitting beside me on my desk to make some copies to play with without risk. That not just in the emotional content but the actual materials I gave myself to work with, I could make it safe to experiment more freely.
“Throughout this book, Sonia Boué writes of Neurophototherapy as a dialogic practice, a practice of making connections – between the individual and the world, between old and current selves – and the little board book felt like an invitation to dialogue. It also recalled a past self, a pre-masking preschooler who often acted on the impulse to get very, very close to books she loved…”
Like Joanne Limburg, who writes the first of two guest essays in the book, I had nurtured early hopes of artistic talent that were eventually subsumed by the necessity of being the smart girl. For reasons both complicated and not, I felt like I needed to throw the majority of my time and energy into high level academics, and it’s not that I was “masking,” but it’s also difficult to exercise the kind of freedom and disinhibition necessary for art when an extreme amount of the cognitive disk space you have available is going to math and chemistry and AP English papers. Especially, probably, when you’re autistic and switching gears/changing activities is specifically something you have trouble with, and also that even when all of your time isn’t being taken up by homework and extracurricular activities, you’re exhausted by school.
I was also struck by Limburg’s statement “I wondered if perhaps neurophototherapy, which is a practice of unmasking to oneself, specifically required conditions of privacy in which to work.” I’ve often wondered whether elements of autistic learning and growth particularly require privacy, whether there are in fact neurodevelopmental reasons why we just don’t thrive under conditions of intense scrutiny.
And it all left me thinking that maybe we just need more ways of talking about all the ways in which autistic people get lost from ourselves, or get separated from who we were as children, or are transfigured by circumstance or necessity, that aren’t necessarily masking.
“One of the cruelest tricks our culture plays on autistic people is that it makes us strangers to ourselves,” Julia Bascom wrote in her foreword to the Loud Hands anthology. And I think that there are actually a lot of different ways that happens, and paths by which we can start to find our way back, that aren’t accounted for by the narrative of masking and unmasking.
Chavisory's Notebook 