What Does a Healthy & Supportive Autistic Community Look Like?

And what does "community" mean, anyway?

People often think of community as just a group of people doing things together, as if proximity alone creates connection. But for me, community is something deeper. It’s not just about gathering in the same space or sharing an activity - it’s about the intentional work of building spaces where we can exist as we are, without masking, without performance, without the demand to fit into a structure that was never built for us.

For autistic humans, this distinction is everything. We’ve spent our lives being told, explicitly or implicitly, that we don’t belong. That we are too much or not enough. That if we want community, we need to play by the rules of neurotypical socializing - force eye contact, suppress our stims, perform an exhausting version of ourselves to make others comfortable. And if we do all that? Maybe we’ll be tolerated. Maybe we’ll be allowed to exist at the edges of a space, never quite feeling at home.

That isn’t community. That’s assimilation.

I understand why so many autistic humans reject the idea of community. We’ve been hurt. We’ve tried to fit in and been met with rejection, confusion, or outright hostility. Many of us find safety in solitude because being around others has never felt safe. I get that - I really do. But long-term, isolation doesn’t serve us. We are social beings. We aren’t meant to do everything alone.

I grew up in the Jewish community, where everything is communal. Judaism is not about the individual Lone Ranger ideal - it’s about people coming together, lifting each other up, taking responsibility for one another. We don’t pray alone if we can help it. We don’t mark life’s transitions alone. We don’t even mourn alone. That core idea - that we are bound to each other, that care is a collective responsibility - is something I carry into my understanding of autistic community.

Autistic humans talk a lot about self-care, but the truth is, self-care is communal care. We can’t always regulate on our own. We need spaces where co-regulation happens naturally - where we can borrow from each other’s calm, lean on each other’s support, and be held when we are struggling. When we reject community because of past harm, we deny ourselves the very thing that makes survival possible.

True community isn’t just about doing things in the same space - it’s about how that space is built, who it centers, and whether the people in it are allowed to be their full, unmasked selves. It’s about shared responsibility, mutual care, and the understanding that we are all bringing something vital simply by existing as we are.

But here’s where it gets complicated - because a lot of what gets called “autistic community” is not community at all.

What I see far too often are autistic humans - often highly intelligent, burned out, professionally trained, deeply dysregulated - starting groups, Discords, Slacks, Facebook spaces, not as a way to build mutual care, but as a way to fix themselves without actually saying so.

They look great on paper. They know how to use tech. They’ve worked in systems that reward masking. They know the language. And they’re hurting. I get that.

But what ends up happening is they start a group, say it’s for autistic tech professionals or ND entrepreneurs or late-diagnosed autistics… and then they lurk. They sit in the background. They read, they absorb, they pull from others’ vulnerability to try and repair something in themselves.

And they call that “community.”

Let me be clear: if someone says, “I’m struggling. I don’t know what I’m doing. I want to build something with other people who are also in a rough place. Let’s figure this out together and see if bouncing ideas off of each other helps us each grow” - that’s mutual aid. That’s honest. That’s cool. It’s got informed consent.

But that’s not what’s happening most of the time. What happens more often is:

• No consent

• No clarity

• No disclosure

• No boundaries

Just lurking. Just extraction. How can the space be used for the organizer to trauma dump and use the space to “teach a lesson” while simply looking to crowdsource “solutions” for themselves.

They’re not holding space. They’re taking it. And not actually sharing.

And here’s what’s important: I’m not saying leaders have to be perfect. That’s not real. God knows that I am not. That’s not sustainable. But if you’re leading a community - especially an autistic one - you do have to be honest. You do have to be willing to show up with authenticity, not performance.

Being a leader in autistic space doesn’t mean being “healed” or “cured” (and when people use this language, this is a major red flag). It means being self-aware. It means knowing how to hold space for others without secretly (or inadvertently) building a stage for yourself. It means being vulnerable in ways that are grounded, boundaried, and transparent - not vulnerable in ways that pull others into your regulation work without their consent.

There’s a difference between being real with your community and using your community to process your unspoken needs. One is relational. The other is extractive.

When I say leadership should be authentic, I don’t mean trauma-dumping. I mean showing up in a way that says, “I’m still healing - and I’m also holding space for you, not just asking you to hold mine.” That’s the kind of leadership I believe in. That’s the kind of leadership I expect in spaces that claim to be supportive and sustainable.

What’s even worse is that when real autistic vulnerability does show up - when someone like an actually autistic therapist or coach says, “Hey, I’m human too. I have bad days. I’m not here to dump on you - but I’m not pretending I’m fixed either” - people often read that as a red flag.

Because we’ve internalized the neurotypical belief that emotional detachment equals authority. That visible struggle means incompetence. That vulnerability means weakness.

So we distrust the therapist who shares openly, but not the lurking founder who’s using everyone’s posts as fuel for their own unspoken trauma processing.

That’s not just irony. That’s internalized masking.

It’s a massive problem. And it’s a huge reason why so many autistic spaces become unsustainable, unsafe, or outright harmful.

We have to build something else.

We need community that doesn’t come from unacknowledged burnout.

We need community that names its limits, its goals, and its agreements.

We need community that’s actually built to hold us - mess and all - not just mimic safety.

That means:

• Saying what the space is for

• Leading with transparency and consent

• Designing for co-regulation, not control

• Refusing extraction

• Understanding that people need different things at different times

• Letting ourselves - and others - show up without performance

Because community, as I see it, is not about perfection or aesthetic sameness. It’s about refusing to pretend we’re okay when we’re not. It’s about building something that actually sees us, supports us, and makes it possible to stop surviving and start living.

And yeah - it’s about healing. But not quietly. Not alone. Not by pulling from others in silence.

We heal in honesty. We heal in mutuality.

We heal when community is built on care - not control or exatraction.

That’s what I mean when I say I want to build healthy, supportive, sustainable autistic community.

Not just something that looks good.

Something that holds.