Title: Meeting of the Minds

Description: The portrait features Nicole Kubilus, an autistic woman and Bret Thayer, the parent of a young adult with autism. Two different perspectives of autism come together in a meeting of the minds during each episode of the Understanding Autism Podcast.

Materials: graphite on paper Dimensions: 14″x17″ Year 2022

Title: What is Autism?

Description: The infinity symbol, representative of neurodiversity, links two puzzle pieces (the symbol for autism). Both symbols represent various aspects of how society views autism and how autism is perceived by those living with it. The black and white color scheme is representative of black and white thinking. The geometric shapes and mirror symmetry represent the autistic desire for order, routine, and predictability.

Materials: graphite on paper Dimensions: 14″x17″ Year: 2023

1.2 Differently Poem

Title: The Stress of Making Eye Contact

Description: People with autism experience a great deal of stress making eye contact. Whenever possible, they try to avoid it. This drawing shows the pain and anxiety a person with autism goes through when they make eye contact with another person.

Materials: graphite on paper Dimensions: 17″ x 14″ Year: 2023

1.3 Eye Contact Poem

Title: Stimming & Fidgeting

Description: This drawing shows different examples of stimming and fidgeting that podcast co-host Nicole Kubilus prefers. Showing them all conducting at once shows the frequency of changing between fidget/ stimming preferences. The symmetry of the piece shows how stimming and fidgeting brings Nicole a sense of balance. Pictured are five different fidget toys: Pop-it, Infinity Cube, Wacky Tracks, twirled elastic, and chain fidget. Stimming behaviors include biting down on finger, hair twirling, and frequent blinking.

Materials: Graphite on paper Dimensions: 17″ x 14″ Year 2023

1.4 Stimming Poetry

Season 1 Episode 5: Meltdowns, Shutdowns and Self-Harming Behaviors

Title: Autistic Meltdown

Description: When a person experiences the limit of social overwhelm, sensory overstimulation, trauma, or other stressors, she will have a meltdown as a way to release that stress. The loud and physically intense experience of a meltdown is captured by jagged, shattering triangles and feeling trapped in a tight, uncomfortable space.

Materials: Graphite on paper Dimensions: 14″ x 11″ Year 2023

Title: Autistic Shutdown

Description: When a person experiences the limit of social overwhelm, sensory overstimulation, trauma, or other stressors, she will shut down. This causes the person to go into an unresponsive comatose state. The physical feeling of shutting down is heavy and disorienting, captured by the abstract downward movement of triangle and tight spaces propping her up.

Materials: Graphite on paper Dimensions: 14″ x 11″ Year 2023

Title: Sensory Dysfunction

Description: When experiencing sensory overwhelm, all of the senses are elevated to a painful, anxiety-inducing degree. Overstimulation creates a jostling feeling in the nervous system. Sensations are unpredictable, threatening, and disorienting. This causes a person with Sensory Processing Disorder to feel anxious and frustrated living in a highly sensitive body. Disassociation from her body or the threatening world around her is the only way to cope. At the same time, navigating the world with high sensitivity is a strength. It can make a person curious and observant of the world and the way it ticks. How can she engage in a world that is not built for her needs?

Materials: Graphite on paper Dimensions: 14″ x 11″ Year 2023

Title: Fixation

Description: Having a strong fixation on a special interest is like being in a hypnotic trance. The world around her doesn’t exist. At times, she is completely disconnected from her body. Her focus is locked on like an archer aiming at a target. Yet surrendering to engrossment is liberating like medication. No wonder it is hard for her to switch back to reality.

Materials: Graphite on paper Dimensions: 11″ x 14″ Year 2023

Title: Perseveration

Description: The more a person catastrophizes, stews in anger, or feels ashamed of herself, the more disconnected she becomes from reality. What is considered truthful and threatening from the neurodiverse perspective? What may seem to others as a repeating script is her examining the detailed layers of a situation that stresses her out. Or maybe worry creates a predictable mental pattern. Once she is hooked, it is arduous for someone else to pull her out of the spiral. Excessive worry causes a disconnect from her authentic self, the part of her that is able to problem-solve through the challenge or see the good in the predicament.

Materials: Graphite on paper Dimensions: 14″ x 11″ Year: 2023

Title: Low Frustration Tolerance

Description: Frustration tolerance is the capacity for a person to deal with challenges. People with low frustration tolerance tend to get agitated, annoyed, and angry easily when something causes great frustration. Their fuse is shorter. People with autism tend to have a low frustration tolerance, especially when it comes to disrupted routines, navigating complicated social predicaments, and sensory overstimulation.

Materials: Graphite on paper Dimensions: 14″ x 11″ Year: 2023

Title: Lack of Object Permanence

Description: Object permanence involves understanding that people and items still exist even when you can’t see or hear them. Neurodivergent people (specifically those with autism and ADHD) have a tendency to lose things or misplace them. Executive functioning issues and struggles with organization can exacerbate this challenge. A neurodivergent person may need support and structure in their personal and professional lives to keep track of all their important objects.

Materials: Graphite on paper Dimensions: 14″ x 11″ Year 2023

Title: Transition Stress

Description: For a person with autism, transitions feel like she is being pulled in two different directions. These transitions feel disjointed and painful. Though a neurotypical person may feel that these transitions are natural and expected, the autistic person feels controlled and wrenched out of discomfort. The environments that she transitions into are rough, threatening, unpredictable, and dysregulating. This contrasts the soft, pleasant, predictable comforts in the present moment. The sense of balance and centering is captured in sun shapes, with a circle, square, triangle, and diamond providing perfect symmetry.

Materials: Graphite on paper Dimensions: 17″ x 14″ Year: 2023

Title: Phobia Triggers

Description: The best way to capture the terror and paranoia that a person with a phobia experiences is to render as many phobias as possible in this drawing. The phobias presented include trypophobia (fear of patterns/holes), trypanophobia (fear of needles), arachnophobia (fear of spiders), ophidiophobia (fear of snakes), hemophobia (fear of blood), and thalassophobia (fear of water).

Materials: Graphite on paper Dimensions: 14″ x 11″ Year: 2023

Title: Emetophobia

Description: Podcast co-host Nicole Kubilus captures her experience of having emetophobia (fear of vomiting). The discomfort of nausea (captured in the right-hand side with spirals) plays a very minor role in the true suffering of this phobia. Instead, sharp pangs of pain and anxiety in the stomach and the vagus nerve (either caused by digestive problems or anxiety) cause the phobia to occur. The square and rectangle patterns in the background represent black and white, systematic thinking that Nicole goes through when dealing with the prospect of vomiting. These thought patterns are primarily about control and predictability–the antithesis of vomiting.

Materials: Graphite on paper Dimensions: 14″ x 11″ Year: 2023

Title: Picky Eating

Description: A person with autism maintains a strict diet due to sensory issues with a wide range of foods. Paired with gut issues, vagus nerve dysregulation, anxiety, and distrust of the environment, she fears that eating unfamiliar food will create indigestion and illness. But the distrust in food is mostly in her head rather than in her gut.

Materials: Graphite on paper Dimensions: 14″ x 11″ Year: 2023

Title: Pinned and Panicked

Description: When a person with autism has chronic anxiety, everything around her is seen as a threat. Examples are social mistakes, changes in routine or environment, sensory experiences, and adult independence tasks. The threats feel like spikes with their own agency positioned to stab her. They threaten but never actually cause harm. The person with autism feels pinned against a wall, helpless, immobilized, and crying. She tries to keep it together, but that can be very challenging. Does the threat truly exist outside of her, or is it all in her mind? Not knowing makes her question her sanity…makes her think that something is wrong with her.

Materials: Graphite on paper Dimensions: 14″ x 11″ Year: 2023

Title: What’s the Point?

Description: The basic understanding of depression is that it embodies overwhelming sadness and hopelessness. It also involves fatigue, heaviness, and lack of motivation. Sometimes, depression can feel like being chronically sick. The heavy black rectangle represents the physical and emotional weight that holds a person down. For people with autism, that weight can be rejection, alienation, judgment, discrimination, transition stress, sensory exhaustion, and burnout from masking.That weight can be immobiling. At the same time, the tight space can feel soothing. Her expression encompasses why she chooses not to move and engage with the outside world: “What’s the point?”

Materials: Graphite on paper Dimensions: 14″ x 11″ Year 2023

Title: Orderly

Description: People with autism love structure, detail, and organization. For most people, it brings joy, entertainment, a sense of purpose, and a sense of safety. The need to bring details into order and have control over the predictability of things can border on perfectionism–sometimes to an unhealthy degree. But when used in a professional sense, a person with autism’s need for structure, order, and perfection can add value to their work.

Materials: Graphite on paper Dimensions: 14″x 11″ Year 2023

Title: Liberation From Shame

Description: Co-host Nicole Kubilus depicts her experience dealing with social shame. The version of her at the bottom of the paper depicts the experience of being in a shame spiral. The squiggles represent the emotion of the spiral and the black spikes represent the judgment and criticism of perfectionist societal judgment of her social skills. The liberation comes from discovering her inner truth–that social perfection and conformity are not as important as authentic expression and good mental health. The insight also stems from knowing that “unspoken social rules” have an implicit ableist bias.

Materials: Graphite on paper Dimensions: 14″x18″ Year 2023

Title: My Life Is Sacred

Description: Podcast co-host Nicole Kubilus created this drawing as an affirmation to embrace the sacredness of her life whenever she experiences intrusive suicidal thoughts. Mindfulness helped her understand the value of her life–and the quality of it. The semicolon is the symbol for suicide prevention. The infinity symbol inside of it represents neurodiversity.

Materials: Graphite on paper Dimensions: 14″ x 11″ Year: 2023

Title: (Mis)Communication

Description: A neurotypical parent and an autistic young adult try to discuss a plan for adult independence. Though both people are engaged, their communication and interpretation of their values are different. This has to do with their bias based on their neurological lived experience.

Materials: Graphite on paper

Dimensions: 14″ x 11″

Year 2024

Title: Bret and Josh

Description: Teamwork makes the dream work! This drawing captures co-host Bret and his autistic young adult son, Josh. The abstract geometry captures the emotional essence of father and son–two different generational beliefs and two different types of neurology–experiencing synchronicity. Bret understands and affirms Josh’s needs when it comes to adult independence. In turn, Josh feels supported by Bret. This comes from a place of mutual respect rather than Bret being too strict or too enabling of Josh’s independence journey.

Materials: Graphite on paper

Dimensions: 14″x11″

Year 2024

Title: Noise-Cancelled Vacuuming

Description: Sensory overwhelm can be a big reason why autistic people avoid doing house chores. An example of this is the noise of a vacuum. Podcast co-host Nicole wears her noise-cancelling headphones while vacuuming her home. Despite the disruptive, agitating suction noise, Nicole is able to clean her place with a trance-like state.

Materials: Graphite on paper

Dimensions: 14″ x 11″

Year 2024

2.27 House Chores Poem

Title: Reviewing a Tenant Contract

Description: An autistic woman reviews her tenant contract with the support of an affirming landlord. He takes his time to explain what all of the terms are, checks for understanding, and sees if she has any questions. The abstract shapes represent the mental processes of landlord and tenant working together to achieve mutual understanding of the contract. 

Materials: Graphite on paper

Dimensions: 14″ x 11″

Year 2024

Title: “Can I Really Do This?”

Description: Autistic young adults spent a long time practicing adulting skills with the support of caregivers and mentors. At some point, it is time for them to live on their own. While some autistic adults may be chomping at the bit to have their independence, others have impostor syndrome about their capabilities. Is it really possible for them to live on their own and not be a failure to launch? The answer to that depends on self-confidence, willpower, patience, making mistakes, and communal support.

Materials: Graphite on paper

Dimensions: 14″ x 11″

Year: 2024