I was around 14 when I tried alcohol for the first time — although that is debatable, as my ‘friends’ back then tried to convince me that their parents had actually switched out my drink for fizzy pop and I was just pretending to be tipsy.

Hey, I was an undiagnosed autistic; we’ll never know the truth on this one.

In delightfully autistic fashion, I have an annoying tendency to fixate on a relatively finite number of writers on here - and will devour their fresh-off-the-press newsletters before we’ve all noticed our inevitable typos.

I wanted to start a monthly segment to showcase these people (there are more!) — and broaden my own horizons a little by asking you to share your favourite recent pieces by an autistic and/or sober writer in the comments.

Special interests are characterised most canonically as nerds and their quantum physics, or middle-aged autistics with locomotives; predictably male iterations of autism spectrum disorder. There is little in mainstream knowledge or media that unpicks what special interests mean to young girls and the women that they become. As tends to be the case, we are dismissed and missed due to the lacking understanding of how autistic traits can manifest differently in females.