The Owner's Manual, Volume One: Your Own Operating System

The first Autism Map Maker guide written to the autistic person rather than to the people around them. Volume One describes how your system is actually built — how attention holds and moves, how your senses take in a room, the signals coming from inside your body, and the days language goes — in enough detail that you can make decisions from it. It closes with a worksheet for writing your own description: what a given thing costs you, what conditions let you do it well, and what happens when those conditions are not there. No functioning labels, no deficit framing, and nothing whose goal is that you appear more typical to other people. Diagnosed at four, at forty, or not at all; speaking, signing, typing, or moving between them depending on the day — if the descriptions land, they land.

The download includes the volume as a PDF to print or read on screen, the same volume as a searchable web page that opens in any browser, and a short printable workbook for working through it page by page, with space to write.